SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt

The Meaning of Sufficiency Economy
International Conference
227
In order to have such lives, villagers also recognize that they are dependent on
the government for certain essential services. Without government investment
villagers would not be able to travel easily on good roads or have electricity. They
look to the government to support medical facilities. They also look to government
to provide increasingly better education which they understand is fundamental to
finding better jobs outside the agricultural sector.
Villagers in Ban Nông Tün in recent elections, like villagers throughout most
of the Northeast, were strongly supportive of the Thai Rak Thai Party because they
received increased support in government services during the period when the
government was controlled by Thai Rak Thai. This support included the expanded
health care program through the 30-baht scheme and subsidies for students pursuing
education in better schools outside their local community. Several villagers in Ban
Nông Tün have created what is essentially an ambulance service to take sick vill
agers to the hospital in Mahasarakham and all villagers avail themselves on a regular
basis of services provided by the government at the Mahasarakham hospital and the
tambon clinic in nearby Ban Khwao. More students from Ban Nông Tün today go
to schools in Mahasarakham town than go to the local village school.
Villagers have also come to take for granted the services – such as garbage
collection – provided by the Tambon Administrative Organization, a local
government body which gained more powers and budget under Thai Rak Thai
governments. One of the government services villagers came most to appreciate
during the Thai Rak Thai period was the expanded loan program. The village million
baht fund made it possible for many villagers to gain access to capital needed for
investing in traveling abroad for work or for local enterprises. Villagers are
concerned about the increasing debt they have, but so long as interest rates are low
and they are able to make sufficient money to pay back what they borrow, they see
loans in positive terms.
In short, while much of the economic development experienced by people
from the village over the past forty years has come about as a consequence of their
own imitative, they have also come to depend on essential government services to
make it possible for them to emulate the lifestyles of urban middle class people.
Most do not, however, seek to do so by moving from the village permanently to live
in urban areas. The reason lies in the fact that the village is not only a place of
residence; it is also a moral world.
On the basis of research over forty years in the same village in northeastern
Thailand, I have found that villagers have unequivocally chosen three courses of
action which Yoshihara Kunio (1995), in a comparison of the Thai and Korean
economies, argued are basic to significant economic growth, that is, to capitalistic
development. Villagers have chosen to work long hours both in the village and for
long periods of time away from the village. They have shown themselves very
willing to take significant risks, especially in choosing to migrate for work not only
to other places in Thailand, but also abroad, especially to Taiwan. They have also