An Evaluation of Incremental Income of Farmers Participated in Paddy Pledging Program Crop Year 1991/92.

Abstract

Rice farmers who need cash usually sell their paddy during the harvest period. When many farmers made the same decision, large amounts of paddy flow farms to market. As a result, market price of paddy during this period is always low. To solve this problem, the paddy pledging program has been designed and implemented by Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives since crop year 1981/82. The objectives of the program are to reduce paddy released from farms during the harvest period, and raise income of rice farmers. The annual program grants soft loans to rice farmers so that they could store paddy for later sale. But, the farmers have to use paddy as collateral for their loans. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the incremental income earned from pledging by famers in crop year 1991/92. In this evaluation, 6 provinces were selected as a case study. And, quasi-experimental design with posttest only was used. According to the design, rice farmers were devided into two group; pledgers and non-pledgers. The data used for this study were collected by sample survey. Both groups of farmers were randomly selected and interviewed with questionnaires. The main findings were as follows : 1. The amounts of subsidy received by the pledgers were 1,578.57 baht per farm. 2. The amounts of incremental income earned from paddy storage by the pledgers were 3,969.00 baht per farm. 3. The gains from pledging were 82 percent against the losses of 18 percent. According to the findings, the incremental income resulted from the low rate of interest and the rising of paddy price after the harvest. Thus, from the evaluation, it was concluded that the paddy pledging program crop year 1991/92 was effective because it could raise income of most farmers.