Thailand Confidential

by Jerry Hopkins

  He said humans were able to perform certain “tricks” to move faster and keep one foot on the ground at all times. Speed-walkers integrated a hip movement that enabled them to walk fast. And then, John added, there was something called “Groucho-running.” It was, he said, named for Groucho Marx, who stooped and sort of duck-walked in the movies, enabling him to accelerate his pace and maintain uninterrupted contact with the earth.

  “Elephants are doing something we haven’t figured out yet,” John said. It was, he implied, the challenge of his young academic life.

  As we talked, seven spots were painted on each elephant on the side facing the cameras that would record the run—on the top of the shoulder (or scapula), at the shoulder joint, on the elbow and wrists on the front leg, and on the hip, knee and ankle of the rear leg. In this fashion, the movement could later be tracked by drawing stick figures based on the film showing their movement as if in slow motion.

  The first elephant was led into position. This was a three-year-old named Pop and he calmly walked the measured distance in a little over twenty seconds, a preliminary timing made with which to compare a gallop. He was then returned to the starting position.

  Now, his mahout stood behind him with two empty plastic water bottles and started banging them together and screaming. Pop took off, the mahout in hot pursuit, still banging and yelling, and the relatively tiny beast was at full gallop when he passed the first light beam, tail curled upward as is always true when elephants run, his fat little legs pumping.

  John stepped to the counter and read the finish time. “Four-point-nine-two seconds!” Not a record, but faster than a California elephant and I could tell that John’s heart was beating faster, too.

  The second elephant was led to the start position. This was May and she was six and had no interest whatsoever in playing this silly game. She walked both laps.

  “We’ll give her another chance later,” said Richard Lair, diplomatically.

  I suggested to John that I thought maybe the reason Thai elephants ran faster than California elephants was the animals in San Francisco led a more sedentary lifestyle.

  “That’s a good word,” said one of John’s associates, who stood near the clock with a clipboard. “Sedentary.”

  “Yes,” said John, “but it still doesn’t explain how the elephants always keep one foot on the ground.”

  I said I didn’t think it was because the elephants were “Groucho-running.”

  In fact, the only thing I was sure of was that Groucho would’ve liked to have been there.

  Funny Business

  The Rubber Barons

  When I was growing up in the United States, the word “rubber,” in the plural, referred to overshoes you pulled onto your feet when it rained. In association with the word “check,” it meant you had insufficient funds in the bank and the check bounced. Affix it to another word and “rubberneck” meant to look about or stare with curiosity.

  Some friends of my parents played a “rubber” of bridge, meaning a round or series of play until one side won two out of three games. In the United Kingdom, it was the word used for eraser, because they were made from rubber and when they fell off your school desk they bounced all over the classroom floor.

  As I entered adolescence, the word gained a deeper meaning, it being the most common euphemism in America for a condom, because it too was made from what my dictionary calls “the highly elastic solid substance obtained from the milky juice of various tropical trees and plants.” Some of those little packets that American adolescents like me carried in their wallets until they fell apart (unused) said “Made in Thailand.” Now I live in Thailand, so I decided to go to the source.

  Welcome to Trang, the first place a rubber tree was planted in Thailand almost exactly one hundred years ago, in 1899, (brought from Indonesia by the provincial governor, although the rubber tree originated in Brazil). Today, rubber is the nation’s second largest agricultural product after rice, thriving in the Kingdom’s humid climate so well that it is the world’s third largest exporter, following Malaysia and Indonesia.

  In Trang, as in much of the nation’s southern peninsula, there are vast stands of rubber, where trees lined up like sentries form long, dark tunnels and men still go out before dawn with miner’s lamps on their heads to make foot-long diagonal cuts in the bark, placing a plastic bowl at the bottom of the “tap” to catch the dripping sap. Two hours later, the bowls are emptied, the white gooey latex is stored in plastic barrels for a day, then poured into what look like deep baking trays and mixed with sulfuric acid to aid coagulation, forming malleable pillows which are then flattened by hand and (literally) foot. Finally, they are pushed through hand-cranked metal rollers and draped over bamboo poles in the yard to dry, looking like bleached doormats. Five days later—assuming it doesn’t rain—the now translucent mats are taken in the family pickup truck or on the back of a motor-bike to collection points and sold by the kilo.

