Rice pledging scheme deja vu

Rice pledging scheme deja vu

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha eyes packaged rice at a farmers' stand. The premier has become an instant expert on rice pricing. (Photo by Thiti Wannamontha)
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha eyes packaged rice at a farmers' stand. The premier has become an instant expert on rice pricing. (Photo by Thiti Wannamontha)

In the early 1980s, as a post-Vietnam war peace took shape in Southeast Asia, Thailand made an important decision. To be more correct, Thailand decided not to decide about rice.

In purely logical terms, a la Mr Spock, it was time to shift the back-breaking burden of rice growing to poorer neighbours in order to move the economy along to modern development including advanced agriculture.

In purely cultural terms, rice was -- well, rice is -- the sustenance of the nation, grown by men and women who are the backbone of the nation, and the nation in turn is the first of the three institutions: nation, religion, king.

In the end, the idea that dirt-poor neighbours Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia could grow rice while Thai farms developed into modern, first world-worthy centres of innovation and technology never was put up for serious discussion.

Ergo: Dirt-poor farmers, subsidised food, political venality and problems both predictable and unforeseen.

In the "predictable" category are political crises. This is not the first time there have been two, parallel rice brouhahas entertaining the nation simultaneously, but it is arguably the most serious, and it could get much testier and angrier before it's settled.

The root cause is worldwide overproduction of rice. This is especially true and especially important in Thailand, the world's leading rice salesman.

But the government for completely understandable political and populist reasons wants to ignore the "worldwide" part. If there is a world glut of rice, there's no way to blame profiteering rice millers and merchants.

And it couldn't be the fault of politicians (English translation: Lord Voldemort na Dubai) because while Voldemort can control Thai dastards, not even he can control rice harvests and markets around the world.

For the second time since the coup that sought to extinguish populism forever, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha had to reach into the government's money bags to address serious poverty among farmers.

Like the problem with rubber growers, the premier really has no choice but a populist programme with two so-familiar aims: bail out the farmers in the short term and try to control the market in the long.

The female ex-premier was confident that paying farmers large amounts for their rice would eventually raise world prices. Wishing doesn't make it so.

Gen Prayut now is equally confident that if he locks up rice stocks -- new rice, at that -- the artificial shortage will raise prices. His contradiction, arguably even bigger than the Pheu Thai dichotomy, is that consumer prices are already high and aren't going lower. Ever. And if he thinks his soldiers can run rice mills and rice marketing, he's going to be disappointed, to say the least.

There is an election due next year. When the emerging pro-military party claims credit for saving the rice farmers, it will just be a factual statement, right? It won't be politics or power greed at all. Bonus: claim credit for saving the rubber farmers, too.

The new constitution which will soon come into force bars populism. So the political party dedicated to making Gen Prayut the unelected prime minister in 2018 will have to try to argue that throwing hundreds of billions of baht (currently 127 billion but rising faster than a Phetchaburi flood) into a scheme to boost farmers' income and trying to control the price of a vital commodity don't add up to populism.

Meanwhile (heavy emphasis on "mean"), newspaper columnists and other cynics note the parallel tracks. On one rail, the government has set up a programme to help and pay rice farmers. On the other, the government is strongly pursuing scores of people from the previous government for setting up a programme to help and pay rice farmers.

"It's not the same thing" is the stock reply of both the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Truth. Comparisons are never exact. And it is a fact that no one in the red shirt government ever said "Let them eat cake" or anything similar, while someone in the green shirt government did.

Gen Prayut's rice problem has barely started. The ability of the state-owned Bank of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives to finance another gigantic handout -- the scheme's estimated cost went from 35 billion to 127 billion baht in three days -- is debatable.

But it gets worse. The initial programme is all about fragrant rice -- khao hom mali aka jasmine rice -- because it is harvested first. Close on its heels are the harvests of ordinary rice, and then the glutinous, or sticky rice, khao niao.

Those farmers' rice also is currently worth peanuts and those farmers also will need -- no, will noisily demand -- subsidies.

The prime minister acerbically criticised the female ex-premier last week and told her to take her complaints to court. That was an unintended gaffe because the dual rice issues now are in court, but not the judicial one.

The court of public opinion counts for a lot and has brought down governments of all stripes, democrats and dictators included, without any regard to their self-awarded amnesty.

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