Finding
The income gap between the richest 20 percent of the population and the poorest 20 percent rose from 8 times in the 1970s to between 12 and 14 in the 2000s.
Paper
Andrew Walker. Thailand's Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012, xiii+277p.
Abstract
Thailand's Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy Andrew Walker Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012, xiii+277p.This is a very important book for understanding political conflict in contemporary Thailand. The stated aim of this book is to investigate "the underlying economic, political, and cultural processes that contributed to Thailand's contemporary contests over power" (p. 5). To achieve this aim Walker examines "rural transformations that have produced a major new player in the Thai politi- cal landscape: the middle-income peasant" via ethnographic engagement in Ban Tiam, a village of 130 households in Chiang Mai province, a major town of Northern Thailand (p. 5). Walker argues that "in order to understand the politics of Thailand's middle-income peasantry-including its strong electoral support for Thaksin's populist policies, the political passions that brought the red shirts to Bangkok, and the electoral triumph of Yingluck Shinawatra-it is necessary to address how power is perceived in a context of rising living standards and a transformed relationship with the state" (pp. 5-6).According to Walker, most Thai peasants are no longer poor. In the 1960s some 96 percent of rural households were living below the poverty line. However, sustained economic growth since then helped to reduce the number of poor rural households to 10 percent in 2007 (p. 39). Thailand's poverty line in that year was 57,000 baht per household per year (p. 41). Annual income of rural households was 187,000 baht in the Central Plains, 175,000 baht in the South, 166,000 baht in the Northeast, and 160,000 baht in the North (p. 39). As a result, "In most areas of rural Thailand, the primary livelihood challenges have moved away from the classic low-income challenges of food security and subsistence survival to the middle-income challenges of diversification and produc- tivity improvement" (p. 8). Most Thai middle-income peasants engage in farming and non-farming economic activities. Only some 20 percent of rural households rely solely on agricultural income. More importantly, "nonagricultural sources of income have proliferated and they are now more significant than farming for a great many rural households" (p. 8).The emergence of middle-income peasants mentioned above is a result of state support for rural development. Worried about the spread of communist influence in the countryside, in the 1950s and the 1960s Thai governments started to invest in rural areas aimed at improving the living standards of peasants. A program of investment in rural development was laid out in the first National Social and Economic Development Plan (p. 49). In the 1970s pressure from politically assertive peasant movements and the victory of communist revolutions in Indochina saw the Thai state increase its efforts to win over rural populations. Since then, argues Walker, "there have been important long-term shifts in the fiscal treatment of the countryside, laying the foundation for the emergence of a middle-income peasantry" (p. 50).Such policy alters state-peasants relationships in areas ranging from taxation to subsidies (pp. 8-9). Agricultural tax, such as the rice premium, which taxed rice exports to generate state revenue and reduce domestic rice prices, was abolished in 1986 (pp. 49-50), while the government invested heavily in rural development. Apart from infrastructure, government supported farmers on price, credit, land tenure, health, education, and welfare among others (p. 56).Despite the significant improvement of living standards in rural areas Walker argues that disparities in income and living standards between rural and urban populations are widening. The income gap between the richest 20 percent of the population and the poorest 20 percent rose from 8 times in the 1970s to between 12 and 14 in the 2000s. The average household in Bangkok is about three times higher than in the rural northeast and the north. …
Authors
Somchai Phatharathananunth
Journal
Southeast Asian Studies