Maybe ThaiBloke you should have reminded that particular Thai Party to observe strictly the election rules. They KNEW, every single Thai Rak Thai Party executive KNEW, that the party was committing a serious election law crime by bribing the small parties in that Apr06 failed election. But not one single Thai Rak Thai Party executive made a fuss! Not One!
Any Thai political that is no more than a grovelling butler service to the Shinawatras do not deserve to be called political, or a party, even! IThai Rak Thai #$#@$ is a maid service for chrissake!
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?
To give it a name is rather irrelevant to be honest.
That is only if one believes that there is pure hearted communist left in the world.
If history has shown anything, communism is the removal of individual rights with subjugation to a single central ideology without the right of protest? Then what is going on in Thailand right now is not that far away.
I am not defending Taksin, rather worrying about the situation whereby a given political party can be removed and another seemingly ordained for election without any consideration for the electorate.
I think you forgot one important category, the category that I belong to:
1997 Constitution, rule of law and elections Faction.
Under the 1997 Constitution, coups were outlawed, so that makes me anti-coup, and if people wanted to get rid of Thaksin because he broke the law, he could have been investigated by the various constitutional bodies and impeached by the Senate.
The problem with the stance that the Democrats took was that their policies were indeed “me too,” policies. There was no real depth to the plans other than to say, “An increase in the minimum wage”.
Plus they had a huge credibility problem.
The Democrats need to adopt an ethos to hang their policies upon. Are they fundamentally free market, are they fundamentally pro FDI, are they fundamentally pro income distribution. These may be western descriptions of a political party and may not necessarily be relevant in a Thai context.
However, until a party stands up and really describes what they want to do to move Thailand in a given direction be it pro poor, pro business, pro exports, pro investment, pro income distribution, pro Bangkok, pro rural a character like Taksin can steal their thunder in a second.
The Democrat policy stance considering that it is the oldest party in Thailand is absolutely pathetic. Or is it truly the case that Thai politics is simply about being in power first and policy later?
Patiwat is quite right: It was the combination of promised policies before the election and their speedy implementation afterwards that way outdid all other party outfits in the election of 2005. And the Democrats under Abhisit still have no clue, but may be helped in the November election by the coup period–but only if the remnants of TRT fail to act in a coordinated way. As Gladiator said: We stay together–we’ll survive; we’ll fight each on his own–we will all die.
On the contrary, Nick: Thaksin did announce his policy manifesto prior to the 2001 election. In fact, the TRT manifesto of universal access to healthcare, a 3-year debt moratorium for farmers, and the 1 million THB locally-managed village development fund was a revolution in election politics.
Prior to the 2001 election, no political party ever had a concrete national policy platform. After the 2005 election, every major party announced a concrete national policy platform – and many parties ended up copying the TRT party’s populist measures.
Nick, your suggestions were taken since the 2005 election: the Democrats, led by a certain younger Oxford-educated old-money politician, adopted several “me too” populist measures in their election platform, including a higher minimum wage, free education, free health care, and greater subsidies on electricity tariffs. They did the same thing in the October 2006 election (the one that the junta cancelled).
Were such copycat promises a surefire way to gain ground from Thaksin and the TRT? No – it was a tremendous failure. The Democrats lost a net 30 seats in 2005. Nobody believed that the Democrats, and elitist party for its entire history, would really be able to deliver on a populist platform.
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.
Why should a well educated person’s heart like yours Srithanonchai bleed for someone so despicable as Thaksin Shinawatra? Thaksin Shinawatra remains still The Toxin of Thailand.
“The Ivory Coast has announced details of compensation to victims of last year’s toxic waste scandal in Abidjan. The families of 16 people who died when poisonous waste was dumped in the city will get $200,000 (┬г100,000) each, with $408 each to thousands who became ill.” – BBC Jun-22
Thaksin’s toxin was more deadly, obliterating more than 2,000 innocent lives during his extra-judicial rampage merely blacklisted by some very dumb uneducated poorly trained village police hicks. I would like to see those victims of Thaksin’s extra-judicial toxin compensated by at least the same amount those Ivory Coast toxic victims will receive. Now that is what I call justice served to The Toxin of Thailand.
