Administratively, Thailand is divided into 76 provinces, each headed by a governor. There are 787 districts and district branches, 7,404 sub-districts, and nearly 66,604 villages in the 76 provinces. The population in 1996 was over 60 million people, and of this population 64 percent reside in the rural areas. Approximately 90 percent of the rural people, or 5.2 million farm families, earn their income through subsistence farming, particularly rice cultivation and other field crop production.
In Thailand, 64 percent of the population are engaged in agriculture. Most of them grow single crops such as rice, cassava, corn, sugar cane etc. The proportion of income per capita of those engaged in agriculture to other sectors was 1:13 in 1997. Several development programmes have failed because there were no realistic assessments of the limited resource base of small farming systems.