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Tag Archives: Thailand
Building U.S. Alliances in the Asia-Pacific: Trade, Disaster Relief and Climate Change Adaptation
For the past few years, the United States had made an unmistakeable shift in foreign policy attention to the Asia-Pacific region (President Obama has described this change as a “pivot,” though the U.S. government is not necessarily comfortable with that term of art). There are both military and civilian dimensions to this shift, and the U.S. will need to deftly combine development, diplomacy and defense in order to maintain a sustainable and beneficent influence in the region. (more…)
Watch This Space: A Recovering Thailand and the Rainy Season
The rainy season is approaching in Thailand, yet the country has not yet fully recovered from the devastating floods that inundated the nation last year (the worst in over 50 years). As we highlighted last November, the nexus of climate change, rainfall variability and political stability in Thailand is a fragile one. Though Thailand is not considered one of the nations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, vulnerability can change over time, and recent natural catastrophes have tested its resilience. This is a critical space to watch, not just for Thais, neighboring countries or those concerned about global food prices (Thailand is responsible for 30 percent of global trade in rice), but for U.S. national security planners as well. Given the so-called U.S. strategic “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific, assisting countries like Thailand in their climate adaptation strategies may be a critical component of advancing U.S. national security interests. We talk about this further in our piece “A Marshall Plan to Combat Climate Change in the Asia-Pacific: The Missing Piece of the New U.S. Security Strategy.”
Thailand and Food Security: Climate Change, Floods and Grasshoppers
A recent article in IRIN details the multiplication of rice pests after last year’s devastating floods – pests that have the capacity to “decimate harvests.” According to the country’s Rice Department, the “brown plant hopper” has destroyed 30 percent of rice production in affected provinces, “amounting to around 1.3 million tons for the country, or more than 15 percentage of the nationwide harvest, which takes place twice a year…” This comes on top of the devastation by the floods themselves, which experts estimated could destroy as much a quarter of the country’s rice crop. Given that Thailand is the largest rice exporter in the world (though it may soon lose that designation), this is not just a local matter. (more…)