This large-format hardcover volume is part of a series resulting from a five-year international research project (2005–10) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), entitled ‘Challenges of the agrarian transition in Southeast Asia’. It comprises nine chapters and includes six maps (in chapter 1), 67 plates (chapters 2 to 8) and four large tables as appendices. To show the time-series statistical data on agriculture and change in nine countries (Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) at national and regional levels, 138 line graphs are presented. The time span covered by these graphs is three centuries since 1700 (in chapter 2), or several decades after 1950 in the following six chapters. The principal source of data is the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations' online database, FAOSTAT (2010). For a number of topics not strictly agricultural, the authors also use data provided by other UN agencies, the World Bank's World Development Indicators and the database of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The book includes an introduction, and the following chapters: Southeast Asian agricultural expansion in global perspective; growth, development, urbanisation and globalisation; the relative decline of agricultural employment; agricultural growth, diversification, intensification and expansion; expansion and intensification of food crops and increase in livestock production; the expansion and intensification of cash crops; pressures on land and the sea, and a conclusion with the book's main title: ‘Gambling with the land’.
The major findings of this book are summarised in the last chapter. First, since the 1960s, the pace of territorial expansion of Southeast Asian agriculture has increased. This has caused massive deforestation and it is still ongoing. Second, the share of agriculture in the GDP has rapidly decreased. However, the industrial and service sectors are not absorbing the ex-agricultural labour force as rapidly as their share of the GDP. Thus, the employment retaining capacity of the agriculture sector remains very significant. Third, farming activities alone are insufficient to keep people on the land and plural activity is spreading. Yet agriculture has shown remarkable resilience, and the ‘deagrarianisation’ of the countryside is not proceeding as rapidly as expected. Fourth, for nearly a half century since 1961, indices of net agricultural and food production per capita in Southeast Asia outpaced global trends. This growth has been attributable to the expansion of both booming cash crops such as oil palm, rubber, and coffee, and traditional agriculture, primarily rice cultivation.
Fifth, a fundamental factor behind such growth has been the dynamic association between crop intensification and a remarkable expansion of agricultural area. The significant increases in yield, particularly in rice production, have been largely attributable to the Green Revolution. In general, intensification is continuing together with areal expansion in Southeast Asian agriculture. Sixth, on the one hand, while Southeast Asia has been quite successful in improving its level of self-sufficiency in rice, the relative share of rice production has been declining because of the faster territorial expansion of cash crops. There have also been remarkable increases in fruit and vegetable production for both the domestic and export markets. Seventh, the pressure exerted on agriculture is now extending to aquaculture and fishery. The seas are being increasingly cultivated. External demand plays an exceptional role in this change, as illustrated by the cases of shrimp farming and seaweed production. The agriculture and agriculturalists of Southeast Asia are not only gambling with and betting on land and soil, but also with and on the seas and inland waters.
Such intensification of demand on environmental resources is the result of at least four major interrelated processes: the commoditisation of agriculture, aquaculture and fisheries; their externalisation and globalisation; the ‘agriculturalisation’ of landscapes at the expense of forests; and relays and complementarities among nearly all Southeast Asian countries in the different boom crops and seafood species, such as rubber, oil palm, and shrimp.
As a whole, this book is quite successful in describing the changing features of Southeast Asian agriculture since the early 1960s up to the present. The large amounts of statistical data compiled and analysed in this book alone will be beneficial for those who are interested in structural change in the region, not only of its agriculture, but also of the economy and society in general.
Nonetheless, this book also contains some shortcomings and minor inaccuracies. For example, the graph line indicating tractor use in Vietnam is lacking in Plate 11 (p. 32). The export of rice from Cochin-china to China and Hong Kong during the colonial period is not mentioned (p. 86). The principal tea product in Vietnam, particularly in the major producing area of Thai Nguyen province, is green tea, not black tea (p. 118). Finally, I would also question the title of this book, ‘gambling with the land’. The word ‘gambling’ conjures the image of land speculation, or rent-seeking behaviour. In contrast, the actual data presented suggest that, by and large, farmers and agriculturalists are simply looking for rational ways to make a profit or simply make a living. The word ‘gambling’ here might be unsuitable or misleading.
