SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt

The Meaning of Sufficiency Economy
International Conference
221
characteristic of many women who learned to subordinate their own desires to help
their parents and later their husbands and children. This ethic would enable both
men and women to work to improve the conditions of their lives and those of their
families as they took advantage of new opportunities created by an expanding Thai
economy.
For villagers to enter successfully into the capitalist economy of Thailand, they
also needed basic literacy in standard Thai and basic numeracy. These skills they
acquired from government-sponsored primary schooling. Ban Nông Tün, like most
villages in northeastern Thailand, had had a government school since the mid-1930s
and since the late 1940s almost every villager completed the four years of
compulsory primary education. From schooling villagers learned to see themselves
as ‘Thai’ even though culturally and linguistically they were ‘Lao’. This
identification together with competence in standard Thai and in the fundamentals of
arithmetic learned in school enabled many villagers to interact in a Thai-national
dominated world (see Keyes 1991a).
Village school in the grounds of the wat (Buddhist temple-monastery),
1963 (photo by Jane Keyes)
As the Thai economy expanded rapidly from the 1960s on, more and more
villagers – including women – would follow their older siblings and parents to
Bangkok and elsewhere to find work.
Re-orientation of the Village toward ‘Development’
In the 1960s villagers wholeheartedly embraced a new orientation toward the
world – namely ‘development’ (kãnphatthanã). This term and what has come to be
called the ‘development era’ (samai phatthanã) in Thailand is usually associated
with government policies introduced at the time when Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat
was the country’s military dictator. There is no question but that some of the
development programs introduced by the government over the next decades –
especially road-building, rural electrification, and support for industrialization –
greatly facilitated growth not only of the national economy but also the economy of
rural northeastern Thailand. It was, nonetheless, actions taken by villagers
themselves which brought the radical changes to rural lifestyles that they came to
associate with ‘development’.
One of the most profound changes in village life occurred when village women
began to adopt birth control methods. They first did this in the 1970s when it was
government policy to promote more births. By the mid-1980s few women were
having more than two children. The dramatic change in population in the village can
be seen in the following tables comparing population distributions in 1963, 1980 and
2005.