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E-book White Gold: The Commercialisation of Rice Farming in the Lower Mekong Basin

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Penilaian

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In their definitive review of the Asian rice economy in the 1970s, Barker and Herdt wrote: “Most Asian rice farms are small ... and employ inten-sive labour practices in place of mechanisation ... [R]ainfall is the domi-nant climatic variable, and the rice crop is normally limited to the rainy season ... Rice dominates not only production and consumption patterns, but is also inextricably woven into the social and economic fabric of life. More farmers are engaged in rice production than in any other single activity, with rice absorbing more than half of the farm labour force in many countries ... [Most] Asian rice economies lacked the capacity for technical change that would permit rapid growth in rice production to create the food surpluses needed for economic development” (Barker and Herdt 1985: 1–2).That description certainly applied to the millions of rice farmers in the Lower Mekong Basin, where small-scale, labour-intensive, low-productivity, semi-subsistence farming systems predominated. While in parts of Asia, such as Central Luzon in the Philippines, Java in Indonesia, and the Central Plain in Thailand, rice farmers were widely adopting modern, high-yielding varieties, in the Lower Mekong traditional, low-yielding varieties still predominated (Barker and Herdt 1985: 63). The low productivity and subsistence orientation of Lower Mekong farmers not only reflected the persistence of traditional farming norms and prac-tices but, in the case of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), the havoc wreaked on the rural population and landscape by decades of war, and the disincentives and hardship subsequently introduced through the imposition of collective forms of agriculture. Rural poverty and the threat of famine were rife. The Mekong River runs for 4500 km from the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand, draining an area of 810,000 km2that takes in parts of Yunnan Province in China and Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam in Southeast Asia (Fig. 1.1). This drainage basin is generally divided into the Upper Mekong (or Lancang Basin) in China, accounting for 20% of the catchment, and the Lower Mekong in Southeast Asia—the region with which this book is con-cerned—accounting for 80% of the catchment (Cosslett and Cosslett 2018; MRC 2019).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

338.1 CRA w

Penerbit

Singapore : Springer Nature., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

462 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789811509988

Klasifikasi

338.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Agriculture

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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