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In Thailand’s modern rural economy, rural livelihoods are no longer predominantly agricultural livelihoods. A new type of “rural” has emerged characterised by a process of “de-agrarianisation” whereby on-farm pursuits are an increasingly modest part of the household economy. According to Thailand’s national agriculture survey, the number of farming households who derived all of their income from agriculture declined precipitously from 46 percent in 1993 to only 21 percent in 2003.
The national “basic needs survey” reported that in 2008 rural people derived 58 percent of their income from off-farm employment and enterprise (Table 49 in this report). In Ban Tiam, a northern Thai village where I have been working for the past 7 years, the basic needs survey results suggest that the proportion of off-farm income is 73 percent, considerably higher than the national average. There are certainly problems with this sort of data collection, and I think that the Ban Tiam survey significantly understates cash-crop income, but the movement of Thailand’s rural economy away from agricultural pursuits is clear and survey results are borne out by a range of local studies. (I would be very interested in hearing about other data sources on this important issue.)
However, many rural households are not making a simplistic transformation from agrarian to non-agrarian lifestyles, or following the path of proletarianisation predicted for them by many old-style scholars of agrarian transformation. In fact, as Jonathan Rigg and others have argued, they are developing economically diversified and spatially dispersed livelihood strategies in which agricultural and non-agricultural pursuits are intertwined. As a result, rural households are increasingly multi-functional and multi-sited, combining an economically and spatially stretched out portfolio of livelihood activities.
Neither the “sufficiency economy right” nor the “community culture left” in Thai public life has come to grips with the social, economic and political implications of this profound transformation.
The changes mentioned are not at all recent. Already in the early seventies, Textor (from peasant to pedicab driver) analysed how circular migration was an important factor in rural livelihood strategies. The transfers from family members working in Bangkok, other large cities in Thailand or from abroad to the rural areas are substantial and have strong effects on rural economy and society.
Woth the building of a well functioning infrastructure during the last decade, the different parts of the country were linked with each other and the rural areas with the cities. This lead to an enhanced integration of the whole country. Even remote areas like the mouontains were integrated into the market economy and administration. This facilitated mobility and migration as a means to get access to non-farm employment and income for farmers. In addition it facilitated cash crops through better access to markets and better access to rural areas by traders, banks etc. etc., which resulted in indeptedness, which is already and indicator of market integration. Another result was the increased presence of the state, economy etc. in the villages. As Hobsbawm describes it nicely in his book on тАЮNations and Nationalism“, the awareness to be part of a larger political and economic context implies that even the farmers are aware that they have a stake and should have a say as well. As a result the position of patrons and others speaking for the farmers, is reduced. The farmers might be aware of their own agency. Nationalism used to be rather ceremonial in Thailand. A ritual show performed by the old elites. The role of the people, especially of the farmers was limited to be an audience. During the last years this has changed to quite some degree: Nationalism has become a base to articulate political demands. It seems that the olde elites are not amused by this development. In short, the changes within even remote places result from processes concering the country as a whole and thus, what happens in the villages becomes a factor of what happens in тАЮthe nation“.
I don’t understand why тАЮsufficency economy“ is categorized as тАЮright“ and тАЮcommunity culture“ as left? The difference are not that big, as both share a neo-romantic perspective of rural live quite removed from reality.
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I have been visiting a province near Bangkok for the past two decades. For many years, I used the train. In the evening, you always had scores of women in their company uniforms getting on the train at one point and leaving at others, that is, rural train stations, to return from their daily work in the factories to their rural villages. Similarly, in the morning and the evening one could observe buses shuttling factory workers, mostly women, from their rural bases to their work places, and back. Finally, the Teachers’ College, later renamed the Rajaphat University, certainly has not mainly been serving people from urban areas. Rather, many of its students have been people who lived in agricultural villages. To be sure, these students, though living in the countryside, did not study for their BAs as a preparation to till the soil of their parents.
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Very useful, Andrew. I’m also interested in whether the increase in non-farm income has contributed to a rise in the informal sector, a sector that, according to Pasuk and Baker’s article “Thaksin’s Populism,” accounts for around two thirds of the Thai labor force. The issue of informality, and its link to inequality, seems to be an increasingly important issue.
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The importance of non-farm income is not new. Using the old Agricultural Statistics data, we reckoned that almost two-thirds of farm households’ total cash income was earned away from the farm in the mid 1990s. That data series seems to have been discontinued. This Basic Needs survey may have different methods, and the categories in play look a bit different, but it seems as if the picture may not have changed that much over the last decade. Does anyone have anything like a series on this income breakdown?
