After finishing her latest rice harvest, Sripai Kaeo-eam hurriedly cleared her fields and planted a new crop in late August — ignoring a Thai government advisory to restrict further sowing of the grain this year to conserve water.
“This crop is our hope,” said the 58-year-old farmer in Thailand’s central Chai Nat province, pointing to her green paddy seedlings only a few inches tall.
Sripai, who is trying to dig her way out of more than 200,000 Thai baht ($5,600) of debt, is motivated by the global spike in rice prices, which are close to their highest level in about 15 years after India — the world’s biggest shipper of the water-intensive grain — curbed exports.
Farmers across the agrarian heartland that makes Thailand the world’s second-largest rice exporter should be poised to benefit.
Instead, the amount of land under rice cultivation in Thailand decreased 14.5 percent in…
