ESPP Doctoral Student Leo Baldiga Publishes in Journal of Rural Studies on Life After an Aquaculture Boom in Thailand
September 29, 2026
ESPP dual major doctoral student Leo Baldiga is first author of a new open-access study in the Journal of Rural Studies that asks a question most research on "crop booms" has overlooked: what happens after the boom is over? Focusing on shrimp and fish farming around Bangkok, the study uses three decades of satellite data and interviews with hundreds of Thai farmers to show that post-boom livelihoods did not collapse into dispossession and monoculture — instead, smallholders kept farming, kept diversifying, and kept their land.
The study, "What happens after the boom? Aquaculture, land use change, and smallholder resilience in Central Thailand", is published in Journal of Rural Studies (Vol. 128, 2026, article 104417) and is available open access.
Boom, bust — and then what?
Over the past 15 years, a large body of research has documented the dramatic expansion and sudden collapse of boom crops across Southeast Asia — palm oil, coffee, rubber, and shrimp. But most studies stop at the boom or the immediate bust. Central Thailand, which has experienced a succession of aquaculture booms and busts since the 1980s — including the 1994 white spot syndrome crash and the 2012–14 early mortality syndrome collapse — offered a rare long-run case for asking how farming communities actually live with the aftermath.
Three methods, thirty years of change
Baldiga and his co-authors combined three complementary approaches:
- Geospatial analysis tracking aquaculture pond expansion and contraction at decadal intervals from 1990 to 2020 using Landsat-based remote sensing data;
- A farm household survey of 455 aquaculture farms across eight provinces surrounding Bangkok — areas that together account for roughly a third of Thailand's freshwater aquaculture area;
- In-depth interviews with 40 farmers, many of whom have farmed for decades and can speak to the full boom-and-bust history.
Findings: not a bust, but a settling
Rather than a classic boom-and-bust cycle, the researchers found a pattern of entrenched, institutionally mediated persistence:
- Boom-and-bust cycles have weakened. Each successive shock has had a smaller impact, and net pond area in the region has continued to grow slowly even as production stabilizes.
- Land has stayed in the community. Thanks to a highly formalized land tenure system, secure agricultural tenancy, and a long history of urban absentee landlords who lease farmland, successful farmers have been able to acquire and consolidate land within extended families rather than see it leave the region. About 40% of surveyed farm parcels were inherited.
- Farmers continuously adapted and diversified. In the years after the 2012–14 disease crash, Central Thai farmers shifted toward semi-intensive and extensive polyculture — growing shrimp together with fish, using low-cost local feeds, and deliberately lowering their exposure to disease and market risk. This diversification is why Central Thailand was far less affected by the 2012–14 early mortality syndrome outbreak than the intensive monoculture operations of the South and East.
- A new domestic market pulled in a different direction. As Thai incomes have risen, domestic shrimp consumption has grown dramatically — up 73% since 2016. Farmers increasingly sell smaller grades of shrimp to domestic markets, weekly popup markets, and restaurants directly, capturing more value while insulating themselves from export price swings.
The authors suggest that this post-boom equilibrium is sustained by the confluence of Thailand's "middle-income trap" dynamics — rising urban demand for high-value food, an aging rural workforce, and limited secure employment options — and by farmers' own strategic diversification.
Why it matters beyond Thailand
Because countries such as India, Vietnam, and Ecuador are currently in the middle of their own export-oriented shrimp booms, the long-term trajectory of Central Thai aquaculture offers a preview of what post-boom landscapes may look like elsewhere. The study argues that with the right institutional conditions — secure tenure, access to land through rental markets, credit, and support for value-adding and diversification — the aftermath of a crop boom can be a pluralized, resilient farming landscape rather than a landscape of dispossession.
The research was conducted in collaboration with Ben Belton (MSU and the International Food Policy Research Institute), Lin Yan and David P. Roy (MSU's Center for Global Change and Earth Observations), Meicheng Shen (MSU), and colleagues in Thailand, and was supported by the NASA Land Cover Land Use Change (LCLUC) program.
Congratulations, Leo!