Finding the way home

6 December 1997

Along the pavement by the construction site there used to be four vendors. Chicken. Som-tam. Grilled meat-balls. Sticky rice sweets. They had a hundred customers when the first shift came on at 5.30 a.m. and another sixty when the shift changed in the evening. A group of taxi-drivers had made this their regular lunch spot. Chicken had found some stools and sold a few bottles of Mekong whisky each evening to the janitors from the office building. The margins were small, but they all made some money.

After the baht float, the construction company cancelled the second shift. Som-tam left soon after. "Gone back to Buriram", her friends said. With the rise in petrol prices, the taxi-driver gang dwindled to two people, and then evaporated altogether. Sticky rice sweets left too. "Why die of pollution on a Bangkok pavement!" The janitors came less often, so Chicken gave up stocking Mekong. Then her daughter lost her job in a Suthisarn bar, and between them they no longer had enough for the rent.

Only Grilled Meat-balls hung on.

Villagers have been coming to the city for decades. Most come temporarily. For a few weeks during the agricultural off-season. For a few years before settling down. Many come and go time after time. Over the last ten years of boom, the numbers have swelled by millions. The increase did not arrive in a stampede. More came. More stayed longer. More brought along their relatives and friends because the money was good. The numbers rose gradually.

Now the jobs are disappearing. Economists have predicted from one to four million people will be unemployed next year. In the service industries and other white-collar jobs, the lay-offs excite attention. Even twenty people laid off from an advertising firm rates a press story. In industry the numbers are bigger. Several thousands are being let go from the factories every month. But the really big numbers are in the informal sector - the vendors, taxi-drivers, construction workers, waitresses, and casual employees of all kinds. Their disappearance is hardly noticed. They drift away one by one. But in total the numbers are enormous.

The city is watching this ebb-tide nervously. The press has carried features on individual returnees. Television cameras have followed families back home and dramatised the transition back from urban to rural setting.

In past crises of the urban economy, the villages have taken a good measure of the strain. The migrants returning to the villages act like a shock-absorber. They transfer the impact of the recession away from the city. They spread the impact over a broader area, lessening the severity.

But the impact does not disappear. During the mid-1980s recession, this backflow made many villagers poorer. Some 3.5 million people dropped down below the poverty line. Two-thirds of this number were in the rural northeast, the main source of city migrants.

In countries such as Latin America, these urban economic crises play out very differently. Most disemployed workers cannot fade back to the villages, because the villages are too poor, the migrants’ families are landless, and the migrants have cut their home links. Because much food is imported, currency depreciation forces food prices up just like petrol prices are going up here now - more expensive every time you buy. The urban poor are squeezed by unemployment on one side and rising food prices on the other. They rob and they riot. Political disorder scares away investors and complicates recovery.

So it is not surprising that Bangkok is watching the backflow nervously this time. Will the shock-absorber still work? At this point, we don’t know. But certainly much will be different from the pattern of the mid-1980s. Many things have changed.

For a start, the numbers involved are much bigger. Just how big is not certain. No-one counts the migrants very carefully. Since 1987, the numbers employed in non-agricultural jobs have increased by almost 6 million. At last Thai New Year, an estimated 1.8 million people went home from city to village for the holiday. The size of the potential backflow is somewhere between these numbers. It’s a lot of people.

The migrants can go home because the family and community ties are still there, and because the family rice bowl can be shared. But this time many returnees will find that the family rice bowl has shrunk. When the young people went away to the city for a long time, families could not keep up cultivation at the old level. In some operations, machinery replaced labour. Rice harvesters have spread very rapidly in the central region. But other tasks are more difficult to mechanise. Families have often had to reduce the land they farm, or adopt simpler and less productive techniques. They have come to rely on the postal orders arriving from Bangkok. They will not be able to reverse this process very quickly.

Many will also find that family and community ties have been strained or sundered by the pressures of migration and commercialisation. Some will find it difficult to go home.

Some migrants have been away too long and have been changed by the city. Many youngsters left at age 13-14 after completing sixth grade. On return to the village, they are reluctant to work in the fields. They have got used to urban work and urban living. They have spent their formative teen years in the city and find it difficult to readjust to village life. Others bring back bad urban habits. Some try to make a living by selling ya baa (amphetamines) in the village. Or they try to organise a sex trade on lines they have learnt in the city.

For the last decade, the urban middle class has tended to look down on the countryside as backward, beyond hope. The future lay with the city, modernisation, globalisation. The collapse of the urban economy is prompting a rapid re-evaluation. The fact that the villages still produce all the food we need may save us from the worst of inflation and urban disorder. Crop exports may keep the national economy afloat next year. The countryside may absorb the shocks of urban unemployment. Remittances from rural migrants who seek their fortune abroad may contribute a bit to Thailand’s current account deficit.

A leading executive of Bangkok Bank recently said we may be "saved" next year by the rural sector. Virabhongse Ramangkura noted in a TV interview that Thailand is "lucky" to still have a large agricultural economy as a cushion. The Chai Pattana foundation has floated a plan for subsidising migrant resettlement to ease the economic and social strains of the slump.

Suddenly the countryside is a good thing again. This appreciation is celebrated in subtle ways. Phongsit Kamphi’s song about migrants thinking back to their village home enjoyed huge popularity. Carabao has revised and reissued the 1984 hit, Made in Thailand, which warned about looking outwards and neglecting local roots. Television dramas are exploiting the unabashed nostalgia for rural settings of a generation ago. Luk thung country music has become fashionable, especially songs which laugh drily about bankruptcy, unemployment, and financial collapse.

There is growing realisation that the countryside contains some assets which are more solid and more bankable in the long term than the electronic illusions in the balance sheets of finance companies or the concrete dreams in the ambitions of property developers.

In a world where the environment is under threat, the Thai countryside still houses a unique stock of flora, fauna and landscapes (natural capital). In a world where urban societies are being homogenised, the villages are the root of much of what makes Thailand valuably different (cultural capital). In a world where the urban rat race imposes high costs in terms of mental and physical health, the villages offer alternative values and ways of life (social capital). Recently the political scientist, Chai-Anan Samudavanija noted: "In the present crisis, financial and industrial capital will not be strong enough." The society would have to fall back on its own natural, social and cultural assets to pull through.

But these asets have not been looked after very well. Over the boom years, the countryside suffered from systematic neglect. Policy-makers concentrated resources on the urban economy to achieve rapid (apparent) growth. The village economy was deliberately squeezed to push labour into the city. Property developers, dam builders, pulp factories, gravel quarries, and petrochemical plants were allowed to destroy natural resources and disrupt local communities.

Rural development policies have been mostly lip service or damage control. The attitudes of politicians and planners towards the villages are often still ruled by the paternalism of the cold war era. But there are alternatives. The Eighth Plan contains a very different vision based on decentralisation of power, respect for local knowledge, and strengthening of local and communal rights.

But there is a real possibility the re-evaluation of the countryside will get stuck at the level of sentiment. The Democrats have been swept back to power by urban support. They will concentrate on reviving the urban economy. Chuan Leekpai once said that the rural population should ideally shrink to 10-15 percent of the total. In 1995 the Democrats were chased out of power because of a rural land scandal. They may be reluctant to take risks with ambitious rural policies again.

If so, they will have squandered a great opportunity. Thailand will gradually lose the invaluable assets stored in the countryside. And at the next swing down of the urban economic cycle, the shock absorber will be even less effective at cushioning the shocks.