A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  But some land soon proved unsuitable for such crops. The virgin fertility was quickly lost. Rainfall was too unreliable. Soil eroded from the slopes and subsoil moisture disappeared once too many trees were removed. Underground saline deposits were leached upwards by irrigation. Over large areas, only maize and cassava could survive in these harsh conditions. These two crops came to occupy half the total area of this upland cash-crop expansion. They were sold to feedmills and other starch producers. The typical farmer on the uplands frontier owned a 25-rai rolling plot, growing rain-fed rice in the hollows and maize or cassava on the slopes. Between the 1950s and 1970s, another 70 000 such farms, occupying an additional 2 million rai, appeared each year.

  These farms were hacked out of the forest, which had covered two-thirds of the country at the time of the Second World War but only one-third just 30 years later. The government tacitly encouraged this destruction because the export of these new crops drove the expansion in the national economy. When communist rebellion began to spread through the forests in the mid-1960s, the government encouraged clearing even more to deny cover to the rebels. It built military roads into the forests and shepherded pioneer settlements along them. It burnt areas around the rebel bases. It handed out concessions to loggers who were supposed to clear areas and then reforest them. By 1986, these concessions covered half the country. In the mid-1970s, forest was disappearing at the rate of almost 600 000 rai a year.

  At first, this frontier ran ahead of any government control. Force rather than law decided possession of land or settlement of disputes. But, by the 1960s, the government had become concerned about the spread of communist bases, and suspected that the lawlessness not only facilitated the rebels’ activities but also encouraged settler communities to support them. Backed by US aid funds, government offices moved into the uplands zone. In the vanguard were the special police and army units engaged in counter-insurgency. They were followed by schools, and then a range of offices set up to dispense aid funds in an attempt to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the peasants. They built village roads, sank wells, connected up electricity, and provided disaster relief.

  The society that developed in these upland conditions was very different from that of the paddy tracts where communities were oriented to subsistence, sold a surplus, and were gradually drawn deeper into the market economy. While some of the new upland villages were settled by kin groups, most were a mix of people coming from all directions. In the early stages of the upland expansion, many moved out from the old paddy tracts, especially into the northeast. Later, many northeasterners moved south to open up new tracts in the coastal basins down the peninsula. Some evolved communal institutions to cope with the harsh environment, but most did not.

  Few upland farmers were self-reliant. For cash-crop cultivation they needed to buy seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, and perhaps hire equipment for land preparation and harvesting. Many producing vegetables, sugar, or poultry were tied into contract farming schemes where they supplied little more than the labour. Those growing tobacco, rubber, or oil palms were often obliged to sell to a sole local purchaser. Maize and cassava farmers worked on annual advances from the local trader. Only a minority of the households had enough paddy land for subsistence, and the unreliability of the rainfall meant that subsistence was never assured. Upland households were bound to the market to sell their produce and buy their staple. The local economy was geared around flows of inputs, credit, and government patronage into the village from outside, and flows of cash crops outwards.

  Upland areas developed a distinct elite of people who straddled these inward and outward flows. These included the crop trader who often doubled as a moneylender and was likely to be someone of Chinese origin with connections to the local town and beyond. It might also include loggers with links to nearby sawmills, and owners of the trucks and buses that connected the locality to the outside world. It also included the local police chief, army commander, and district officer who wielded the government’s power and dispensed the government’s patronage. The post of kamnan, the head of a group of villages, became central to these networks of commerce and officialdom, and rivalry for the post was often fierce. This local elite was usually overwhelmingly male and ritually bound together by a drinking circle. By pooling their commercial and official power, they could further profit from illegal businesses and official chicanery: illegal logging would go unnoticed, land titles be generated in the paperwork, and smuggling proceed unimpeded.

  Most settlers arrived poor and remained so. The nation’s first count in 1962–63 found over three-quarters of rural households in the northeast living below a poverty line. By 1988, the proportion had fallen, but only to around a half. Few had a full land title. The government failed to extend the titling system into the upland tracts, so most had only an occupancy certificate. In 1964, the government resolved to preserve 40 per cent of the country as forest and began mapping areas in which people would not be allowed to settle. This mapping exercise ran in parallel with the rapid destruction and settlement of these same forest areas. By 1974, perhaps 5–6 million people were living inside the official ‘forest’ and were considered ‘squatters’ who did not qualify for any land deed at all. By the early 1990s, the number had risen to 10–12 million, over a third of the whole rural population.

  Peasants into the market

  Development also transformed the old paddy tracts. After 1945, international agencies were interested in expanding Thailand’s rice surplus to help feed the war-torn countries of Asia immediately, and the growing population of Asia in the longer term. Van der Heide’s 1902 plan to regularize the water supply of the whole Chao Phraya delta was revived and updated with international expertise and sponsorship. The Chainat dam at the head of the delta was completed in 1957, and two more dams on the upper tributaries were added over the next decade. These dams lessened the risk of seasonal flooding or scarcity. The rivers and an extended canal network spread the flow from the dams more evenly across the whole delta zone.

