Effects of agricultural policies on rice industry in Myanmar

Myanmar is an agriculture-based country; thus rice industry is the one of most important sectors for her economic development. During the early 20th century Myanmar was worldly recognized as the “Rice Bowl of Asia” and was the number one exporter in the world. However, the amount of rice export declined significantly time by time and no longer dominated the world’s rice export market. Therefore, the significance of this study is to examine how Myanmar’s rice policies shift its rice sector from top rice-exporting country to self-sufficient production of rice. This paper focuses on macro and micro economic policies. At macro level, the study analyzes policies on credit systems, exchange rate policy whereas at micro level, the study looks into policies on production, trade and price policies. This study discovered that since the end of British colonization in 1940s, rice policies in Myanmar had been constantly intervened by the government. This resulted to mismanagement and ineffective policies for rice industry in every successive government regime. It is obvious that the socialist period was the most damaging part throughout Myanmar’s history of rice industry. These policies focused more on rice production rather than to develop strategies to improve the export of rice. The reason is that the government considered rice as one of the factors contributing to political stability in country. This resulted to the maintenance of low price of rice which has been proven not effective for the farmers as well as production thus led to the decline in rice export at the global market.