My wife’s father sleeps in a wooden hut in the middle of his rice paddies. Den didn’t grow a rice crop this year. Instead he watches over his 15 cattle worth 15,000 baht each. 225,000 bath on the hoof for the teams of cattle rustlers ranging over Thailand’s central plains to take advantage of a sleepy farmer and they don’t only target livestock.
Thieves staged midnight raids on rice paddies with tractors and farmers wake to 40 rai of stubble. With success comes failure, for as all rice farmers know, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
And farmers are reporting their fields getting ravaged by rats, which are in turn eaten by the farmers. No wonder they can never get ahead.
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