  The initial impact of this big investment was disappointing. But the 1960s’ ‘Green Revolution’, sparked by research on rice technology in the Philippines, combined with greater water security to bring major changes. New paddy seeds adapted to Thai conditions were developed and distributed in the 1960s. Fertilizer and pesticide use rapidly increased. Two-wheeled tractors, developed in China and known as ‘iron buffalo’, were locally produced and rapidly replaced their four-legged counterpart. The dams spread the water supply over a long period, the new seeds ripened more quickly, and the iron buffaloes shortened the time for land preparation. Favoured areas, especially around the top and sides of the Chao Phraya delta, could now grow two or three crops of rice a year.

  On a lesser scale, government water projects brought the same benefits to other established paddy tracts. The Mae Teng project extended the same principle of stable water supply to the Chiang Mai valley. Dams on the upper tributaries of the Chao Phraya created more secure water supplies along valleys that had been highly prone to seasonal flooding. Barrages improved the usability of the water along the Mun-Chi river system of the northeast. Smaller projects were built in the rice-bowls down the peninsula coasts.

  With these innovations, paddy yields per rai in the central plain doubled in 30 years. Rice exports surged again, making Thailand the world’s largest rice exporter. People benefited. The proportion of households below the poverty line in the central region fell from two-fifths in 1962–63 to just one-eighth only 13 years later.

  In the mid-1970s, a Japanese anthropologist returned to a village in the upper delta that he had first studied a decade earlier. Then, it had been a recent frontier settlement of smallholder farms using exchange labour and traditional technology. He was amazed by the change over the intervening handful of years. Bullocks had disappeared, replaced by small tractors. Exchange labour had collapsed and professional agents now managed people in labour gangs. Traditional rice varieties had been replaced by the ne
w Green Revolution seeds, nourished with fertilizer and chemicals. Most of all, the anthropologist noted the mental change. Villagers who had described the local rituals to him only a decade ago now exclaimed that ‘the rice spirit is no match for chemical fertilizer’.17

  This anthropologist, along with many others, feared that this rapid commercialization, combined with the pressure on land, would break the society apart. In other countries, the Green Revolution favoured the big farmers and many predicted a similar result in Thailand. But the Chao Phraya delta’s experience was subtly different.

  There were no scale barriers preventing the Chao Phraya delta smallholders from gaining access to the new technology. With land pressure, farms became smaller – the old 25-rai average was reduced to around 19 rai. But smallholders could compensate by investing in more productive technology or tapping a growing market for rented land. There was another spurt of mobility as families shifted around the delta in search of new opportunities, now framed not by access to land but by access to inputs, water, and markets. The smallholders did not disappear. Indeed, their numbers increased markedly. But they were now more conclusively transformed into market-oriented farmers, supplementing their family resources of knowledge and labour with purchased technology, wage labour, and rented land.

  A few entrepreneurial farmers played the market to amass large landholdings. But at the same time, some of the old noble landlords took the opportunity of rising land prices to liquidate their holdings. The concentration of landholding increased only marginally and the large proportion of land worked by owner-occupiers barely changed.

  At the social base, the number of households with no land or too little land slowly increased. By the 1970s, about a fifth of households in the central plain and in the northern valleys were landless, and around another tenth were land-poor. Many, particularly in the north, survived by share-cropping. The rest worked mainly as wage labour.

  The big change was that smallholder households now dealt with and depended on commercial markets much more than before. They hired tractors to level or raise their land to take best advantage of the secure water supply. They bought high-yielding seeds, fertilizer, and chemicals. They invested in iron buffaloes and water pumps. Some switched from rice to fruit, vegetables, and other higher-value crops. Many now grew high-yielding varieties of rice, which did not suit local tastes. More households bought their staple food from the market. Weaving and other crafts withered away, and the number of shops and occasional markets increased. To increase rural credit, in 1966 the government created an agricultural bank, the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC), which by 1979 was advancing 19 billion baht a year. In 1975, the government forced the commercial banks to direct at least 5 per cent of their lending to agriculture.

  Smallholders also dealt more with the government. As in the uplands, schools, police, and district offices spread into the countryside. Unlike in the uplands, the government opened land offices and began to give full land titles. Water had earlier been a gift of nature, but, as the saying came to be, ‘nowadays water has a master’. Farmers often had to negotiate with officials to get their share.

  Also as in the uplands, an elite appeared that handled these relations with the commercial and official worlds beyond the village. As a popular song joked, a few seemed to monopolize a whole range of new business opportunities:

  Talking of riches, none equals me.

  All over Suphan I’m known as the big millionaire.

  Even my thousands of cattle have their teeth capped with gold.

  I’ve a rice mill, a construction store, a pottery, an ice factory, a brewery.

  I’ve just built an iron works, gambling joint, upholstery, and several

  funeral parlours.

