Agriculture—Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, as a whole, is richly endowed with natural resources. Expansive river valleys and deltas, generally rich soils, and a humid tropical climate ensure that the constraints to agricultural development have historically been more economic and institutional than environmental. Agriculture was the primary source of income, employer of labor, and contributor to export revenues in the precolonial and colonial eras (until about 1950). Agricultural output, value, and trade volumes have continued to grow in the past half century. However, the character of Southeast Asian agriculture has changed dramatically, and its relative importance, as measured by its shares of national income, employment, and trade, has diminished tremendously as other sectors have expanded. Whereas in 1965, agriculture accounted for between one-fourth and one-half of GDP in the market economies of Southeast Asia, by the late 1990s its share had fallen to 20 percent in the Philippines, 16 percent in Indonesia, and even less in Malaysia and Thailand, according to the World Bank. In today's Southeast Asia, the only countries in which agricultural activities still dominate national income are those, such as Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar (Burma), that have failed to grow in other ways. Within the market economies of the region, with the exception of plantation sectors producing specialized export crops and remote, poor areas with little or no complementary infrastructure, other forms of economic activity now dominate the lives of most households.
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