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