Critics also say that coalition politicians are taking kickbacks on contracts from the millers and exporters to whom they have chosen to sell quotas of rice overseas, all while many of the poorest farmers are seeing their prices reduced significantly by the time the money filters down the food chain, albeit while still earning more than before Yingluck Shinawatra took power.
“We don’t know how much rice is in the warehouses, how much is being exported and how much the farmers are actually making – we don’t know anything,” says Democrat Party spokesman Chavanond Intarakomalyasut.
Kreetha Charatkulangkun, director of Tek Seng Rice Mill, a rice export company based in Bangkok, says the scheme has proven devastating for the country’s rice industry.
For years, Thailand was the world’s number one exporter in the world, but is expected to slip to the third position this year, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimating it will export 6.5 million tons of rice in 2012 compared with India’s 9.75 million tons and Vietnam 7 million tons.
“In my and many other opinions, the government’s rice-pledging scheme is very extreme and is clearly a vote-buying policy,” says Kreetha. “It is the worst political policy in the history of Thailand.”
As enemies of the state’s rice scheme have queued up to criticize Yingluck’s government, most have pointed fingers squarely at her brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has calmly defended the policy in exile where he remains on the run from a two-year prison term for corruption. A day rarely passes without a Thai newspaper reporting on efforts by Yingluck to smooth her brother’s passage back to Thailand.
Meanwhile, the main farming areas in the north of the country remain as supportive of the current government as they were of Thaksin when he was in power from 2001 to 2006.
In a poll last month by Khon Kaen University in the northeastern Isan region (which includes Nakhom Phanom province), 81% of respondents said they supported the government’s overall performance, even if only 46.8% backed its performance on the economy, a figure much lower than in many other areas including the coalition’s handling of democratization, social issues like crime and drug use, foreign policy, and environmental protection.
Suthin Wainwiwat, director of E-Saan Poll which conducted the survey, said as long as the Shinawatras continue their populist policies aimed at the millions of families who farm in the north they will remain unstoppable at the ballot box, no matter the criticism in Bangkok.
“They support Yingluck because they hope that Thaksin will be able to come back and help them again,” he said.
Steve Finch is a freelance journalist based in Bangkok. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Independent, Toronto Star and Bangkok Post among others.
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laurel
Now that we know that Thai rice has some of the lowest levels of inorganic arsenic, maybe someone in Thailand can figure out how to market that and export to the US where consumers pay more for healthier products.
Lonie
Why are you guys ( butting heads ) ? None of you have a Thai name and probably don't have a vested interest and could give a crap less what the price of rice is and on top of that it is probably none of your damned business what the Thai government does !!.
Andrew Spooner
David,
You wrote "Is it too late to build a nice big climate controlled high tech rice storage warehouse and get my piece of the government pie?"
I think I am right in saying the biggest river of money flowing from government coffers to private companies in world history is that paid by US taxpayers for military hardware to privately owned arms manufacturers.
My advice? If you really want to get rich at taxpayers' expense make weapons in the USA.
Andrew Spooner
David Chasm
There is no debate to be had with someone who is so incoherent that they attempt to equate criticisms of a misguided article about Thailand's rice growing subsidy programme with those responsible for the slaughter of 2million people.
davidchasm@yahoo.co.uk
The point is that you can't tweak an agricultural policy that is completely broken. Your apparent offense at the KR thing is as superficial as your arguments.
And, of course, to respond to some of these points would actually require engaging on the issue in a reasoned fashion. I notice you haven't actually attempted to debate a single point I have raised as yet, instead producing the kind of excuse commonly seen in playgrounds when someone doesn't want to play anymore: "I'm going to take my ball home."
Andrew Spooner
David Chasm
I was going to read your longer comment but you lost me completely with your rather misjudged and tasteless attempt to equate my input to the Khmer Rouge.
David Chasm
And back to the issue at hand. Your Spoonerisms are again delving into the murky world of half-truths, non-truths and outright nonsense:
1. You say that the article doesn't quote any rice millers directly when it does:
“In my and many other opinions, the government’s rice-pledging scheme is very extreme and is clearly a vote-buying policy,” says Kreetha (who two paragraphs up is named as a rice miller). “It is the worst political policy in the history of Thailand.”
2. You reference the word "rotted" as if either the article or people's comments have used this word. You say: "As for unsubstantiated stories that a large percentage of the stored rice has "rotted" – they remain that: unsubstianted rumours put out by politicized sources and backed up, as usual blah blah blah…"
This sentence has a number of problems. Firstly, this article is citing rice millers as saying this, as have numerous other articles. Now, the rice millers themselves are among the best people to comment on this because their whole business model is based on determining the quality of rice in storage and then selling it. So this is substantiated and no-one is saying "has rotted" – in the past tense – people are warning that Thailand is getting into a situation in which a perishable good is packed up in full warehouses across the country and it looks like a lot of it could sit there for a very long time. What's in Thailand's warehouses right now will take more than two years to sell which means some of this rice is going to be there for this amount of time. This is the best-case-scenario as far as I'm aware. I think someone made a similar point earlier but you brazenly dismissed him or her as a Democrat supporter, most likely.
3. Even if the journalist in question did get pictures you will notice from all the picture by-lines on this website that they are not supplied by the journalists themselves, they are usually public-domain so for all you know this guy could have 65 million photos of rice warehouses, rice farmers, rice paddies, rice, etc and you would have no idea, not the slightest clue, but yet you've made this assumption based on not actually checking how photos work on The Diplomat and then making an unsubstantiated criticism. Something the paragraph before you accuse other people of.
4. You've totally missed the boat on the fiscal deficit vs. GDP point. If you are losing $33 billion on a rice scheme every year and you're going further into the red all the time but the guy next to you has an overdraft double the amount who cares about the other guy? Certainly not Thailand, they need to worry about themselves. The point is that this rice policy is causing Thailand's fiscal deficit to rise fairly sharply and actually Thailand itself has a cap on fiscal deficit vs GDP ratios which I believe is either 50% or 60%. Therefore the Thai government is moving towards a position in which it would essentially be violating its own rules (which, of course, Thai governments have in general been very good at in recent years, both Shinawatras and Democrats). The point is therefore to track the deficit in the Thai context and establish what impact this rice-pledging scheme is having on it, which has already been done by the Senate and numerous other people and groups. Hence why the Senate is going to grill Pheu Thai at the end of the month – on this and numerous other things, particularly related to the rice-pledging scheme.
5. I dare you to say something not very nice about Thaksin…
David Chasm
Apologies Andrew, that should read Andrew Spooner. Everyone seems to be called David on this comments page…
David Chasm
A possible conversation between Pol Pot and Nuon Chea in late 1978
Nuon Chea: Hey, so this agricultural policy we've got going on isn't doing so well, there's a few people out there starving to death.
Pol Pot: No, I think it'll be fine. The system can work – I just spoke to David Spooner on the phone and he says it just needs a few tweaks.
Nuon Chea: Er, but the whole system is screwed to be honest. Wouldn't we better off investing in the rice industry, creating a way to actually incentivize while calibrating market forces to work for the farmers rather than throwing the capitalist baby out with the bath water?
Pol Pot: Sorry, do you want to say that again a bit louder?
Nuon Chea: I said… Oh forget it.
Phone rings: beep beep…
Pol Pot: Can you get that…
Nuon Chea goes to pick up the phone
Pol Pot: Is that Yingluck?
Nuon Chea: No, it's David Spooner.
Andrew Spooner
David Chasm.
I spent a few minutes reading your comment but found nothing in it substantive enough to make it worth replying to. Thanks for taking the effort to write it though.