Resource information
According to Myint's "vent-for-surplus"
theory, development of the economies of Indonesia, the
Philippines, and Thailand from the nineteenth century on
depended on the natural advantage of large tracts of unused
"empty land" with low population density and abundant natural
resources of the type typically found in Southeast Asia and
Africa at the outset of Western colonization. When these
economies were integrated into international trade, hitherto
unused natural resources (primary commodities the indigenous
people had not valued) became the source of economic
development, commanding market value because of high import
demand in Western economies.
The major delta of Chao Phraya
River was the resource base of vent-for-surplus development
with rice in Thailand; tropical rain forests filled that
role in Indonesia and the Philippines with respect to the
production of tropical cash crops. This basic difference
underlay differences in the distribution of farm size: the
unimodal distribution of peasants or family farms in
Thailand and the coexistence of peasants and large estate
farms or plantations specializing in tropical export crops
in Indonesia and the Philippines. Differences in agrarian
development were also shaped by different policies toward
the elites preemption of unused land. Under Spanish
colonialism, the elite preempted unused land in the
Philippines wholesale, bifurcating land distribution between
non-cultivating landlords and sharecroppers in lowland rice
areas, and between plantation owners and wage laborers in
upland areas. In Indonesia, the Dutch government granted
long-term leases for uncultivated public land to foreign
planters, but prevented alienation of cultivated land from
native peasants, to avoid social instability. In Thailand,
concessions were granted for private canal building, but the
independent kingdom preserved the tradition of giving land
to anyone who could open and cultivate it. Relatively
homogenous land-owning peasants dominated Thailand's rural
sector. As frontiers for new cultivation closed, the
plantation systems initial advantage (large-scale
development of land and infrastructure) began to be
outweighed by its need to monitor hired labor. The peasant
system, based on family labor needing no supervision,
allowed Thailand's share of the world market in tropical cash
crops to grow, as Indonesia and the Philippines lost their
traditional comparative advantage. Moreover, land reform in
the Philippines made land markets inactive, with resulting
distortions in resource allocation and serious
underinvestment in agriculture.
