I recently wrote a post about the diversification of livelihoods that has taken place in rural Thailand. From the informed comments received there appears to be general agreement that the move away from agriculture is strong throughout rural Thailand, though the extent and timing of this shift has varied from place to place.
In this post I want to raise a related issue. While this new(ish) rural economy is very diverse, it also seems to be somewhat hollow. In some (many?) rural areas it seems to be characterised by a profound lack of private investment. My perspectives on this is, I admit, strongly influenced by my very localised research in Ban Tiam, a village in Chiang Mai province. In the district of which Ban Tiam is a part, private enterprise is dominated by local construction contractors and they are hardly “private” because they primarily live off a stream of government contracts. Beyond that, private enterprise extends to shopkeeping, restaurants and money lending. Contract farming is also making some inroads.
A relatively low level of private investment in rural areas may be natural, even inevitable. But I get the impression that while many rural households in Thailand are moving away from agriculture (both out of choice and necessity) a good number of them are failing to get a firm foothold in other, more lucrative, sectors of the economy. In Ban Tiam it is the pipeline of government projects, programs and salaries that underpins much of the local economy.
In many parts of the world, rural industrialisation has been identified as making an important contribution to sustainable poverty alleviation and rising living standards. Does anyone have any good suggestions about data sources (or research) on the extent of private sector investment in rural areas of Thailand?
2 responses so far ↓
1 MongerSEA // Oct 13, 2009 at 3:10 pm
We might be grateful that the rural areas remain largely agricultural and hollow in terms of private investment. Not that poverty is praiseworthy, but consider that if investment should come that makes a meaningful difference in average incomes at the tambon level, it will require large-scale investment which would almost certainly come from Bangkok. While local wages would rise, the actual expertise would come from and profits would flow to the capital. Experience tells us that business and political interests always work in harness here, so we need to be mindful of where power would accrue.
Should this large-scale investment happen, it would almost certainly reflect an intrusion of yellow-allied interests (they being the capital-holding class generally) into former red-allied areas. Without choosing a side, can we at least say that resolving the tension between the two camps by democratic compromise might be the way forward for Thailand? It’s not too much of a stretch to think that yellow-allied business might use the workplace to disseminate propaganda, or worse, make support of a particular party a de facto condition for employment. Once the economic hook is set and consumption rises to meet the new income levels, this form of coercion could be very hard to resist, and the legitimate concerns in the red agenda swept aside for another generation.
2 Srithanonchai // Oct 14, 2009 at 4:31 pm
For an interesting article on rural resistance in SEA, see
http://www.geog.mcgill.ca/faculty/turner/Turner%20and%20Caouette%202009%20Agrarian%20Angst%20Final%20published%20version.pdf
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