Rice harvesting curtails cassava starch production

With rice harvesting season in the Northeast of Thailand coming to an end in December, laborers are switching their efforts to harvest rice instead of raw cassava for cassava starch, which grows in the same region with an overlap in harvest during November and December.

The shortage of overall labor workforce brought on by COVID-19 has shifted focus away from cassava harvesting, which has lower priority than rice, to the more lucrative harvest of rice, leading to a shortage of cassava starch over the next two months.