Jasper Goss

Agri-Food Restructuring and Third World Transnationals: Thailand, the CP Group and the Global Shrimp Industry

In this paper we concentrate on developments in Souththeast Asia concerning newly-emerging relationships between the nation-state and a globally-oriented corporation. Using an integrated corporate-commodity systems analysis, we examine the nature of the farmed shrimp industry in Thailand and the company (Charoen Pokphand, or the CP Group) most responsible for the vertical integration of production, first in Thailand and subsequently elsewhere in the region. We argue that the shrimp industry, both globally and in Thailand, offers a particularly significant example of the consequences that agri-food restructuring and the intensification of aquaculture has on the possibilities for the participatory control of social resources.

From agricultural modernisation to agri-food globalisation: the waning of national development in Thailand

Agriculture has been central to accounts of Thailands modernisation and the rise of the national development project between the 1940s and the 1970s. However, the role of agriculture in the waning of national development is rarely explored critically in the Thai context. This paper focuses on agriculture and the role of the state in the shift from national development to globalisation. The first part of the paper examines the beginnings of Thailands modern agricultural sector, before turning to the state-sponsored diversification of agriculture in the 1950s. The paper locates shifting state responses to agriculture in the late 1950s and 1960s in the context of specific political and historical social forces, before exploring the emergence of agri-food exports in the 1970s and the rise of agribusiness in the 1980s and 1990s. The paper concludes by commenting on the significance of the Thai states role in the national development project and the globalisation project.