Is Small-holder Cultivation Viable? A Question of Political Economy With Reference to Thailand

THE THAI RURAL ECONOMY, for more than a hundred years, has been characterized by small-scale owner cultivation, with a substantial concentration on exports. Yet the widespread commercialization of agriculture, reflecting the development of a capitalist economy, especially in the last three decades, has brought about considerable changes in cultivated area, production techniques, type of crops sown, farm incomes, infrastructure, rural mobility and land tenure. subject of the present inquiry is the significance of these changes, particularly in relation to capitalist development and to social polarization. For example, are owner-operated small-holdings giving way on a substantial scale to tenant farms or large estates? Is the income gap widening between landless labourers and small-holders, on the one hand, and richer farmers, on the other; and between the rural and the urban population? What role does, or can, politics play, either in sustaining or undermining small-holder production? Answering these questions is a matter of establishing the evidence, such as it is, and then of interpreting it. At the very outset, however, it is important to distinguish between economic analysis, which can be undertaken with a certain degree of precision, and political or sociological analysis which, from the nature of the subject matter, as Gunnar Myrdal recognizes, is more complex: The factors abstracted from in the economic analysis-attitudes, institutions, modes and levels of living, and, broadly, culture-are so much more difficult to grasp in systematic analysis than are the so-called economic factors. Yet, he continues (and his argument is central to my own position), The 'economic' facts cannot be studied in isolation from other social facts.'

Economics · Economy · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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