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’.
“That is the problem, one can very rarely see what one has become when one has been in control so long.” – ThBloke
Actually one 4-year term (which certainly is not “so long” is it?) and power begins to intoxicate any self-respecting megalomaniac. Megalomaniacs are dangerous . . . they gall the masses with false promises, they extra-judicially kill, they steal big, they divide the country and to further add insult to the grievous injury they cause, they cheat big on taxes too. Reminds us Thaksin Shinawatra doesn’t it?
It is not fair to put quasi-communists as royalist inspired, or, vice-versa. Royalists and communists are opposing forces by nature.
But control of the masses had always been THE objective, by communists, royalists, democrats, republicans, leftists, centrists and rightists. At least that is what I learned from my elementary grade teacher.
SE sounds like a wonderfully patronising statement to the have-nots of the world, “Do not aspire to anything more, because you may risk that the sky will fall on your head one day”. If Thai people think that the status quo in Thailand is economically enough, then a short trip to Isaan or the South should probably change their view pretty quickly.
Of course people should live within their means in the long run as I am sure the people of the US will find out in a few years time when they have to fund their deficit. Of course people should be prudent to minimise the shocks that come along in anyones lifetime. Ideally individuals should make their own provision without having to rely on the state and for those that cannot the state should provide.
However, the rural poor are getting royally ripped off endlessly by their country. They are scammed on food prices, they are scammed on government spending projects and the only answer that SE can provide is “This is the way life is, make provision since you should take care of yourself while I go and buy another Mercedes.”
Happiness indexes are a ridiculous measurement, and so subjective as to be absolutely worthless. If you have a subservient population, and I am sitting in one not too far north of Thailand right now, they are bombarded with so much politicised nonsense that they are brainwashed into believing they are happy. The sun in Thailand improves my happiness no end, whereas ask a Brit in mid winter if he is happy and see the results.
Of course money is not the fountain of all happiness, but neither is being told that “Sorry mate, the rambuthan price collapsed because me and my buddies get together as a cartel and collapsed it. Cheer up, be happy, better luck next year, oh by the way, that loan repayment.”
I have never heard such a worrisome policy in a developing nation as suficiency economy. We have all heard the stereotypical nonsense that Thais don’t know how to handle money and that Chinese do etc etc. There are more fundamental problems that the Thai rural poor do not actually have any money to handle. I have worked in agriculture in Thailand, and Thai farmers are no less smart with their money than American farmers.
The endless chasing of agricultural success in Thailand means that there is a real incentive for the rich to keep the poor in the fields which really only serves to feed the country and to line the pocket of mass of government and business people in Bangkok with their dirty dealings.
The last thing Thailand needs is for its poorest to be told, “Be happy with what you have.” To increase the wealth of a man earning 100 USD by 10% is a far cheaper, economically beneficial and easier project than to increase a millionaires wealth enough so he buy another Mercedes.
If Thailand does not get this right very soon, the rural masses who have had a taste of someone who gave them everything will be wanting someone who can give it them again.
I think the comparison between the palace and a quasi-communist state is very relevant. Control of the masses, servitude to a central knowledge base, media control, patronage over ability, party loyalty, the list goes on.
I believe that the ‘elite’ do not believe themselves to be quasi communist, in that they may feel that they bring genuine benefit to the poor. That is the problem, one can very rarely see what one has become when one has been in control so long.
[…] 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 […]
What was obviously so scary to the Bangkok so called Elite was how easy and how realtively cheap it was to gain landslide popularity in the rural areas.
I don’t have the stats for how many villages he gave the money to, but at 25,000 USD per village it proved to very very cheap I would think. Yes he was corrupt, yes he had some crazy policies, yes he indebted the poor and yes he was the single most popular and successful politician that Thailand has ever had.
