Quantcast
Channel: Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist » Thailand
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 3

Thoughts prompted by the coup in Thailand

0
0

Protesting rice farmers in Thailand

For journalists like Seumas Milne and Andre Vltchek, the anti-government protests in Venezuela and Thailand are cut from the same cloth. They are middle-class movements fueled by resentment against government programs that favored the poor. If this is the case, you would expect the NY Times and the Murdoch-owned London Times to throw its support behind Thailand’s “Yellow Shirts” after the fashion of their support for the anti-Maduro student protesters. As is so often the case, reductionism does not serve political analysis very well.

Because in fact Thomas Fuller of the NY Times has been consistently in support of Thaksin Shinawatra’s “Thais Love Thais” party. On May 22nd he filed a report that stated “The coup was seen as a victory for the elites in Thailand who have grown disillusioned with popular democracy and have sought for years to diminish the electoral power of Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister who commands support in the rural north. Unable to win elections, the opposition has instead called for an appointed prime minister and pleaded with the military for months to step in.”

If anything, the London Times’s Richard Lloyd Parry was even more gung-ho for the Thais Love Thais party, even using “99 percent” type rhetoric against Akanat Promphan, a leader of the “yellow shirts” opposition:

For all his talk of a national movement acting on behalf of all Thais, Mr Akanat is not an obvious man of the people. His parents were both members of parliament and, like a surprising number of opposition leaders, he received an expensive British education. He attended the £31,680-a-year boarding school Charterhouse and the University of Oxford.

After a day of marching on the streets of Bangkok, he retreats not to a tent pitched beneath a flyover, like those inhabited by many of his fellow demonstrators, but to the five-star sanctuary of the Dusit Thani Hotel in Bangkok, overlooking Lumphini Park.

Like Fuller, Richard Lloyd Perry stressed Thaksin’s FDR type love for the common people:

Mr Thaksin was a billionaire telecommunications tycoon who, on the face of it, also had little in common with Thai farmers. His cavalier attitude to human rights and his manipulation of state institutions and the media drew the loathing of educated, urban Thais.

However, his rural development programmes, which bestowed cheap loans and subsidised healthcare on Thailand’s villages, won him the loyalty of a far larger voting population.

That loyalty has been severely tested by a government program that subsidized rice farmers. A couple of years ago, it seemed like a safe bet since Thailand was the world’s leading exporter of rice. Subsidies were seen as a way of motivating farmers to grow more rice and help consolidate one of Thailand’s major exports. Unfortunately for the Thais Love Thais party, the world market for rice became glutted and demand for the overpriced Thai variety took a nosedive. With tons of rice sitting in warehouses and beginning to rot, the sales that would have paid for the subsidies failed to materialize.

Growing desperate, the unpaid farmers resorted to measures found frequently in the Indian countryside:

BAN NON SON, Thailand—Attempts to steer markets seldom end well.

In this village in northeast Thailand, Thongma Kaisuan’s family and neighbors are trying to come to terms with the death of the 64-year-old farmer, who slipped out into his backyard and hanged himself from a tree late last month. The suicide, they say, is in large part due to the Thai government’s bid to control the world’s price for its best-known export: rice.

Investors and governments often have fantasized about controlling global markets for commodities to drive up prices and profits. In the 1970s, the Hunt brothers, American oil billionaires, attempted to corner the world’s silver market, only to see their position collapse. Sumitomo Corp.’s 8053.TO -0.52% chief copper trader, Yasuo Hamanaka, in the 1990s bought up to 5% of the world’s copper supply. His position also collapsed, losing $2.6 billion. Other debacles include efforts to corner gold, tin and even onion markets.

Now add Thailand to the list of the world’s frustrated speculators.

An attempt to set global rice prices has stripped the country of its position as the world’s top exporter, left its prime minister facing a potentially ruinous investigation into the management of the plan, and thrown thousands of farmers like Mr. Thongma into a deep hole of debt.

