• 
• 

Published on April 1, 2008

Although the farmers' situation is much more complicated than that, I was intrigued that someone in the capital demonstrated genuine concern for the welfare of our fellow countrymen in the hinterlands.

Assuming farmers get their fair share of the fruit of their labour, such money flows are precisely what need to happen to help eradicate poverty, political scientists and economists say. Turning farmers into the middle class as well, they say, must be part of the rural development recipe if Thailand wishes to seriously address the impasse sustaining so much of the country's political instability.

Fuelling the rural sector was a controversial topic at the recent Asian Rural Sociological Association (ARSA) meeting in Beijing. China, in particular, is pumping massive amounts of money into urban development across the country, transforming farmland into factories and warehouses, while farmers are now living in newly constructed high-rises.

Will it work? A growing number of sociologists are not convinced. Rural-urban relationships are now extremely dynamic, too complex, they say, to fully understand.

At the conference, Dr Huang Ping from the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Science cited an example of such complexity, saying there are rural enclaves in the urban sector and vice versa. He proposed a new concept of "ruban" in which the two co-exist in harmony.

Indeed, talking to farmers these days, it is hard to come across anyone whose income is solely from farming. Almost every tambol has a food-processing unit or other kind of factories nearby. On the other hand, many urban economic sectors are run by rural migrants.

But again the reality epitomised by the prospect of rice shortage in many Asian countries now should remind us of our dependency on rural farmers to maintain our food supplies and livelihoods.

"The issue of food and natural resources security challenges the dominant thinking that only industrialisation and urbanisation represent growth and modernity,"  Chulalongkorn University's Surichai Wankaeo, chairman of ARSA, said. "We have to go beyond the urban-versus-rural dichotomy and find harmony between them."

One topic on the table for the world's climate-change negotiators in Bangkok this week is that rural people across Asia will face a disproportionate burden of impacts from extreme climatic events.

They will, in turn, flock to the cities, where the financial and political resources of the urban sector will be much more capable of mitigating the impacts of global warming. Whether some more money for the rice farmers is forthcoming or not, it nonetheless reminds us that there is an increasingly complex dynamic between us and those beyond our concrete canyons, to which we must pay more attention.

Nantiya tangwisutijit can be contacted at nantiya@nationgroup. com

Nantiya Tangwisutijit

The Nation