Date & Time: 13:30-15:00, Thursday, 2 July, 2020
Place: Large-size meeting room, 3rd floor, Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, CSEAS

Title:
Agrarian change in the Chao Phraya delta (1950-2020)

Presenters:
Dr. François Pierre Marie Molle, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, France
CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar

Abstract:
The Chao Phraya delta, also known as Thailand’s rice bowl, has been the historical heart of commercial rice production in Thailand since the Bowring Treaty (1855). In the early 1900s, it accounted for 70% of the country’s production and 100% of exports. What happened to this agrarian system in the following 100 years? How did it respond to population change (fertility, migrations, division of land between heirs at each generation, etc), economic transformations (urbanization and in particular the growth of Bangkok, industrialization, rice price fluctuations, skyrocketing land prices, etc), technical change (eg rice cropping or aquaculture), or changes in water control (storage, irrigation infrastructure, individual pumping capacity, etc) and in the water regime (floods, drought, pollution, etc)? How does Thailand’s rice bowl look like in 2020? This seminar will discuss how particular patterns of agrarian change in the Chao Phraya Delta result from this multiplicity of drivers.

About the Speaker:
Dr. François Molle is a senior researcher at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), France and visiting scholar at CSEAS. He as 35 years of experience working on issues of water management, water governance and water policies, especially in Brazil, the Middle-East/Northern Africa and Thailand/Vietnam. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, France, holds a Ph.D from the University of Montpellier, serves as an editorial board member for several journals, and is co-editor of Water Alternatives (www.water-alternatives.org).

Moderator:
Prof. Yasuyuki Kono, CSEAS, Kyoto University