SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt

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