BANGKOK —
Record temperatures, reduced rainfall and changes in the natural climate will hurt Thailand’s economy and increase poverty, experts say.
Thailand is suffering from droughts caused by the El Niño weather event, which is causing the country’s arable land to dry out important crops.
Thailand’s rainfall has been below average this year, down 25% nationwide through July, according to the Meteorological Bureau of Thailand. This has forced the government to advise some farmers to switch to other crops that use less water if cultivation has not yet started.
“It has rained less in central Thailand in recent months.
As [the World Meteorological Organization] said July was the hottest July on record. But the hottest month of the year [for Thailand] It’s April,” said Chaowat Siwapornchai, a meteorologist in Bangkok.
“As a long-term trend, we continue to face rising temperatures in combination with El Niño this year, which further develops the situation we are facing,” he added.
The La Niña phenomenon is the natural cooling of water in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. It occurs every few years but impacts weather changes around the world. The El Niño pattern does the opposite, creating warmer waters that bring drier weather and reduced rainfall, contributing to extremely hot weather in the Asia region. Extreme heat was also common this year in India, China, Laos, Pakistan and Vietnam.
People wear hats and hand-made fans to cool off from the extreme heat in Bangkok, Thailand, April 23, 2023.
In a report released last month, the World Meteorological Organization said that El Niño conditions had developed in the Pacific for the first time in seven years, adding that there was a 90% chance that El Niño would last until the end of 2023 There is almost certainty that the next five years will be the warmest on record, with one of the five years in this period being the warmest on record.
But for Thailand, the Southeast Asian country already experienced record-breaking temperatures earlier in the year.
In April, the city of Tak recorded its highest temperature ever at around 45.5 degrees Celsius. In the same month, Thailand’s heat index – which measures how the temperature feels due to humidity – hit a record 53.9 degrees Celsius in Chonburi province and on the popular tourist island of Phuket.
Searing temperatures also forced Thai households to use more electricity, for example for air conditioning in homes, causing electricity consumption to surge to record levels in April and May.
And last week, the water level at the Lam Takhong Dam in the Korat region dropped so low that a historic part of Thailand was revealed. The Thai-America route, built and used during the Vietnam War and used by the US Air Force as a route to their base at Udon Thani, has resurfaced. According to the English newspaper Khaosod, the road is usually under water, which has dropped to less than half its capacity.
Kiatanantha Lounkaew, an economics lecturer at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, says El Niño droughts will affect the economic livelihoods of the Thai people.
“The main crops that could be affected are rice, corn and sugar cane. The household incomes of those who grow these crops are low. Therefore, this effect could lead to persistent poverty. Impoverished households will not have adequate resources to mitigate the effects of the drought,” he told VOA via email.
Data shows that around 40% of Thai farmers live below the poverty line.
“Since these products are the staple food of Thais and are used to feed livestock, rising prices would be felt across the economy. As previous empirical evidence shows, there is a clear link between periods of drought and inflation, particularly food inflation.” . Low-income people are more vulnerable to the impact as around 50-70% of their monthly income is spent on groceries.”
Agriculture accounts for up to 9% of Thailand’s GDP. The country is the second largest rice exporter in the world and the third largest raw sugar exporter. The industry employs about a third of Thailand’s workforce, including millions of farmers.
Workers transport blocks of ice to a storage unit at a fresh market during a heatwave in Bangkok April 25, 2023.
After an economic downturn during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thailand, Southeast Asia’s second largest economy, has rallied and GDP growth was forecast at 3.5% in 2023.
In early August, the Bank of Thailand’s policy committee warned that the economy could contract amid weather concerns and political uncertainty, Reuters reported.
Kiatanantha says the droughts could hurt Thailand’s agricultural competitiveness.
“In the long term, it will affect the competitiveness of Thailand’s agricultural sector. Agricultural households faced with fluctuating incomes will find it difficult to remain competitive as this requires further investment to improve their yield and the quality of their produce.”
“Furthermore, such a prospect would ‘pull’ people who are able to into other sectors of the economy. A change in the composition of the labor force will put further downward pressure on the agricultural sector and create regional and sectoral inequalities,” said Kiatanantha.
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