The next step will be if this realisation has had any effect on the politicians left in his wake and whether this will spark something akin to manifesto politics. Thai politics with it’s godfathers and patronage lurches slowly from fad to the next crackdown because no party every stands up and says what it stands for and what it is going to do for the country.
I believe it may well happen that in the next election that we might get some of the younger more western educated politicians to stand up and for example say “I will put one percent on higher rate income tax to fund rural education, or I will tax rental incomes since this is the preserve of the rich to pay for scholarships for the rural to attend university”. Likewise tax reductions here, social programs there etc etc. This is the best surefire way to make sure that Thaksin cannot re-enter politics. I do fear however, that the vested interests of the few are so entwined in Thai politics there is only a remote chance of any party coming up with a comprehensive plan to get this country moving in both the metropolitan and rural areas.
There is no accountability in Thai politics because no party has an ethos that drives their ideas of how a country should be fundamentally run be it left, right, open, closed etc etc. They sway in the wind, and can never be held accountable for failure because there was nothing planned and announced to the electorate. How the electorate be expected to educate itself when the only real policy is “Let me give you a hundred baht, and trust me”.
That is exactly what Taksin did, but unlike just about every other party before he put his hands in the government coffers and he paid out in what the rural populous felt was mountains of money.
However, Thaksin didn’t even announce his manifesto before he won. He won and out of the hat he produced Thaksinomics. It was a marketing and political masterstroke, much like Blairs “Third Way”, a mish mash of this and that pandering to the masses. The Bangkok elite had better be scared, very scared that he doesn’t come back because he can move this country in both good and bad ways.
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Erasing Thaksin’s “anomalies”
Maybe ThaiBloke you should have reminded that particular Thai Party to observe strictly the election rules. They KNEW, every single Thai Rak Thai Party executive KNEW, that the party was committing a serious election law crime by bribing the small parties in that Apr06 failed election. But not one single Thai Rak Thai Party executive made a fuss! Not One!
Any Thai political that is no more than a grovelling butler service to the Shinawatras do not deserve to be called political, or a party, even! IThai Rak Thai #$#@$ is a maid service for chrissake!
Upland insufficiency
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?
Mapping the post-coup academic landscape
Thaksin could have been voted out. > Yes, theoretically…
Erasing Thaksin’s “anomalies”
To give it a name is rather irrelevant to be honest.
That is only if one believes that there is pure hearted communist left in the world.
If history has shown anything, communism is the removal of individual rights with subjugation to a single central ideology without the right of protest? Then what is going on in Thailand right now is not that far away.
I am not defending Taksin, rather worrying about the situation whereby a given political party can be removed and another seemingly ordained for election without any consideration for the electorate.
Mapping the post-coup academic landscape
I think you forgot one important category, the category that I belong to:
1997 Constitution, rule of law and elections Faction.
Under the 1997 Constitution, coups were outlawed, so that makes me anti-coup, and if people wanted to get rid of Thaksin because he broke the law, he could have been investigated by the various constitutional bodies and impeached by the Senate.
Also, there was an election scheduled in October.
Thaksin could have been voted out.
Will rural voters be “confused to death”?
If he announced before then I stand corrected.
The problem with the stance that the Democrats took was that their policies were indeed “me too,” policies. There was no real depth to the plans other than to say, “An increase in the minimum wage”.
Plus they had a huge credibility problem.
The Democrats need to adopt an ethos to hang their policies upon. Are they fundamentally free market, are they fundamentally pro FDI, are they fundamentally pro income distribution. These may be western descriptions of a political party and may not necessarily be relevant in a Thai context.
However, until a party stands up and really describes what they want to do to move Thailand in a given direction be it pro poor, pro business, pro exports, pro investment, pro income distribution, pro Bangkok, pro rural a character like Taksin can steal their thunder in a second.
The Democrat policy stance considering that it is the oldest party in Thailand is absolutely pathetic. Or is it truly the case that Thai politics is simply about being in power first and policy later?
Will rural voters be “confused to death”?
