The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

408 REVIEWS
In the export sector at least, rice has declined from 7096 in the early 1960's
to 33% in 1974 on high world prices and will be down to 20-23% of
total export value in 1975 with further prospects of decline in 1976
and 1977.
The next essay "Thai Rice Exports: An Analysis of Its Performance
in the 1960's'' by Chaiyawat Wibulswasdi (pp. 167-190) is a thoroughly
inadequate piece of work taken as a chapter from his 1973 M.I.T. Ph. D.
dissertation supervised by Jagdish Bhagwati. Chuiyawat starts with a
simplistic oligopolistic model of the world rice market. This model
was originally developed by Manmohan Singh in his book, India's
Export Trends (Oxford, 1964), which presumes that the optimal strategy
for every supplier is to protect its existing share. In the case of
Thailand there is no discussion at all of the merits in the early 1960's
of agricultural diversification away from the sharply fluctuating world
rice export economy. There is no mention of the critical role of heavily
subsidised U.S. sales of PL-480 rice to key markets. On close examination
ofChaiyawat's Tables A-I- A-VIII one finds that Thailand's share
held up well over the decade in the commercial markets of Hong
Kong, Singapore and Japan, but lost to the U.S. in Indonesia, Malaysia
and Saudi Arabia and to China in Ceylon. The key question: ''Should
Thailand have competed on price with U.S. and Chinese rice exports?"
is never asked.
Olarn Chaipravat's work on the production structure of paddy
cultivation from 1951 to 1973 (pp. 191-205) is a valuable compilation,
which emphasises the low level of input usage in Thailand and his
conclusion (p. 205) will certainly arouse controversy, a! though it might do
a great deal to mitigate rural/urban disparities if carried out energeti­
cally:-
"It is most urgent for the government, therefore, to introduce the
programme of providing productive farm inputs for the farmers at
subsidized prices in order to maximize the welfare of the farming
population and increase the net foreign-exchange earning of the
country without jeopardizing too much of the government revenue
on the welfare of the urban consumers, especially during the period
in which the foreign demand of Thai rice remains buoyant."
This policy will be costly and difficult to administer, but measures to
raise rise yields in Thailand will be vital in the period 1976-80.