A week on Thailand’s Koh Samui and Koh Phangan islands provided a great escape from a cold and sometimes wet winter without having to stress about the lawn getting out of control, as well as a complete break from New Zealand’s eternal debates in the media about everything that’s wrong in this country. I hadn’t realised just how depressing exposure to politicians indulging in puerile arguments and constant whingeing on radio, TV and in the papers can be.
So it was good to have warm weather, sun, beach and pool, to be able to avoid TV and to be exposed to a country where the people genuinely appear to be happy.
I am not unrealistic enough to confuse a holiday in tropical conditions with the realities of everyday life in a temperate climate, but there were some signs the Thais have a few things over us.
We were there to visit my wife’s son, who has been living there for over a year and intends to stay longer, because he likes it so much and, as a diabetic, finds the health system very easy to navigate with no problem receiving care and medication.
As a more mundane example I was able to buy antibiotics for an insect bite from a pharmacy; in New Zealand, a doctor would have to have prescribed them.
In the towns the traffic speeds are moderated by simple strips across the road at regular intervals, probably costing no more than a few hundred dollars, compared with the monstrous humps and judder bars Auckland Transport finds it necessary to install.
The sensible use of cones was also a relief compared with the horrendous waste of manpower, cones and traffic control whenever a minor repair is undertaken here.
The price of very palatable food is substantially lower than in New Zealand, no doubt because the overheads, wage costs and raw material are all cheaper. Although Thailand is certainly not an expensive destination compared to many others, eating out merely served to emphasise just how costly everything has become here.
Any involvement with animals and livestock was minimal, although a dog adopted us at one hotel, insisting on coming into our poolside room when the door was open; we also visited an elephant sanctuary, having the chance to feed them watermelon and pumpkin slices (did you know an elephant’s trunk has 70,000 muscles in it?), and a snake farm where we watched a live show featuring pythons and cobras.
From an agricultural perspective, Thailand is the world’s second-largest rice exporter after India. The start of the rice-growing year is marked in May by the Royal Ploughing Ceremony, dating back to the 13th century. When the first monsoon rains appear, farmers plant seeds into seedbeds, traditionally plough their paddies with water buffaloes and transplant the seeds when they reach about 15cm.
The whole community shares this back-breaking work, standing for hours with their “backs to the sky, faces to the earth”, generally in high spirits with much joking and singing.
Harvest is in November or December, normally performed with a scythe through the stalks, before threshing to remove the chaff, usually done by hand, bagging and storing in the rice barn. Through the growing season farmers venerate the goddess of rice, Mae Phosup, who is invited to take up residence in the barn when harvesting is complete to protect the crop from disease or theft by rats. This last ritual is performed by women, since if men were left alone in the barn with the goddess, they would be unable to control their desire for her!
While Thailand is very different in some respects from New Zealand – land mass, population, climate and trade profile – both countries share several features: tourism is of major importance, but has fallen since before covid and is not forecast to return to pre-covid levels until 2025 at the earliest; goods exports have been adversely affected by a downturn in world trade, particularly with China; inequality is very high with over half of Thailand’s wealth held by 10% of the population; per capita productivity is poor and falling; an ageing population will consume an increasing proportion of the healthcare and welfare budgets; and the quality of education, poor literacy and numeracy threaten to result in a skills crisis.
The political environment in Thailand is very different from New Zealand’s. It remains a kingdom in which the king is compulsorily revered, although the present monarch enjoys far less love and respect than his father. In spite of significant economic growth since World War 2, there have been many devaluations, changes of government from military to democratically elected and back again, and major fluctuations in GDP. However, over the past 70 years, Thailand has progressed from a mainly agrarian economy through import substitution with light industry, textiles and food processing to an export-led economy, mainly based on heavy industry, energy and tourism.
Thailand’s next phase is planned to be a high tech economy capable of producing value-added products and services, but sceptics point to the low internet uptake among Thais and a lack of specialist skills as obstacles to achieving this goal.
New Zealand and Thailand benefit from various free trade agreements, which result in approximately $4 billion of two-way trade of Thai exports of delivery trucks, cars and air conditioning units compared with New Zealand’s main exports of milk powder, butter, cheese, beef, crude petroleum, apples and pears.
This confirms Thailand’s progress towards value-added, industrial products, whereas New Zealand’s economy is still firmly based on agricultural commodities, supplemented by tourism.
