Discussions of rural life in Thailand often proceed in the absence of good quality local information. This is unfortunate, as local studies often throw up findings that challenge popular misconceptions. Here is a fascinating graph from ANU PhD researcher Runako Samata.
Runako has been studying the economy of upland Karen farmers in Thailand’s Mae Hong Son province. As I have discussed previously on New Mandala, Karen upland farmers feature prominently in the local sufficiency/local wisdom account of NGOs and activist academics. These accounts are often motivated by a legitimate desire to defend upland farming practices from exaggerated charges of environmental degradation. But they sometimes tend to slip over into a romanticisation of upland livelihoods. This is where Runako’s graph comes in useful. The graph illustrates the annual per capita un-milled rice production for 60 households that are entirely dependant on upland fields (not irrigated paddy) for their rice. The two lines indicate two locally informed estimates of annual per capita rice requirement (one thang is about 10 kilograms). The story it tells is stark: the vast majority of these upland rice farmers cannot meet their rice requirements!
Runako has found that farmers respond to this deficiency in various ways – some diversify into cash crops (interestingly she found that some of the highest upland rice yields were achieved by farmers who had grown cabbages on the plots in the previous year – the rice benefits from the fertiliser residue) while many others seek wage labour opportunities within the village, in the local trading centre or in towns and cities further afield. As in much of rural Thailand, achieving sufficiency involves spatially dispersed diversity.
7 responses so far ↓
1 ThaiBloke // Jun 23, 2007 at 9:27 pm
So actually, they use experience, join the market economy, grow something else that they can sell and use the proceeds to buy rice.
Adam Smith would be very proud of them, no sufficiency economy needed.
2 Vichai N // Jun 23, 2007 at 11:19 pm
What popular misconceptions are you Andrew Walker referring to?
At least what we urbans know about the rurals, particularly at the uplands, is that they are certainly insufficiently being attended to and their incomes are generally meager and insufficient. Their agro -pursuits are at most rudimentary and not bound to yield enough considering the terrain and the small size plots being farmed.
And of course when people do not have enough to eat . . they will seek additional income elsewhere. That is what normal hungry people usually do.
The graph was NOT even necessary Andrew. From general knowledge and my occassional forays to the hinterlands, I could have concluded as much without wasting somebody else’s funds to do a ’study’.
3 jeplang // Jun 24, 2007 at 2:21 am
If I may be so impertinent to state that the graph is a plot of raw data, and as such it is difficult for the reader to estimate the percentage of households not reaching the required annual requirements.
Plotting the cumulative percentages of households [y axis]against the annual rice yield per capita ,using a class size or 5 thang,[x axis] produces an “s” shaped curve-roughly-that enables the reader to read off that roughly 65%-75% of households do not reach the annual requirements.
The “s’ shaped curve indicates that the data are approximately normally distributed , at least on my crude values read off from the graph.
4 phrek gypmantasiri // Jun 24, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Runako showed interesting information. About 3% of studied households achieved very high yield per capita of upland rice (over 60 Thang). These households managed upland rice-cabbage cropping systems very effectively under rainfed conditions, perhaps a good combination of appropriate local upland rice variety, nutrient management, and cabbage production practice. Can we use these households as local resource persons for improving livelihoods of other less privileged groups?
About 18% of households achieved above rice sufficiency level, yielding 44-50 Thang per capita. We can use these households as benchmark for rice improvement.
Among those rice-insufficiency households (about 67%), whose rice yields below 20 Thang per capita would be critical (27 % of studied households). It is a challenge to raise rice yield from 20 to 40 Thang per capita in a sustainable farming practice.
Commercialization introduced in the Karen community, like other Lanna Thai communities, has benefited a few. It is interesting to follow coping strategies of different groups (based on rice sufficiency-insufficiency) as shown in the Figure, so that better interactive learning approach for integrated resource conserving land use practices could be developed between development workers (NGOs and governmental, alike) and local communities. What are social relations or mechanisms among different groups in the Karen community that provide us with better understanding before making any location-specific intervention?
5 jonfernquest // Jun 25, 2007 at 3:57 pm
There is a lot of variation to be accounted for. Is the report available? It would be interesting to see what factors account for this variability.
IMHO Zero growth sustainability philosophies and rural demographics rarely seem go hand in hand. Whenever I think of the sort revisions of mainstream economic thinking like Sufficiency Economy, I immediately think of the **continual unremittant pressure to have babies** on young rural women and also their lack of educational opportunities that is usually a way out of this vicious circle.
Food supply and birth -death rates historically go hand in hand. Has infant mortality gone down over time? It sure has in the Chiang Rai to Keng Tung area, particularly on the Burma side where you meet women who have had as many 10 children. I would speculate that birth rates are above the mere zero growth replacement level which would imply that food supply and cultivated land has to be growing over time or if it is not, offspring must find a livellihood outside of agriculture or the market economy has to be exploited for income.
6 Johpa // Jun 28, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I have never lived in a Karen village that did not have some padi land. In the two Karen villages I lived in, there were those with padi and those without padi land. Those without padi land planted hill rice. The hill rice never was sufficient for a years supply of food. Those without padi land would supplement their rice by helping with the planting and harvesting of the padi rice of others in exchange for a pre-arranged amount of harvested rice.
I should note that both villages were settled in the 20th century by Karen immigrants who originally hailed closer to the Burmese border. I would think that the potential for developing rice padi in these under-populated, and at the time rather remote foothill areas, was a prime motivator for making the move.
7 New Mandala » Paddy in the uplands // Jun 28, 2007 at 9:35 pm
[...] few days ago I reported on research (by Runako Samata) suggesting that the upland rice production of many Karen farmers [...]
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