  The work hours are long, starting as early as midnight on some of the larger plantations and continuing through much of the day. The labor is also unpredictable. The latex flows best when the weather is cool and the air is still. Warmer, windier weather is not so good and you can’t cut when it rains or the leaves fall, or in the spring when the new leaves are coming in. This means tappers may sometimes work only 120 to 160 days a year.

  Nor is it always an attractive investment for landowners, who must wait five to seven years before a tree is ready for tapping, and replant every twenty-five to thirty years. Rubber grows better in poor soil than do cash crops such as sugarcane and maize, but the work is as labor-intensive today as it was when the business was growing up with the new automobile industry. And with world economies bouncing like, well, a rubber ball, market prices are unpredictable, too. In 1999, the slump in economies worldwide plus stiff competition drove the price in Thailand well below break-even.

  Kam Nuchitsiripatra is a third-generation rubber planter who knows the market well. His grandfather migrated to Thailand from China in 1917. By the time Kam was fourteen he could “tap” eight hundred trees in a day, so he hired someone to collect the latex as he continued to cut and asked his grandfather for fifty percent of the earnings. At sixteen, he introduced a stronger, more productive strain of tree to Trang and sold cuttings from the new trees to other farmers. Stick one of the cuttings into plain red earth and in six weeks you had a plantable tree.

  Kam is called “famous” in Trang province. Besides the thousand or so mature trees his workers tap on land he owns outside the city, he still has a backyard “farm” in town where he sells cuttings. As head of the local rubber planters association, he is also a storehouse of facts. There are six million acres (2.3 million hectares) of rubber in Thailand, spread across twenty-two provinces, mainly in the south, he says, a half-million of the acres in Trang. The export of rubber currently brings about US$2 billion to Thailand annually, and a family makes about US$1,750 a year. Rubber may once have made millionaires of colonial plantation owners (in what was then called Indochine, Indonesia, and Malaya), but today the world price is so low, Thailand’s government pays farmers to replant.

  Choosit Lee, another third-generation rubber worker, is the factory manager at Sri Trang Agro-Industry, where in a warehouse larger than two airplane hangers about four hundred tons of the latex sheets are washed and dried every day, then graded and bundled for resale, a job he holds, in part, because he speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, and two southern Chinese dialects, Thai, Malay, English, and Japanese; his company sells to factories around the world, making him handy to have around when the phone rings. He is teaching his two young children Mandarin and English, but they, he insists with a laugh, probably won’t be interested in following in their father’s footsteps when it’s time to choose a career.

  As on the plantation, he tells me, in the factory, too, little has changed in a hundred years. There are forklifts now, and regular coffee breaks for the employees, but much is still Dickensian, r
eminiscent of an earlier, harsher era. Here, in a building six acres in size, endless piles of rubber sheets on pallets are brought to the ends of massive cement tubs full of water for washing. Men throw armloads of the sheets into the waist-deep water and other men inside the tubs wearing only shorts hold on to bamboo scaffolding overhead and stomp on the floating mats to separate mold and other external impurities, kicking the mats forward to where women standing in the water flip them one by one between rollers to remove the surface water. The pace is frantic and the noise and water splashing recalls a public wading pool for children on a hot summer day. But you know this isn’t fun.

  As the sheets come through the rollers, they’re draped over bamboo racks, taken by forklift and stacked ten meters high in metal rooms for smoking, to remove the last moisture inside the rubber. Five days later, the sheets emerged baked to a golden brown and smelling eerily like kippers, or smoked herring, the popular English breakfast dish.