Another key indicator changed trend over the 1997 crisis. Over the prior decade, about 3 million people transferred from farm to non-farm employment (the exact figure depends a lot on which years and which month of the LFS is used, but the trend is clear). Since 1997, employment in agriculture has not only stopped shrinking but on trend has even grown a bit. The net increase in the total labor force is going to non-agricultural work, but there is no longer a net outflow. Now, this figure and its interpretation are complicated by the fact that we now have a large (2 million? 3 million?) immigrant labor group which is not being counted.
On Rick’s point. Our formal/informal calculation was rather rough. NSO did a survey in 2007 which put the formal:informal split at 37:63. I’m not sure of their definition criteria, but the report (in Thai) is on the NSO website. The breakdowns by age, gender, and sector are quite interesting. I’m sending Andrew a pdf. [AW: Here it is.]
I wonder if this delicate balance between farm and city – under which rural families export labor to the city in return for wage and remittance incomes that allow the family farm to survive – has been rather stable over the past decade. And perhaps one reason for that is the large labor in-migration which has reduced the capacity of the non-farm economy to absorb more (Thai) rural labor.
Meanwhile two other things seem to be happening, though a bit obscured. First, the farmers are getting older. The median age of all agricultural workers has risen from 30 in the 1980s to 39 in the 2000s, and last year some government agency announced that the average age of a rice farmer is now above 50. Second, a process of land consolidation may have begun, but is still obscured because the land statistics are so opaque.
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On off-farm income, I recall that Suchai Treerat at Chulalogkorn University was doing research that reflected on this for Suphanburi back in the early and mid-80s and I believe he has updated this in recent years. If my memory of his papers is accurate, I believe he was showing that off-farm income was the only thing keeping the family farm going back then in the area he studied.
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In response to C. Baker, the OAE data on “income, expenses and debt of farm households” are available for the following years: 1978/79 (47% of total income from farm income), 1982/83 (41%), 1987/88 (50%), 1991 (33%), 1995 (37%), 1998 (32%), 1999 (33,9%) and 2000 (35%). The data only concerns cash income; whatever is produced for self-consumption is not computed as income. The data suggest there was not a gradual and unilinear decline of the share of farm income within agricultural hh.
What is to me most intriguing in the OAE data and the Basic Needs Survey (tab 50+) is the great infra-country variations in the capacity of farm income to grow at an acceptable rate. The Basic needs survey suggests agriculture is by far most lucrative in the South (probably in large part because of great farm profits in rubber cultivation). Regretfully, very few studies focusing on agriculture in the South have been recently published, at least in English.
Note that although agriculture can be very lucrative in the South, it seems cultivated land declined markedly on the eastern coast. This also would deserve more studies.
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A few other thoughts to add to this discussion, which is often framed in terms of farm/non-farm, rural/urban, sedentary/mobile.
First of all, it is evident that the increasing personal mobility of many rural Thais (best exemplified in the motorcycle ‘revolution’) has led to some relocalisation of living. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s villagers would have to leave home in order to engage with non-farm work, they can now continue to reside in their natal villages while working elsewhere. In the central plains, factories will pick up daily from a radius of 100 km. And many younger women and men, of course, have their own means of private transport. I do not think, however, that we should be tempted to see in this process a reinvigoration of the village and rural life; far from it.
Notwithstanding this relocalisation, and second, there is still an interesting stretching of families and households over space – something that was particularly striking when Albert Salamanca and I recently re-studied two villages where I originally worked in the early 1980s. This raises interesting questions about the nature of the village ‘community’. And there are two ends to this: the changing nature of source communities, and the changing nature of destination settlements, where an influx of migrants changes the nature and functioning of the host settlements.
Finally, I got a great deal from a recent book by Eric Thompson on rural change in Malaysia in which he argues that rural spaces are becoming ‘socially urban’. This certainly resonates with what I have seen in Thailand and requires us to think about ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ in new ways.
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I’ll echoe Chris Bakers’ comments – but with the addition that decline of the rural economy has meant far more empowerment in other areas for Isaarn :
in every sense – not least the now far more welathy, mobile Isaarn worker attitude that he’s/ she’s a force to be reckoned with – if not a separate national LAO identity.
Isaarn is now almost a nation in itself, for itself, self confident in its’ self. Almost ready to break-away from “Tai” land.
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