Resource information
A Japanese study illustrates how farmers created an agricultural market in spite of the military government’s bureaucrats...
"Economic Disparity in Rural Myanmar" by Ikuko Okamoto. National University of Singapore Press, 2008...
"THE devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis and spiraling global food prices have placed even more pressure on the agricultural sector of Burma, once the world’s largest rice exporter and potentially one of Asia’s most prodigious producers of agricultural staples.
The majority of the Burmese labor pool is in farming, and rice production remains not just a national priority but an obsession of the junta. Successive regimes have attempted a number of initiatives to increase agricultural production, first through disastrous socialist policies, and since 1988 with piecemeal open market reforms which have continued to stifle the true promise of the agricultural sector.
Ikuko Okamoto’s book looks at one success story in this sad litany of state failure. Economic Disparity in Rural Myanmar is an academic analysis of the rapid increase in production of pulses in one township close to Rangoon. A pulse is a bean, in this case one called pedishwewar, or golden green gram, otherwise known as the mung bean.
It is a close study of the relationship between Burmese farm laborers, rural traders, tractor dealers, some available land, rice paddy crops and a fortuitous gap in the global rice market that produced a pulse market where before there was none. The sting is that most of the people on the lower rungs—the farmer-laborers—profited least from their labors.
Pulses brought in a total of 3.6 billion kyat (US $3 million) in 2007, mainly due to India, which reduced pulse cultivation, allowing farmers and traders in Burma to fill the demand.
Okamoto, a researcher at Japan’s Institute for Developing Economies, spent several years studying production techniques in Thongwa Township, east of Rangoon and home to 64 villages and about 150,000 people.
In this well-designed and detailed study, she looks at how the dramatic growth in green gram production produced an export success...
