INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines how the Thai state formulates its rice policy, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that if the Thai state sees rice farmers as political threats, it is likely to impose extractive policies such as taxes on rice farmers. Conversely, if the state considers rice farmers as political partners, it is likely to implement subsidy programmes. But if the state views farmers as neither, it is likely to abandon them altogether, as has happened under General Prayuth's administration during the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, the Thai state has shifted from interfering to abandoning the country's rice producers.

Depending on the regime in power, Thai rice policies can seem paradoxical. While the state imposes policies to control rice prices and tax farmers, it also guarantees farmgate prices to appeal to farmers. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has not rectified this paradox, the magnitude of assistance programmes and the significance of state policy has been reduced. For extractive reasons, the state seeks to control the rice sector to allocate resources from it to industrial and other agricultural sectors. For electoral reasons, political leaders want to mobilize rice farmers via subsidy programmes because they are a huge voting bloc. Thai governments, especially those democratically elected from 2002 to 2014, implemented pledging schemes that procured paddy from farmers at high prices. From 2019 to the present, the government has implemented a price guarantee programme that set a floor price for paddy. Elected governments procure paddy and guarantee prices to solve the problem of falling prices. However, there has been considerable variation in the size of procurement programmes, which depends on the relationship between farmers and political leaders. Since the administrations led by Thai Rak Thai and its successor parties depended upon rice farmers’ votes, procurement programmes were larger in scale than those of other governments. After the 2014 military coup led by General Prayuth Chano- Cha, the government abolished the pledging scheme and replaced it with a production assistance scheme which allocated less money to rice farmers. Rice farmers’ problems such as falling prices, water shortages or indebtedness have not been solved. These