If you saw a newspaper article written by a farmer telling the bankers of this nation how they could improve the way they do business, what would your reaction be?

Read on in the expectation of a bit of a giggle? Be reminded that this was a golden opportunity for changing the paper at the bottom of the budgie’s cage? Or idly wonder that if this was the level of contribution to the local press, then perhaps the world was ready for your long-postponed op-ed piece on the propriety of using Viagra to cure hamsters of jetlag?

But one assumes the Bangkok Post does expect us to take seriously an article by banking executive Burapa Atthakorn in its Wednesday edition that tells farmers what they are doing wrong.

The purpose of the article is blameless. It is to guide us out of the economic recession (although from what I have read, banking executives bear a large share of the responsibility for guiding us into this recession in the first place). Former Senator Burapa has a quick and snappy answer: productivity.

Thai agriculture is an inefficient, under-resourced sector of the economy, employing far too many people for the good it does, but one where Thailand is already a major player in world markets. Folk have to eat, so a bit more productivity (he mentions irrigation, consolidated land-holdings, and some way of allowing farmers to borrow so they can use more fertilizer) and Thailand’s farms could drag the country out of recession.

This argument has all the logical force it had 40 years ago when the World Bank re-modelled the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives to effect just this. It didn’t make sense then, it hasn’t worked for 2 generations of still poverty-stricken farmers, and it won’t work now.

Khun Burapa claims that Thai agriculture is 10 times less efficient than in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Now there are many ways of measuring (and mis-measuring) agricultural productivity and Khun Burapa gives no references, but I think he must be referring to productivity in terms of output per worker. And it is true that the rich agricultural-exporting countries employ a far smaller fraction of their populations to produce food.

So suppose Khun Burapa gets his way and the number of people involved in agriculture shrinks from the current 50% (approximately) to the 10% that its share of GDP indicates. That translates into 14 million people suddenly losing their jobs on the farm and swelling the ranks of the unemployed. This at a time when the rest of the economy (here or worldwide) is shedding workers with no signs yet of any uptick in employment figures.

But productivity (as defined by Khun Burapa) will be improved. Whether it will be improved enough to pay for the social cost of 40% or more unemployment rates is quite another question.

Khun Burapa seems to have missed a point that the technocrat planners of the NESDB, who largely share his views on productivity, have carefully kept in mind. The countryside is not just a source of employment and (admittedly low) production. It acts as a magic sponge.

When the labour-intensive bits of the multinationals move into town and there is a need for factory-loads of semi-skilled and unskilled workers, then rural poverty will squeeze out a steady supply. But when times turn hard, as they did in 1997 and again now, then the unwanted masses are supposed to be painlessly absorbed back onto the farm.

Well, it’s painless for the planners, I suppose.

But productivity can also be measured in terms not of output per worker, but output per unit of input. And in agriculture, your biggest input is land.

Now Khun Burapa, working from a point of view that says farms operate on the same principles as factories, or banks, immediately thinks of economies of scale. Piddling little fields with a bit of this and a bit of that, mixed up with ponds and fruit trees, well, it’s just not efficient. Broad monocropped acres is the way to go.

Except that from country to country, from climate to climate, the research shows that small farms are more productive. Not if you just count the yield from a single crop. But no farmer with any sense wants to do that. Easiest way of depleting soil quality and encouraging pests. Put bluntly, in terms that banker might understand, nature doesn’t recognize economies of scale.

But the World Bankers of the 60s were as misguided as Khun Burapa and actively encouraged monocropping. So soils have been depleted and pests have multiplied. The fertile soil of Thailand that Khun Burapa takes as a given is, in what were the most fertile places, a thing of the past. Farmers need fertilizers. And since soil degradation just gets worse until you change the cropping system, you need more and more just to keep yields at the same level. Even if the price of fertilizer didn’t go up (and it does), farmers need to spend increasing sums on ever more liberal applications.

And here Khun Burapa moves closer to his own area of expertise. Farmers need to borrow to finance their ever more exorbitant artificial inputs, he says. But they have been borrowing. For decades. The result is the crippling rural debt that sends rural youth into the cities in search of income to pay the interest on the loans.

That’s interest paid to the banks, of course.

Must find that farmer to write an article on banking. Can’t possibly be more wrong-headed than this.