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Where to start...

...well besides showing a few pictures, I want to talk about FOOD SECURITY.  For most of us in the West, food security means having enough money to get more pop-tarts at the local corner store.  It is certainly much more than that and we in the West need to appreciate that.

Food security is a broad, bewildering and largely beguiling pursuit embracing:

  • access to land;
  • access to water;
  • access to genetic resources (seeds, etc.);
  • domestic and international policies that are conducive to small-scale agriculture;
  • appreciation of lifestyles very different from our own in the West;
  • lots and lots of talking;
  • lots and lots of listening.
    •
    For those of us in the West probably the hardest thing for us to appreciate is the difference between our lifestyle and that of the vast majority of South, East, Southeast and Central Asian as well as most of the African populations.  Our own lifestyle and culture has a diurnal nature to it.  It begins at about 5pm and ends somewhere around 8m the next morning - it also gets week-ends and statutory holidays in there as well.  In short - our work is NOT our life and we all groan about the fact that when we have too much work we are lacking a life.  Our popular music and t.v. bemoan having to work to make a living.

    For the people that surround me now, working IS their life.  They loose their work, they loose their life.  Their work is agriculture.  Their life is agriculture.  Many of their songs are about agriculture, about the weather, about living by the way of the winds and rains.  Their celebrations, their days of rest, choice of years of marriage, building a house - they all depend on factors that interplay with agriculture.  Presently there is little domestic policy support in Thailand to protect their lives; to protect their agriculture.  What is happening is more and more farmers are becoming but contract employees of large companies - accepting contracts to plant rice or corn or raise chickens.  The farmers have little choice but to accept as there is not much of a system established by the government to provide available loans for the start of the season (when seed and other input costs are very high) so the farmers turn to these companies as means to be able to live - as a means to be able to farm.  They are borrowing for their lives.  And they pay back with their lives.

    It has now reached the point where farmers are planting tonnes and tonnes of rice for export (Thailand is by far and away the leading exporter of rice) yet many of those very farmers and their families are going hungry!  HOW?  Because the companies own the annual yields.

    So you see food security does not mean simply being able to plant food, nor is it solely access to land or access to money.  These farmers seem to have all of that.  IT is the nexus of all the points listed above - the support and feedback of each of those factors interacting between and among the others.  IF each of them exists but without any interaction with the others, there is little chance of food security - there must be a managed point of balance among these factors.

    So what am I doing?  Well...in my little bits of efforts I am trying to understand the policies of the World Trade Organization as it affects agriculture.  Since those policies are largely a construct of the Western mindset, I am trying to understand the options other mindsets offer trade and agriculture.  I am trying to determine what effects the present WTO policies have on small scale (smallholder) agriculture.  I also link my findings with what my coworkers (Thai people working in a national Non-Government Organization) dig up in domestic policy searches.  Then we take this information to the farmers themselves, presenting it in a manner and pace they are comfortable with (many have only a grade 4 education).  We have also brought many farmers to various countries in the region or brought farmers from other countries here.

    This is all in an effort to let the farmers know that they are not alone in their frustrations over incompetent governments and selfish businesses who exploit the situation as it exists here (that being the lack of education and corrupt government staff and institutions).  This gives the farmers a sense of purpose in pursuing change.  They see and hear of success stories and also find strength in the sheer numbers of similar cases that exist across South, East, Southeast, and Central Asia as well as the vast majority of the African continent!  Finally, enlightened about how domestic and national policy affects their daily lives, they are then empowered to pursue changes along channels that will hopefully yield results.  They know the truth about what really affects their lives versus what they are told in the government run or otherwise controlled popular media so they can low out strategies to pursue change along channels that will not prove to be wild goose chases.

    Knowledge, simply, is power.

    OK enough of this.   Time to play and maybe be enlightened - or maybe I am the only one who had to learn this the hard way - but hopefully these pages will enlighten someone out there.

    J.D. Comtois
    December, 1998

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