Patiwat is quite right: It was the combination of promised policies before the election and their speedy implementation afterwards that way outdid all other party outfits in the election of 2005. And the Democrats under Abhisit still have no clue, but may be helped in the November election by the coup period–but only if the remnants of TRT fail to act in a coordinated way. As Gladiator said: We stay together–we’ll survive; we’ll fight each on his own–we will all die.
Democratic Alliance Against Dictatorship protests, Bangkok
Sawarin: You are probably right. More than the other members of the DAAD, Jakrabhop seems to have radicalized and talked himself into a corner.
Thaksin come home!
Vichai: Some irony should not do any harm.
Will rural voters be “confused to death”?
On the contrary, Nick: Thaksin did announce his policy manifesto prior to the 2001 election. In fact, the TRT manifesto of universal access to healthcare, a 3-year debt moratorium for farmers, and the 1 million THB locally-managed village development fund was a revolution in election politics.
Prior to the 2001 election, no political party ever had a concrete national policy platform. After the 2005 election, every major party announced a concrete national policy platform – and many parties ended up copying the TRT party’s populist measures.
Will rural voters be “confused to death”?
Nick, your suggestions were taken since the 2005 election: the Democrats, led by a certain younger Oxford-educated old-money politician, adopted several “me too” populist measures in their election platform, including a higher minimum wage, free education, free health care, and greater subsidies on electricity tariffs. They did the same thing in the October 2006 election (the one that the junta cancelled).
Were such copycat promises a surefire way to gain ground from Thaksin and the TRT? No – it was a tremendous failure. The Democrats lost a net 30 seats in 2005. Nobody believed that the Democrats, and elitist party for its entire history, would really be able to deliver on a populist platform.
Upland insufficiency
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.
Thaksin come home!
Why should a well educated person’s heart like yours Srithanonchai bleed for someone so despicable as Thaksin Shinawatra? Thaksin Shinawatra remains still The Toxin of Thailand.
“The Ivory Coast has announced details of compensation to victims of last year’s toxic waste scandal in Abidjan. The families of 16 people who died when poisonous waste was dumped in the city will get $200,000 (┬г100,000) each, with $408 each to thousands who became ill.” – BBC Jun-22
Thaksin’s toxin was more deadly, obliterating more than 2,000 innocent lives during his extra-judicial rampage merely blacklisted by some very dumb uneducated poorly trained village police hicks. I would like to see those victims of Thaksin’s extra-judicial toxin compensated by at least the same amount those Ivory Coast toxic victims will receive. Now that is what I call justice served to The Toxin of Thailand.
Upland insufficiency
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’.
Erasing Thaksin’s “anomalies”
“That is the problem, one can very rarely see what one has become when one has been in control so long.” – ThBloke
Actually one 4-year term (which certainly is not “so long” is it?) and power begins to intoxicate any self-respecting megalomaniac. Megalomaniacs are dangerous . . . they gall the masses with false promises, they extra-judicially kill, they steal big, they divide the country and to further add insult to the grievous injury they cause, they cheat big on taxes too. Reminds us Thaksin Shinawatra doesn’t it?
It is not fair to put quasi-communists as royalist inspired, or, vice-versa. Royalists and communists are opposing forces by nature.
But control of the masses had always been THE objective, by communists, royalists, democrats, republicans, leftists, centrists and rightists. At least that is what I learned from my elementary grade teacher.
Upland insufficiency
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.
Sufficiency and the rich
SE sounds like a wonderfully patronising statement to the have-nots of the world, “Do not aspire to anything more, because you may risk that the sky will fall on your head one day”. If Thai people think that the status quo in Thailand is economically enough, then a short trip to Isaan or the South should probably change their view pretty quickly.
Of course people should live within their means in the long run as I am sure the people of the US will find out in a few years time when they have to fund their deficit. Of course people should be prudent to minimise the shocks that come along in anyones lifetime. Ideally individuals should make their own provision without having to rely on the state and for those that cannot the state should provide.
However, the rural poor are getting royally ripped off endlessly by their country. They are scammed on food prices, they are scammed on government spending projects and the only answer that SE can provide is “This is the way life is, make provision since you should take care of yourself while I go and buy another Mercedes.”
