The Political Economy of Rice: A Comparative Analysis of the Success and Failure of the Green Revolution in Southeast Asian Countries

Although information technology, bio-technology and other industrial sectors have dominated the world economy, a large majority of the world population, especially those in Asia and Africa, still rely on the agricultural sector as a major source of income. With the support of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the World Bank, many Asian countries have undertaken green revolutions -- a major movement to transform the agricultural sector through mechanization and the introduction of improved seeds and chemical fertilizers -- as part of the attempt to develop their economies in the 1970s. Although the green revolution is a thing of the past in most developed countries, it is still an often discussed subject among policy makers and their consultants in developing countries. In fact, to the present day, the green revolution continues in most Asian countries. Despite this, the agricultural sector in many Asian countries is not doing very well. Needless to say, good policies and good technology are vital for agricultural reforms.However, the availability of good policies and good technology alone will not guarantee the reforms’ success. Economic reforms in countries that adopted similar policies and that had access to similar technologies did not always lead to similar outcomes. Although Asian countries received similar policy guidelines from the international institutions, the green revolution proved to be more successful in some countries than others. There is a shortage of a comparative study of Asian rice economies. Even though Thailand and Burma have been two important rice exporting countries since the turn of the 20th century, there has been no in-depth comparative political and sociological analysis of these two countries.This project will analyze the varied outcome of the green revolution across the Southeast Asian countries of Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and Burma. More specifically, the project will probe the conditions under which a green revolution would be successful and the measures government and societal groups should take to obtain and sustain such success. In so doing, the project will explore the role governments and societal groups should play in agricultural reforms and how external factors (such as the international situation) and internal factors (such as the political and social systems, civil wars and natural disasters), affect the ability of governments and societal groups to deal with reform-related problems. Finally, the project will outline the lessons that other countries undertaking agricultural reforms may learn from these six countries.