Thai rubber farmers wheeze as prices slump

As rubber prices slump, hard-up farmers in Thailand -- the world's top producer of the commodity -- are appealing for a bailout, testing the junta's resolve to end populist policies and an entrenched subsidy culture.

The global price for a one kilogramme sheet of natural rubber has retreated to 43 Thai baht ($1.3) after a three-year slide.

That decline, from highs of up to 120 baht in 2011, has chiselled away the income of Thailand's estimated six million rubber farmers.

Many of them reside in the nation's south, a region home to the ultra-royalists who backed a May army coup that toppled the elected government.

Now, as their profits shrivel, they want payback from an army they helped propel to power.

With dawn creeping over his plantation in Pa Ko subdistrict of Phang Nga province, Jade Charongan said tapping his 500 trees for the once-lucrative sap yields around $130 a month.

Three years ago he earned five times that amount, as surging demand from China saw rubber reach highs of $3.6 a kilo.

"Now the rubber price is very, very low and life is tough," Jade said adding that rising living costs mean "farmers in almost every house have problems".

The uncertainty heaps further misery on the daily 4:00 am torch-lit trudge to bleed the trees for the milky white sap, he added.

The Thai Rubber Farmers' Association says the kingdom produces around four million tonnes per year with an average annual export value of around $8 billion -- although that sum has been sheared by falling global prices.

Farmer Somjai Chomkhwan, 51, was among thousands of southerners who travelled to Bangkok to join the mass rallies that paralysed Yingluck Shinawatra's government, paving the way for the May 22 coup.

"When the junta came into power, we expected the rubber price would probably be increased," he told AFP.

"But it has been months and the rubber price has kept dropping."

Farmers' groups are calling on the military government to guarantee the price at 80 baht a kilo.