  Now embedded bits of dirt, insects and air bubbles are cut away by hand with scissors and the sheets are graded individually according to the quality of what’s left. The cleanest rubber is graded highest and is sold for the best price to firms making tires for airplanes and luxury automobiles. The coarser stuff is used for truck tires and everything left over, including the bits cut out of the sheets with the dirt, is turned into rubber slippers.

  Like the pig, where everything is used except for the squeal, little of the rubber tree is wasted. The wood, lightweight and easy to work with, as well as abundantly available, is made into furniture and toys, from dollhouses to blocks to spinning tops. Because Thailand has banned the logging of most trees, rubber wood now accounts for seventy percent of raw materials for the country’s wooden furniture industry.

  There’s also a market for the liquid latex, brought to the factory in tanker trucks. Choosit Lee takes me to a rise on the property, one of the highest points in the province, he says. Below and stretching to low mountains miles away are the countless rows of trees. Here, a cargo that looks like melted vanilla ice cream is pumped into company trucks and transported to nearby Hat Yai, where hand-sized molds are dipped into it to form rubber gloves, ubiquitous around the world.

  In ways too numerous to count, this stuff thus plays a role in more people’s lives than possibly any other man-made product, save perhaps steel and electricity. Remove rubber from the earth and you lose what must be history’s favorite toy, the ball, you leave most land and air vehicles without tires and inner tubes, and homes and offices and shops go wanting the rubber band, while children are denied something with which to correct mistakes and party balloons to blow up.

  Without rubber, we’d have to get along without hot water bottles, life rafts, bathing caps, foam mattresses, raincoats and other all-weather gear, wetsuits for divers and surfers, garden hoses, gaskets and seals and fan belts for cars and buses and trucks, airport conveyor belts, door and car mats, baseballs (the cores are rubber), basketballs, and ping-pong paddles. Bureaucracy everywhere would stumble to a clumsy halt without a rubber stamp. And as for all those you-know-whats essential to family planning and world health, they’d probably be made of plastic or something even unfriendlier.

  They are not made in Trang, by the way. Most of those factories are in Chon Buri. Another story for another time.

  Thailand’s Beer Wars

  There must be a hundred ways to rate a country as “world class,” but my favorite is in the answer to this question: Does it have a great beer? So I guess it wasn’t Thailand’s “greatness” that led me to move there. Even before I visited the country, I didn’t like its beer. In fact, I thought it was quite horrible.

  At the time, in the 1980s, I was living in Honolulu where there was a Thai restaurant that imported what was commonly regarded as Thailand’s “national” beer. That was because from the 1930s onwards, the government had given a monopoly to the Boon Rawd Brewery Company Limited of Bangkok, makers of a lager called Singha.

  Based on a recipe and technology from Germany and made from locally grown barley and imported hops, the beer whose name meant “lion” (an animal never seen in Asia) had a high alcohol content of six percent and, for my money, too many of those female hop flowers that gave the brew its bitter taste. Of course, it could have been the water, always a determining factor in a beer’s flavor. Singha had its brewery alongside the polluted Chao Phyra River and drew its water from artesian wells, sunk deep beneath the swampy ground on which the city was built, creating an image that was less than reassuring.

  When I bellied up to my first Thai bar in 1993, Singha controlled ninety percent of the market and two other locally produced beers, Kloster and Amarit, franchises from the German brewer Beck’s, competed for what was left, mainly selling to tourists and expatriates. Both had less alcohol than Singha and neither had its acrid bite. When in Bangkok, I drank Kloster. However, when I traveled outside the city, there was no choice. If you didn’t drink Singha, you didn’t drink beer. And even if you’d brought some other brand with you and wanted to cool it with ice—in Thailand, men customarily put ice in their beer—the frozen water available was of extremely dubious origin.