Mr. Thongma’s tale began two and a half years ago. Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra launched a gambit to shift more cash into the rural economy by buying up rice from farmers at about 18,000 baht, or $550, a ton, around 50% higher than the market rate.

Across the country, Thais started to buy new televisions, along with smart-phones to tap into the 3G networks springing up across the country. Household debt crept up past 80% of gross domestic product, a dangerously high level, according to the central bank.

Mr. Thongma, for his part, borrowed 400,000 baht, or about $12,000, from an agricultural cooperative to help pay for a minivan for his son-in-law to start a small transport business.

“We were confident about borrowing the money because the government program appeared to guarantee a stable income,” said Mr. Thongma’s widow, Thongbai Kaisuan, as Buddhist monks in orange robes chanted prayers for her departed husband.

Reality quickly sank in.

The timing of the government’s rice program could scarcely have been worse. Just as Thailand began withholding rice from the international market, India resumed exports after a long absence. Major importers such as the Philippines, stung by the 2008 price spike, also began producing more rice. Instead of rising, global prices for rice fell from a peak of more than $1,000 a ton in 2008 to the current level of around $390 a ton for the most commonly traded grades.

–Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2014

You would think from the NY Times and the London Times that the movement against the government was made up of white-wine drinking and brie cheese-eating yuppy computer programmers and civil servants, a trope heard frequently in the past when it comes to “color revolutions”. In fact Yingluck Shinawatra’s undoing probably had more to do with farmer discontent than anything else as Reuters reported on February 17th:

Hundreds of unpaid Thai rice farmers swarmed around the temporary office of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on Monday, threatening to storm the building if the beleaguered premier did not come out and speak to them.

The escalation of the protest by farmers, who have not been paid for crops sold to the government under a state rice-buying scheme that helped sweep Yingluck’s Puea Thai Party to power, came as thousands of demonstrators seeking to unseat the prime minister surrounded the government’s headquarters.

Live television pictures showed farmers climbing over barbed wire fences and barriers at the Defence Ministry compound in north Bangkok where Yingluck has set up temporary offices. They pushed back a line of riot police, who retreated from confrontation, but did not enter the building.

“The prime minister is well-off but we are not. How are we going to feed our children? I want her to think about us,” said one protesting farmer.

On May 7th Yingluck Shinawatra resigned after a high court found her guilty of transferring a National Security chief from his office in an irregular manner. It was clear that the real reason was to remove a politician who had lost the ability to govern after the fashion of Yanukovych in the Ukraine.

If the assumption is that the army will now go full blast ahead with an attack on the poor, it might be worth noting that the General in charge has declared that the rice farmers would be paid the money owed them. Thomas Fuller reported on this today but could not help but remind his readers that the army was only acting on base Machiavellian considerations:

Other reports showed farmers marching to army bases to hand over red roses and holding up banners proclaiming appreciation for the general who led the coup, Prayuth Chan-ocha. Identical banners, featuring rice stalks and the same image of General Prayuth raising his hand in the air, were paraded by farmers in Phuket, Lopburi and Ubon Ratchathani, provinces that are separated by hundreds of miles.

Thai newspapers quoted farmers praising the military in highly formal language.

“We, on behalf of all farmers, would like to thank you for your true kindness and understanding of the hardship of the people,” a man who was described as a farmer was quoted by the ASTV Manager news website as saying. “We are here to offer moral support and flowers to thank you, the military of the entire people.”

All this might be true but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If buying votes is considered to have something to do with a progressive agenda, then Boss Tweed might be due a revisionist make-over since traditionally machine politics in big cities revolved around favors to working-class voters such as a turkey in November or lining up a construction job on a city project.

Some argue that the Red Shirts will emerge as a true radical movement after the Shinawatra clan has left the building. I hope that’s true but after reading about Thailand on and off for the past few months, I am a bit skeptical. In the final analysis, Thailand needs the same thing as Ukraine does, a mass socialist movement that can unite the anti-corruption urban dwellers with the rural agrarian population. That was symbolized by the hammer-and-sickle of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The iconography might be dated but the political imperative remains.



Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 3

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images