The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- February 24, 1998
Thailand's Rural Safety Net
Is Cushioning People's Fall
By PAUL M. SHERER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
UBON RATCHATHANI, Thailand -- As setting sun and smoke bathe
the five spires of a Buddhist temple, a man bows his head to
the ground three times, paying respect to the abbot who has
just given him counsel.
Like the other 30,000 temples sprinkled across the Thai
countryside, Wat Nongbua offers spiritual solace, a place to pray
for family and fortune -- and if worse comes to worst, food left
over by the monks. Since Thailand's economic crisis began, the
number of people coming to Wat Nongbua has jumped 50%.
And Thais are listening once more to men like the abbot, after a
period in which finance-company executives seemed to outrank
monks as society's guiding lights. "I always taught people not to
get into debt," says the abbot, Phra Kru Jitti Wannobon. "At one
time, these people told me, 'You are a monk, you don't know
anything.' Now it is my time to teach them again."
Outsiders might wonder how Thailand has avoided spinning apart
socially, as jobless city dwellers flood back to villages in the
already impoverished countryside. But a visit to this poor
farming region near Laos reveals rural Thailand's resilient
safety net: extended family, abundant land, and the ubiquitous
Buddhism.
Indeed, Buddhism's detached acceptance seems to permeate people's
response to the crisis. Instead of anger and violence, the mood
is a mixture of frustration and quiet bemusement, worry and
confident self-sufficiency.
"The people who are suffering are the rich people," says the
headmaster of a village primary school outside Ubon, a provincial
capital of about 110,000 people. "We'll go on living. If the
price of sugar goes up, we don't care. We don't eat sugar; we eat
fish sauce. If fish sauce is too expensive, we'll live with
pickled fish we make ourselves."
Many people who flocked to the cities in the past decade still
have farming relatives to return to. The bountiful land makes
Thailand one of Asia's only net exporters of food -- and means
few if any Thais should starve during the economic crisis. Even
farmers who sold their land in the boom years often used some
money to buy new farmland, farther from roads and towns.
Consider Wasana Cheuntam, 26 years old, who worked six years in a
Taiwanese-owned dried-fish factory in Bangkok. In November, the
factory offered six months' salary to any employees who
volunteered to leave. She took it, afraid the factory would close
and leave her with nothing.
Lucky for her, the extended-family system remains largely intact
in Thailand, ready to catch people falling on hard times. Three
or four generations often share the family home; if someone loses
a job, there is usually a sibling available to live with until
things improve.
Now Ms. Wasana is back home in Ban Khaem, a small village outside
Ubon, living with her brother's family. She helps him care for
the 5,280 chickens he raises under contract for Thai conglomerate
CP Group, and helps her mother tend the family's rice fields.
"We don't need that much money here. So maybe there won't be that
many problems," Ms. Wasana says, sitting on a small stool under
her brother's stilt-raised house of rough wood, next to a
jackfruit tree. Her two-year old son giggles in the arms of his
grandmother. "It hurts to be out of a job, but I can still come
back to the family."
As extended families absorb displaced workers, the temples
blanketing the countryside are once again beckoning the
spiritually homeless, ending a cycle of diminished interest.
For centuries, the Thai monk was the keeper of wisdom in a land
of illiterate peasants. But in recent boom years, a monk's
education often lagged far behind that of his flock, making him
seem increasingly irrelevant to a people obsessed with gaining
wealth.
Now, the stress of the crisis is bringing people back to the
temples, and the message no longer seems so dated and
unrealistic. In fact, at Wat Nongbua, the abbot's analysis of
Thailand's economic crisis somewhat jarringly mirrors the
prescriptions of some leading global economists: Thailand
shouldn't try to compete on all fronts, but should instead focus
on its natural strengths.
"Countries are like families," the abbot explains, puffing on a
cigarette as he sits on a bamboo platform above two visitors
seated on the ground. "Every family has to do a different job. We
have to produce different things. Thailand is basically an
agricultural country. But the government wanted to turn it into
an industrial country. We didn't know how to keep what we had.
This is the reward."
Paeng Thamasat knew how to keep what he had.