  But I stay clear of the police station.18

  The subject of this song was female – quite common in the delta where the traders and rice barge-owners had often been women. But generally within rural society, the position of women had declined over the past century. After corvée ended and settled agriculture spread, men took the leading role in agricultural work. As contacts with the (male) merchant and (male) official increased, men displaced women from their roles in trade. Local spirit worship, often led by female experts, gradually but incompletely ceded space to Buddhism with its exclusively male monkhood.

  Almost everywhere, communal practices of exchange labour faded away. Villagers might still cooperate strongly for managing irrigation, festivals, and the local wat, but increasingly they dealt with state and market as individuals.

  Village and city

  The era of development prompted rural migration into the city. For over a century, the open land frontier had drawn people away from the city. Most labour for the rice mills, sawmills, port, and other enterprises that boomed in the colonial era came from Chinese migration. Because of high natural productivity and expanding supplies of land, rural wages were high, creating little incentive to look for work in the city.

  From the 1920s, some villagers were pushed to the city by bad seasons and periodic slumps in the international rice trade. In 1949, immigration from China was effectively stopped. Over the next two decades, urban growth on the one hand, and growing demographic pressure and exhaustion of land in the Chao Phraya delta on the other, widened the gap between urban and rural wages. More rural people were drawn to work in the city. Road construction and new bus services made such moves easier. In the 1960s, Bangkok’s population spurted from 1.8 to 3 million people. The growth of the city not only created factory work but also jobs as drivers, house servants, shop and restaurant workers, and construction labourers. The arrival of US troops and the use of Thailand for ‘rest and recreation’ from the Vietnam war boosted the sex industry. From the early 1970s, labour contractors conveyed people to work overseas, especially in the Middle East.

  A complex pattern of migration was established that continued over the decades to come. Teenagers left the village to complete their education, to make some money, or just to have some fun and broaden their experience. Some stayed in the city only a few years, but others remained permanently or returned to the village only at retirement. Meanwhile there were also many shorter-term moves. Most farming depended on the monsoon rains and hence lasted only half the year. Some people sought work elsewhere for the other half. Others shuttled back and forth between planting and harvest. By the late 1970s, 1.5 million people were moving between village and city in these seasonal flows. At first, most of the migrants came from the central plain because of proximity and because of the land crisis. By the 1970s, northeasterners had also begun to join the flow, particularly on a seasonal basis. The migration stream contained almost as many women as men.

  This passage from village to city was reflected in luk thung (literally, ‘child of the field’) music, which boomed in the 1960s and 1970s. The music was rooted in folk styles from the central region where most of the migrants originated. But the boom was created by the development of a national radio network in the 1960s, the construction of roads that conveyed touring roadshows around the villages, and the development of audiotapes. To succeed, singers had to have an authentic rural background. The female star Phumphuang Duangjan had been a child labourer on sugar plantations. The male star Sayan Sanya had been a rice farmer:

  I studied only to fourth grade.

  I travelled from Don Chedi, Suphanburi, in the forest.

  Singer Sayan Sanya, a rural lad,

  I gambled my life with my songs.

  The songs convey the excitement and the heartache of leaving the village for the city. Many songs described new urban lives as truck drivers, waitresses, bus conductors, factory hands, and sex workers. They lamented the crop failures, natural disasters, and general poverty that had forced them to migrate. They warned other migrants that city people would look down on them with comments like ‘the poor are smelly’. They cautioned migrant girls about predatory urban men. Several songs emphasized that the city sojourn was a temporar
y life-stage, and that the singer intended to return as soon as possible to the village. The singer of ‘I won’t forget Isan’ explained to his girlfriend left behind:

  I have to go though I miss you all the time.

  If I save enough I would ask for your hand.

  I’m poor and that’s why I have to leave you

  To find money in Bangkok.

  Please wait until I save enough.

  The sheer energy of luk thung celebrated the excitement of experiencing the city. But the content of the songs emphasized the difficulties and the desire to retain contact with the village. Many songs returned to the theme of remembering the peace of the village, the warmth of the family, and the boyfriend or girlfriend left behind. Phumphuang sang:

  Mum and dad, help me, or else I’m dead this time.

  My youth and beauty ruined because of a city slicker’s sweet talk.

  Mum and dad, help me to go back home.

  The passing of sakdina

  The old elite of great households was not destroyed after 1932, but its role and significance changed. For 16 years there was no resident king to serve as the ritual focus of the old order. Many royal family members were purged from the top ranks of military and civilian officialdom. The Ayutthayan-era ranks and job names were discontinued from 1932 and banned in 1941 (though some, including Phibun and Wichit, converted the latter into a personal name). People in the bureaucracy were now known by a name that recognized their individuality and their family, rather than their rank and position as granted by the king. The education of new officials, especially at Thammasat University, stressed service to the state rather than to the monarchy. The great inflation of the Second World War decimated the real value of official salaries, eroding the overall cachet of bureaucratic office. Yet this transformation was far from complete. The conventional term for bureaucrat remained kha ratchakan, the servant of the king.