SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt
SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt
SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt
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224<br />
The Meaning of Sufficiency Economy <br />
International Conference<br />
By the 1970s more and more villagers, including young women as well as<br />
young men, left the village for extended periods, or even forever, to find work in<br />
Bangkok or elsewhere. As Mary Beth Mills has shown in her study of young women<br />
factory workers who came from another village in Mahasarakham, these women<br />
were attracted not only by the possibility of adding to their family’s income but by<br />
the chance to emulate urban women in ‘becoming modern’ (than samai) (Mills<br />
1997). In villagers’ eyes, ‘development’ increasingly came to mean acquiring the<br />
material goods – clothing, household furnishings, motorbikes, radios, televisions,<br />
and even houses – that they associated with urban rather than rural life. They found<br />
that only by working outside the village could they acquire sufficient money to<br />
become ‘modern’ and ‘developed’.<br />
Although most village women still find work for extended periods in the<br />
vicinity of Bangkok, some today now can work in knitting and fish-net factories that<br />
were recently established in Mahasarakham province. <br />
Young woman from Ban Nông Tün working at a high tech knitting fac<br />
tory in Mahasarakham, 2005 (photo by Jane Keyes)<br />
In the 1970s men and a few women from rural northeastern Thailand began to<br />
be recruited for work outside of Thailand. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, such<br />
opportunities were primarily in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Emirates and other Gulf<br />
States. The first Gulf War led to a sharp reduction in job opportunities in the Middle<br />
East. However, even greater numbers of jobs became available in Taiwan and, to a<br />
lesser extent, Singapore and Japan (see Tsai 2001). Job opportunities in Taiwan