More than 70 years ago, as a young farmer, he bought 50 rai
(eight hectares) of land outside of Ubon for 70 baht ($1.55), and
obtained another 30 rai just by staking it out. Four years ago,
amid a property boom in Ubon, his family sold much of that same
land to a developer for a housing project.
Now the half-built development sits abandoned, and the builder,
some locals say, has fled to Australia. But Mr. Paeng's family is
still around on other land nearby -- and so is Mr. Paeng himself,
now 96 years old. He walks up to the meager house of a grandson,
his legs wallpapered in tattoos beneath the cloth he wears
wrapped around his waist. He paid 1.5 baht for the tattoos when
he was 18, as a charm to attract women.
Did they work? You bet. "Before that, I didn't have any luck with
women. After that, many women wanted to sit on my lap," he says,
cackling. He went on to have 18 children, by two wives. And how
many grandchildren? "Ooooyyyy!" he exclaims. Mr. Paeng, a son and
grandson Kambuey Thamasat count for several minutes before
arriving at the total: "About 100," including great
grandchildren, Mr. Kambuey says.
As chickens run around the garbage-strewn lot, Mr. Kambuey's
six-year-old son throws paper airplanes at a sleeping dog. A
commercial for Pampers disposable diapers plays on a television
set, though villagers here don't buy diapers, but instead let
their small children run around bottomless.
Like many residents of the village of Ban Kam Charoen, Mr.
Kambuey sold his land during the boom years. Of the 1.7 million
baht he received, he spent 270,000 baht on a used Isuzu pickup
truck parked now under his stilt-raised house, 160,000 baht on a
chicken coop, 110,000 baht fixing up the house, and 500,000 baht
or so "here and there," he says.
But crucially, he used 600,000 baht to buy a plot of land farther
from the road -- even larger than the plot he sold. He complains
bitterly of the rising price of fuel and chicken feed he buys,
and the flat price of the chickens he sells. But for now at
least, he is getting by. "I still have about 30 rai of land
left," he says.
The harvest that just ended was a good one: 1.4 million tons of
rice was produced in Ubon Ratchathani province, up from 870,000
tons a year ago. Today, unhusked jasmine rice fetches 10,000 baht
a ton, compared to 6,000 or 7,000 baht a year ago, mostly because
of the weaker baht.
Of the people in the Ubon area, 80% are farmers. "Rice production
is a key to our living," says Chavalit Ongkavanit, a veterinarian
and head of the agricultural section of Ubon's chamber of
commerce. "So when the rice price and harvest are good, it can
make up for the crisis. The purchasing power remains."
But people look to the future with apprehension. Farmers may be
doing OK now, but a recent shortage of rain is worrisome. Even
during the current dry season there are usually some light rains,
known as "the rain to wash the mango flowers." But this year they
never came. Suthep Chaluaysri, Ubon province manager of the
government's Bank for Agriculture and Cooperatives, points at the
trees outside his office windows, barren of fruit. "Last year at
this time they were full of mangos," he says.
Prices have soared for the imported fuel, fertilizer and
pesticides farmers depend upon. And not everyone was wise enough
to hold onto their land before setting off to Bangkok for a
factory job. "Within six months, if a person can't find a job, he
will turn to robbery to survive," worries Thirachai
Jungwiwattanaporn, an Ubon businessman. "I think the country will
go into turmoil. It's very dangerous."
But along with the Buddhist detachment taught in Thai temples, a
tendency to downplay problems and avoid conflict is a hallmark of
Thai society. In contrast with their Indonesian counterparts,
even Thai villagers who blame Thailand's Chinese merchants for
the economic crisis temper their anger when pressed.
"I don't think there's anything to worry about," says the
village-school headmaster, moments after criticizing the ethnic
Chinese "capitalists" in the town of Ubon. He was grumbling that
they sold farmers overpriced fertilizer, and bought up farmers'
rice in advance of the harvest last year, before rice prices went
up. "The Chinese people have become Thai, like us," he says. "I
don't think there will be any conflict starting."
Indeed, for people who have watched their wealth evaporate, the
Buddhism that permeates Thai society offers an explanation for
the bust that followed the boom: the impermanence of all things
material.
The abbot at Wat Nongbua explains it: "There is night, there is
day," the saffron-robed monk says. "There is death, there is
life. This is the nature of the world. The people who are
surprised don't know nature."
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