Fishing Without a Net: Fish Farms and the 2011 Floods
KHON KAEN – This year’s floods ravaged much of Thailand, leaving over 600 dead and millions displaced. In the Northeast, farmers everywhere are beginning to clean up destroyed crops and prepare for the next harvest season. But while millions of rice farmers await their flood insurance from the government, 2,200 baht per rai of rice field, the hundreds of thousands of fish farmers in the region are not as lucky. With little support from government agencies, only modest discounts offered to them by corporate distributors, and no organizations that offer fish farming insurance, fish farmers are faced with the task of rebuilding their small farms and repurchasing fish on their own. Here in Khon Kaen province, nearly 9,000 fish farms claimed flood damages. None can collect on insurance.
The video above takes a look at the flooding of Tawatchai Farm in Khon Kaen, just one of half a million freshwater fish farms in the country. To learn more about its story, click play.
CP is outsourcing the risk and losses while internalizing the profits. It’s what all capitalists do. The people need to take over the government and use its executive, legislative and judicial power to protect themselves from the greed and ruthlessness of capital. The Phuea Thai Party is just a different collection of capitalist faces and will bruatalize the people just as thoroughly as the Democrat or any of the boutique parties.
It’s the same all over the world. Read about the ‘evolution’ – collapse and regression – of the
Peoples’Plutocrats’ Republic of China.For more background information, please visit:
http://aanesan.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/contract-farming-in-the-chi-river-mahasarakam-benefits-for-agribusiness-and-costs-for-small-farmers/
Thanks for the link and the article.
It’s always distressing to read about capital and the government working together to exploit the people, but it’s good to realize that someone, in this case the Alternative Agriculture Network – Esan, is at least formally describing the exploitative situation, and has identified positive steps that can be taken to begin to end the exploitation of the people by the traditional forces of exploitation, government and capital, that have been teaming up to prey upon them for so many years.
The original article did not make clear the degree to which the people were being exploited by capital and government. It sounded like ‘just bad luck’.