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Thailand Rice
Rice, the nation's major crop, was grown by about threequarters of all farm households in the early 1980s. Two main
types were cultivated: dry, or upland, rice, grown predominantly
in the North and Northeast; and wet rice, grown in irrigated
fields throughout the central plain and in the South. About half
the 1986 production of 19 million tons was grown in the central
plain and major valleys in the North; another two-fifths was
produced in the Northeast; and about 6 percent came from the
South, which was a rice deficient area. Roughly 8.5 million
hectares were devoted to rice production in the early 1980s,
about 40 percent more than in the early 1960s. The rice yield was
highest in the Center, averaging about 1.9 tons per hectare,
which was about a third of the yield per hectare in Taiwan and
South Korea.
Low productivity was attributed in part to longstanding
government policies aimed at keeping consumer rice prices low.
The so-called rice premium (in fact an export tax) and occasional
quantitative export controls were claimed by opponents to have
discouraged production expansion by reducing profitability.
Although perhaps a valid argument for commercial rice farming,
the policies probably had a minimal effect on the large number of
subsistence farmers in the Northeast and North, who produced
small, if any, surpluses and whose dry rice was not usually
exported. Perhaps more significant was the apparent loss of paddy
fertility in the North and Northeast because of poor soil
management and the extension in those regions of the growth of
lower yield upland rice.
Data as of September 1987
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