Back to the future
Re: "VAT mulled for firms with less revenue -- B1.8m threshold may be erased", (Business, May 2).
Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra seems set to follow her aunt Yingluck in creating a rice fiasco at the public's expense. Finance Minister Pichai Chunhavajira reports the government wants to reduce the rice cultivation area by 15m rai (23%-25% of the total rice growing area) to cut supply and boost market prices.
Reducing rice-growing areas would certainly slash rice availability in the market, which is what then-PM Yingluck aimed to do in 2011. But instead of prices rising as Yingluck anticipated, global prices fell as rice exporters in India, Vietnam, and so on increased production and exports, causing Thailand to lose its position as the world's top rice exporter in 2012-2013.
Not only that, PM Paetongtarn aims to simultaneously increase rice production efficiency -- unintentionally countering the effects of her supply reduction programme.
Also, what would the displaced farmers do? On average, Thai farmers are aged 58, well past their peak earning/learning years. Only 20% have had a M6 education.
The average Thai farm household has debts equal to 7.89 years' h/h income, limiting capital available for investment. We have about 11.6 million farmers -- so we're talking about retraining arguably 2.7-2.9 million people. Can we switch them to other occupations, and possibly relocate them from their farms -- fast enough and at low cost?
I'm all for increasing rice productivity -- but not another fiasco, please.
Burin Kantabutra
Apocryphal tale
Re: "Does religious freedom trump animal welfare?", (Opinion, March 16).
Recently a bad man who just robbed a bank was surrounded by an angry crowd in the street as he tried to flee. The bad man grabbed a bystander -- Freddie the carrot -- and said: "Back off or I'll eat this carrot".
The crowd gasped in horror. Suddenly a policeman tackled the bad man from behind but not before the man took a bite out of Freddie.
Freddie was rushed to the hospital where surgeons miraculously saved his life. As Freddie recovered in his hospital bed, a nearby nurse was reading Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation.
The book noted that because of the inefficiency of meat production, a meat eater indirectly causes the destruction of 10 times more plants than a vegetarian does. So the nurse walked into Freddie's room and ate him.
She felt sorry for Freddie who had begged for his life. But she felt that by becoming a vegetarian she'd be saving far more Freddies from being slaughtered by the livestock industry.
Freddie no doubt died a martyr and will go down in history as the Martin Luther King of carrots.
Eric Bahrt
Healthcare drama
Re: "Slaying the healthcare zombie", (BP, May 3).
"Slaying the healthcare zombie" is another in a series of highly relevant articles on Thailand's failing public healthcare system which concludes as they all do: urgent reform is immediately required.
Although many matters such as employee retention, poor working conditions, lack of proper equipment and so on have been addressed, the impact upon public health must also be considered.
As intangible and unquantifiable as it may be, people are dying and the data is not being kept to remind officials of what their malfeasance and sheer negligence causes.
Here is an anecdotal personal account. A Thai friend came to me regarding her sister who was in poor health. At the age of 29 she was experiencing a nagging cough, severe fatigue, and weight loss. Her 38kg weight was truly alarming.
She had been treated at a provincial hospital for pneumonia for many months and was in decline. I told my friend to take her to her doctor and demand she be treated for tuberculosis. Her doctor then gave her the proper treatment and within about 10 months she had regained her normal weight and was symptom-free.
A year and three months later, my friend returned to explain that her sister was ill, had lost weight again, and was in a dire condition. I found out she was being treated for pneumonia at the same hospital by the same doctors. In disbelief I explained to my friend that her sister had TB again. She was misdiagnosed twice at the same hospital yet TB is common in Thailand and inexpensive to diagnose!
Poor record keeping, poor diagnostic methods and cost-driven, corner-cutting neglect almost killed a patient twice. The real reason that justifies public health reform is to save lives. The government must prioritise its budget and to hell with land bridges, F-16s, casinos, and all the rest of politician's get-rich-quick schemes.
Michael Setter
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