SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt

198
The Meaning of Sufficiency Economy
International Conference
to survive, they needed to change cash crop plantation into planting food crops to
serve families needs. Meanwhile, the deforestation continues to be a very critical
issue. In the villagers’ perspective, the forest is the main source of food and
household commodities. They found that food gathering from the forest was getting
harder to locate, and also the reduced rainfall as an indicator of the depleted forests.
In order to address such problems, an active group of thirteen farmers was formed to
take action according to the concept of sufficiency. After a while, they formed a
more extensive network by introducing friends and relatives to Inpaeng ideas. In
1988, they bought a piece of land and built Inpaengcentre as a place for the
network’s activities. From that time onwards, more and more people were attracted
to the idea of economic self-sufficiency. In 2009, Inpaeng members increased to
almost 30,000 people located in four provinces around the Phuphan mountain range.
Inpaeng’s concepts and missions
As noted in the Inpaeng 2002-2003 annual report accompanied with some
articles on Inpaeng network(เครือข่ายอินแปง 2005; รัตนา โตสกุล et al. 2548; เสรี พงศ์พิศ
2545), the main concepts can be summarized as follows.
Firstly, regarding the concept of reflection, members were asked to look back
to the past, compare their quality of life to the present, and project the future
situation. As a result of several conversations and meetings, it was seen that their
quality of life at the present time was diminishing compared to the past and the trend
looked like it would get worse in the future. In the near future, they predicted more
serious droughts, lower product prices, more farm chemical use, more debts, worse
physical health due to chemical exposure, and more family stress due to emigration
for better jobs.
Secondly, with respect to the concept of community strength, Inpaeng
members were encouraged to explore their communities’ strengths. The strengths
could be identified in several forms such as community norm, natural resources,
community setting, local wisdom and the presence of local scholars. Inpaeng’s
believed that by focusing on communities’ strengths, not on problems the members
could design their sufficiency lifestyle better.
Thirdly, with the concept of evidence-based decision making, community
research skills were introduced to the members. Inpaeng networks encouraged their
members to analyse their annual food intake and household consumption. Local
research, exploring community food consumption, was carried out. They found that
most of the food consumed in the community could be produced by the people in the
community. Then they were encouraged to change from monoculture cash cropping
such as cassava, sugarcane, or eucalyptus forests to the mixed, varied, integrated
farming systems. This concept of evidence-based decision making can be considered
as the counterpart of the “blind follower” concept. People generally make decisions,
particularly farming decisions, following neighbors’ or government suggestions
without adequate understanding to make their own decisions. For example, when
cassava’s price is rising, everyone changes their paddy field to cassava planting or