I had started translating this book back in the second half of 1996.  My Thai was not the strongest then (and it has probably been going downhill since then) but the effort was not for eloquence.  What should be noted in the pages you are about to read is that each family's largest hurdle is labour.  The general trend of the young leaving for work in the urban centers is huge and growing.  This leaves many with little hope for an increase in the number's of farmers taking up alternative agriculture.  This book, among the other of the series, then is a chronicle of what has been and, if one considers the popular trends, what is to come.  It also tells of just what kind of hell the greater majority of farmers across Thailand (and, indeed, the greater majority of the World's farmers) go through everyday under conventional cash cropping agricultural systems.

There is a reason so many people dedicate their lives to this issue.  By this I am certainly not talking about my tiny little efforts - I am talking to all the many small efforts of so many farmers and NGO workers in Thailand and across Southeast Asia working to fix the system that prevails around them.  It is worthwhile.

In case you are wondering - or even noticed - one of the stories is not completed.  In fact the whole book is nowhere near complete.  There are 5 other case studies but unfortunately I erased them in a fit of cleaning up my hardrive.  Whoops.  Oh well...what i have here is fortunately well representative of the kind of things the book was talking to overall.

Hope it is useful.