What do rice, politics, and infrastructures have to do with each other? More than intuition would have us believe, as Atsuro Morita highlighted in his November 28, 2014 talk at the Asian Institute on multispecies infrastructures in Thailand’s Chao Phraya Delta.

While we tend to think of infrastructures as man-made systems that operate separately from or subjugate nature, Morita argued that this is not always the case. In the amphibious environment of the Chao Phraya Delta, this relationship becomes particularly clear as interdependencies between rice species, farmers, and water management systems begin to emerge.

To study this area, Morita employs a research strategy termed “infrastructural inversion”, which essentially involves a renewed focus on infrastructures, placing them in the foreground rather than in the background of the activity they are facilitating. In doing so, he revealed a fascinating process of adaptation at play between the farmers in the delta and a particularly species of rice called floating rice that is particularly well-suited to this flood-prone area in Thailand. Floating rice has the unique ability to elongate its stem to keep pace with the surrounding flood waters, giving it an important survival advantage over the short stem, high yield rice that may seem favorable from an economic point of view.

This survival advantage, however, is not simply a matter of Darwinian natural selection processes. Instead, Morita describes the cultivation of rice in the delta as one of “mutual dependence” between farmers and rice varieties, emphasizing that rice is a matter of care. He notes that the natural heterogeneity of rice varieties, along with the rare instances of mutations and spontaneous cross-breeding all contribute to the survival of some species in the harsh environment of the delta. He adds, however, that the farmers have an incredibly important role to play in the area of seed selection, which is a painstaking process that can last several years.

The under-appreciation of this cohabitation relationship between farmers and rice species in the delta became especially pronounced when the government of Thailand held a contest to determine the best rice varieties, which would then be used for rice breeding throughout the country. As Morita argued, this contest revealed two contrasting concerns. On the one hand, the elites and foreigners who judged the competition were concerned primarily with the export values of the different rice varieties, yet had no advanced knowledge of rice farming practices or rice varieties around Thailand. On the other hand, the farmers themselves, who entered around 165 different varieties into the contest in total, revealed a deep and nuanced understanding of and concern for these practices and species.

Thus, the elites had a very different relationship with the rice varieties than did the farmers; a contrast which again revealed itself in the implementation of the modern water management systems. These new systems, funded in part by the World Bank, often proved more vulnerable to flooding than traditional water management systems. In fact, as Morita argued, the elongation that gives floating rice its advantage in the flood-prone areas is a result of constant care of the farmers, and cannot be designed in the way that engineers construct infrastructures.

Overall, the talk helped reveal a complex entanglement of elite versus farmer interests and modern versus traditional infrastructures operating on the relationship between human and non-human species in the Chao Phraya Delta. Morita’s work helps reveal the importance of focusing on infrastructures to fully understand any given activity, especially in the face of conflicting interests and infrastructure-related disasters, such as the 2011 floods in Thailand.

-written by  Fatin Tawfig, a third year student double majoring in psychology and political science at the University of Toronto.

This article is part of a series of articles written by undergraduate students affiliated with the Asian Institute about events hosted by the Asian Institute.