Thai Floods – What Effect on Rice?

Thailand’s worst floods in decades have caused over 350 deaths, and are inflicting extensive damage to much of the country’s land, crops, livestock, infrastructure, housing and industrial areas. An estimated 12.5 per cent of Thailand’s cropland or 7 million tons of crops across 81 provinces have been damaged, and many tons more have been destroyed in flooded warehouses. Regionally, flooding in Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, and to a lesser extent, Vietnam, has damaged significant stretches of arable land. A high percentage of the destroyed croplands have been rice fields – particularly in Thailand, which supplies 31 per cent of the world’s rice exports and was, before the floods, expected to produce a record 25.1 million tons of rice this year.