To stress my point, a high economic growth in the Thai economy from the 1950s to
the 1980s might have come about as a result of two conditions; high population growth and
damage to the environmental resource, namely deforestation. The agricultural sector was
deployed to generate economic growth and revenue to feed industrialists in the city until the
1970s. The continuous growth of this sector with scanty technological progress lends support
to the notion that Thai farmers were heavily squeezed by the Thai state. The surprising
feature of agricultural growth was that Thailand was probably the only country in Asia where
cultivated land per agricultural worker actually increased until 1977