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Rubber crop diversity and its influential factors in Thailand

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Abstract

Thailand is the largest nature rubber exporter in the world. The rubber industry is particularly important for both the national economy and farmers. However, the increasing popularity of monoculture rubber plantation has posed challenges for the sustainable development of rubber industry due to the negative impacts of homogeneous cropping systems. Rubber crop diversity system is expected to alleviate the environment degradation and secure rubber farmers’ income. Nevertheless, the rubber diverse cropping systems adoption is more complicated for most rubber farmers in Thailand. Using the data on rubber farmers which cover 3344 observations from Office of Agricultural Economics in Thailand throughout the period of 2012–2014, this paper investigated the influential factors of rubber crop diversity adoption. The results indicate that rubber farmers are usually lack of management skills, information, and market access in crop diversity adoption. Adequate rainfall and water, household labour, land right certificate, land degradation, the use of organic fertilizer, crop sales channels and irrigation access have positive impacts on the adoption of rubber crop diversity. On the other hand, in the southern region, the hiring of foreign labours, agricultural training, off-farm work, male household heads as well as their age and education level are negatively associated with crop diversity adoption. According to the empirical results, it is necessary for rubber institutions to pay more attention to training programmes and education on rubber farmers’ diverse cropping system management skills. Moreover, rubber sustainable development strategies should offer rubber households additional incentives and financial support to relieve their financial constraints and improve the market accessibility. In addition, it is also necessary to focus on rubber households with poor natural resources and agricultural infrastructure and offer supports for infrastructure, such as irrigation systems, to increase rubber crop diversity adoption in Thailand.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thanked Pichet Chaipanich, the Director of Chachoengsao Rubber Research Centre and staff from the institution for useful information and support in field surveys. The support from Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) is also acknowledged.

Funding

The study was funded by the China Agriculture Research System of MOF and MARA (CARS-28), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (SKYC2020005, 2020SJA0063), “A Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD)”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Economics and Management, Nanjing Agricultural University, No. 1, Weigang, Xuanwu District, Nanjing, 210095, China

    Sirimaporn Leepromrath, Jing Zhu, Jiajun Zhou & Tianxiang Li

  2. College of Economics and Management, China Centre for Food Security Studies, Nanjing Agricultural University, No. 1, Weigang, Xuanwu District, Nanjing, 210095, China

    De Zhou

Authors
  1. Sirimaporn Leepromrath
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  4. Tianxiang Li
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Contributions

Conceptualization by JZ, SL and DZ; methodology by SL, JZ and DZ; formal analysis by SL, JZ and DZ; data curation by SL, JZ and DZ; writing—original draft preparation by SL, JZ and DZ; writing—review and editing by JZ, SL, TL and DZ; supervision by JZ. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to De Zhou.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

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Table 3 The correlation of the covariates
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Leepromrath, S., Zhu, J., Zhou, J. et al. Rubber crop diversity and its influential factors in Thailand. J Rubber Res 24, 461–473 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42464-021-00114-7

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