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Farmers in the Forest, while using examples chiefly from northern Thailand, is concerned with complex problems found in all tropical countries. In these areas rapid population growth, increasing demands for food, and burgeoning international markets for forest products and other raw materials are associated with active competition for land and natural resources in upland areas. This book brings together studies by administrators, agronomists, anthropologists, forest ecologists, geographers and jurists, who describe a variety of swidden systems and their effect on soil, forest, society, and economy. They point to conflicts between traditional farming systems and modern legal and administrative constraints now being imposed, and they describe special and technological conditions that contribute to a marginal, stagnant upland economy, increasing socio-economic disparities with the lowlands, and the serious ecological consequences of these conditions. Several possible solutions are suggested to solve these problems.
When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.
This volume looks at the origins and consequences of the accelerated growth of the Thai economy since the mid-1980s, and explores the factors that set Thailand apart from other Asian, African and Latin American countries.
In this far-reaching examination of environmental problems and politics in northern Thailand, Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker analyze deforestation, water supply, soil erosion, use of agrochemicals, and biodiversity in order to challenge popularly held notions of environmental crisis. They argue that such crises have been used to support political objectives of state expansion and control in the uplands. They have also been used to justify the alternative directions advocated by an array of NGOs. In official and alternative discourses of economic development, the peoples living in Thailand's hill country are typically cast as either guardians or destroyers of forest resources, often depending on their ethnicity. Political and historical factors have created a simplistic, misleading, and often scientifically inaccurate environmental narrative: Hmong farmers, for example, are thought to exhibit environmentally destructive practices, whereas the Karen are seen as linked to and protective of their ancestral home. Forsyth and Walker reveal a much more complex relationship of hill farmers to the land, to other ethnic groups, and to the state. They conclude that current explanations fail to address the real causes of environmental problems and unnecessarily restrict the livelihoods of local people. The authors' critical assessment of simplistic environmental narratives, as well as their suggestions for finding solutions, will be valuable in international policy discussions about environmental issues in rapidly developing countries. Moreover, their redefinition of northern Thailand's environmental problems, and their analysis of how political influences have reinforced inappropriate policies, demonstrate new ways of analyzing how environmental science and knowledge are important arenas for political control. This book makes valuable contributions to Thai studies and more generally to the fields of environmental science, ecology, geography, anthropology, and political science, as well as to policy making and resource management in the developing world.
First published in 1974. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Most studies of Southeast Asian economic change focus on the phenomenal growth experienced by a few large cities, such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. Big business has been viewed as the economic engine fueling the region's growth and prosperity. Studies of the rural areas have concerned themselves with the social and environmental impact of metropolitan growth--villages emptied by migration to the big cities, cultures crushed by tourist development, and agribusiness and lush landscapes destroyed by the devastation of natural resources. The literature reveals that few analysts have examined the middle distance between metropolis and countryside. The contributors to this book have addressed the issue by concentrating on the intermediate level of economic, political, and social life--the world of Thailand's provincial cities and market towns. In the past decade the rise of frequently violent competition for business and political leadership in the Thai provinces, and the growing importance of provincial support for national powerholders, has drawn attention to the way in which these town and village centers are being transformed by capitalist development. This volume brings together some of the research inspired by this, drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, national backgrounds, and sites of study. Contributors: Daniel Arghiros, Chris Baker, Sombat Chantornvong, Kevin Hewison, Jim LoGerfo, Ruth McVey, Michael J. Montesano, James Ockey, Pasuk Phongpaichit, Maniemai Thongyou, Yoko Ueda.
First published in 1973. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.