Time for a change
Re: "R&D essential for Thai rice," (Oped, March 8).
Your editorial reveals the answer concealed in your summary of the problem.
The Rice Department's budget for rice research is around 200 million baht annually. Yet the combination of subsidies, pledging costs, and guarantees for farmers approaches 1 trillion baht. Further limiting success, the false concept of climate change responsibility and so-called "low emission rice" have crept into farming research funding. Farming rice sequesters carbon. The more rice produced per hectare, the more carbon per hectare is sequestered. Isn't that sufficient?
It is no longer advisable for rice strain development and advancing farming methods to be the responsibility of the government at a practical level. Enough is already known about intercropping (crabs, Azzolla, and rice for example) and other efficient rice-farming methods which, if implemented, would make a huge difference in productivity.
Strain development should be outsourced to companies who are eminently capable of integrating genetic selection, analysis, and optimisation at the biochemical level. Seed selection and rice production tailored for Thailand's specific climate and soil characteristics could advance Thai rice toward a top-tier world class position in a year or two by resorting to this strategy. It should be noted that although the Vietnam Food Association (VFA) says that Vietnamese rice does not contain GMOs, Vietnam has no restrictions on GMO products and there is no certification, testing, or genetic sequencing information available on their rice.
The government needs to reallocate their enormous budget and eschew their time-honoured tradition of keeping farmers uneducated and poor in order to maintain the old political order and perpetuate farmers' dependency upon the patronage system. Politics is not going to work that way for much longer. You just can't lock everybody up for trying to make things better and expect to get away with it forever.