Happiness indexes are a ridiculous measurement, and so subjective as to be absolutely worthless. If you have a subservient population, and I am sitting in one not too far north of Thailand right now, they are bombarded with so much politicised nonsense that they are brainwashed into believing they are happy. The sun in Thailand improves my happiness no end, whereas ask a Brit in mid winter if he is happy and see the results.
Of course money is not the fountain of all happiness, but neither is being told that “Sorry mate, the rambuthan price collapsed because me and my buddies get together as a cartel and collapsed it. Cheer up, be happy, better luck next year, oh by the way, that loan repayment.”
I have never heard such a worrisome policy in a developing nation as suficiency economy. We have all heard the stereotypical nonsense that Thais don’t know how to handle money and that Chinese do etc etc. There are more fundamental problems that the Thai rural poor do not actually have any money to handle. I have worked in agriculture in Thailand, and Thai farmers are no less smart with their money than American farmers.
The endless chasing of agricultural success in Thailand means that there is a real incentive for the rich to keep the poor in the fields which really only serves to feed the country and to line the pocket of mass of government and business people in Bangkok with their dirty dealings.
The last thing Thailand needs is for its poorest to be told, “Be happy with what you have.” To increase the wealth of a man earning 100 USD by 10% is a far cheaper, economically beneficial and easier project than to increase a millionaires wealth enough so he buy another Mercedes.
If Thailand does not get this right very soon, the rural masses who have had a taste of someone who gave them everything will be wanting someone who can give it them again.
Erasing Thaksin’s “anomalies”
I think the comparison between the palace and a quasi-communist state is very relevant. Control of the masses, servitude to a central knowledge base, media control, patronage over ability, party loyalty, the list goes on.
I believe that the ‘elite’ do not believe themselves to be quasi communist, in that they may feel that they bring genuine benefit to the poor. That is the problem, one can very rarely see what one has become when one has been in control so long.
The “Karen consensus” strawman is alive and well
[…] 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 […]
Will rural voters be “confused to death”?
What was obviously so scary to the Bangkok so called Elite was how easy and how realtively cheap it was to gain landslide popularity in the rural areas.
I don’t have the stats for how many villages he gave the money to, but at 25,000 USD per village it proved to very very cheap I would think. Yes he was corrupt, yes he had some crazy policies, yes he indebted the poor and yes he was the single most popular and successful politician that Thailand has ever had.
The next step will be if this realisation has had any effect on the politicians left in his wake and whether this will spark something akin to manifesto politics. Thai politics with it’s godfathers and patronage lurches slowly from fad to the next crackdown because no party every stands up and says what it stands for and what it is going to do for the country.
I believe it may well happen that in the next election that we might get some of the younger more western educated politicians to stand up and for example say “I will put one percent on higher rate income tax to fund rural education, or I will tax rental incomes since this is the preserve of the rich to pay for scholarships for the rural to attend university”. Likewise tax reductions here, social programs there etc etc. This is the best surefire way to make sure that Thaksin cannot re-enter politics. I do fear however, that the vested interests of the few are so entwined in Thai politics there is only a remote chance of any party coming up with a comprehensive plan to get this country moving in both the metropolitan and rural areas.
There is no accountability in Thai politics because no party has an ethos that drives their ideas of how a country should be fundamentally run be it left, right, open, closed etc etc. They sway in the wind, and can never be held accountable for failure because there was nothing planned and announced to the electorate. How the electorate be expected to educate itself when the only real policy is “Let me give you a hundred baht, and trust me”.
That is exactly what Taksin did, but unlike just about every other party before he put his hands in the government coffers and he paid out in what the rural populous felt was mountains of money.
However, Thaksin didn’t even announce his manifesto before he won. He won and out of the hat he produced Thaksinomics. It was a marketing and political masterstroke, much like Blairs “Third Way”, a mish mash of this and that pandering to the masses. The Bangkok elite had better be scared, very scared that he doesn’t come back because he can move this country in both good and bad ways.