  Then came one of the greatest shifts in the history of beer marketing. In under ten years, not only were dozens of brands made available, Singha, once in privileged command, was left hanging out to dry with only eleven percent of the market, while an upstart newcomer called Chang (Thai for “elephant”) had a whopping seventy percent! How that was accomplished is not taught in reputable business schools, nor likely would the tactics survive any court test in the developed world. It was, on the other hand, a classic story that illustrated perfectly how trade was conducted in Thailand: ruthlessly.

  It was a war waged by two families, one led by a man of inherited riches who coaxed royalty to captain his board, the other by a man with a fourth grade education, the son of a vendor who sold oysters on the street. If novelist James Clavell were alive, this cast of characters and their books of dirty tricks would have offered him material for a sequel to Tai-pan and Shogun .

  Boon Rawd, the makers of Singha (or “Singh,” as its loyal drinkers say), was established in 1934 by Phraya Birombhakdi, whose son Prajuab was sent to study beer culture in Germany’s Domen Institute, returning to look after the Singha monopoly. When he died, Santi and Piya Bhirombhakdi took command. For more than half a century, through the Japanese occupation of Thailand and into the 1960s and 1970s when Americans built air bases and ports and roads for the transport of bombs and out-drank the thirstiest of Thais in noisy go-go bars, and thence into the boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s when the Kingdom was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having the world’s fastest growing economy, Singha was never challenged. The family had built its business on connections with the aristocracy and for a time Adulkit Kittiyakara, brother of Her Majesty the Queen, served as company chairman. Further competition was not allowed. And sales went up, up, up.

  Then along came the oyster vendor’s son, Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, whose company was given a monopoly of his own, being awarded by the Finance Ministry licenses to all twelve regional whisky distilleries—“whisky” so called but made from fermented rice and sugar cane and thus, in fact, a rum. In rural Thailand, where seventy percent of the population lived, the preferred drink was one of Charoen’s products, named for the Mekhong River that flanked part of the country’s borders with Laos and Cambodia. This drink was colored brown with caramel for the city folk and left “white” (clear) for the rural market, and it was cheaper than beer by far.

  Deciding to take on Singha’s dominance, Charoen formed a partnership with Carlsberg when the beer giant from Denmark was given permission to enter Thailand. The original formula was changed, increasing the alcohol content and bitterness, and the international price was reduced—but it still cost more than Singha. They claimed a price premium went with the beer’s international status. New brand, higher price: one thing was very clear—if Carlsberg wanted to topple Singha
, it had to sell in volume. Thus, began a marketing war unlike any seen in Thailand before.

  Charoen ordered his sales network to push Carlsberg along with all his whiskies, including Saengthip as well as Mekhong, and to tell any Singha agent (retailer) declining to take the beer that it couldn’t buy the popular whisky. The genteel Bhirombhakdi family then told its more than ten thousand agents nationwide that if they so much as sold a single bottle of Carlsberg, they’d lose the right to sell Singha. It was what was called in another part of the world a “Mexican stand-off.” It didn’t last long. Upcountry, if you couldn’t get the whisky your customers wanted, you were, effectively, out of business and as a result, the Singha distribution system disintegrated.

  Some later said this was a diversionary tactic, that Charoen all along had planned to introduce a purely “local” brand. Hadn’t he obtained two licenses to produce beer, after all? In any case, in 1994, this is what he did, launching Chang, a brew with a higher alcohol content (6.4 percent compared to Singha’s six percent) and a price so low it didn’t even cover production costs, creating a product that literally delivered more bang for the baht and demanded the attention of the budget beer drinker.

  How could he do this and survive? He nearly doubled the price of the whisky and bundled whisky sales and beer sales together: in order to get the whisky, a retailer had to take the package. If you wanted to buy twenty liters of the whisky most popular in the countryside, you also had to buy four cases (forty-eight big bottles) of Chang. In this fashion, the beer loss was covered by the increased cost of the whisky…and the entire nation was saturated with the strongest, cheapest beer ever marketed.