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ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship observes that smallholder agricultural practices in East and South East Asia continue to persist, despite modernization theories predicting otherwise. This article contributes to these discussions by considering the context of smallholder agriculture in southern Thailand, where rubber and oil palm have both long been prevalent in the livelihood profiles of rural households. Beyond demonstrating the ways in which contemporary circumstances of southern Thailand’s smallholders largely cohere within the broader agricultural trends documented for the rest of the country, the discussion branches out to explore the implications of such a sustained smallholder presence beyond the farmgate. It shows specifically how protests staged in Bangkok in late 2013 and 2014, which led to the removal of the Yingluck Shinawatra administration through a coup d’état, ought to be understood partly in relation to earlier rounds of protest, in August and September 2013, when smallholders in southern Thailand blocked highways and railroad crossings to call on the administration for price supports. By assessing these stories jointly, the article shows how the sustained organization of large portions of rural life around smallholder agriculture contributes to shaping the political turns on Thailand’s national stage.
Acknowledgements
My sincere gratitude goes to the members of my dissertation committee (Ian Baird, Katherine Bowie, Kris Olds, Peter Vandergeest, and Stephen Young), who helped me think through key ideas, from inception of the project to oral defence, which are brought out in this article. I owe tremendous thanks, of course, to the numerous interlocutors, smallholders and non-smallholders alike, in southern Thailand who spent time with me during interviews in 2015 and 2016.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Shattuck (Citation2018, Citation2019) for detailed discussions of these sentiments.
2 Similar outlooks, of people continuing to plant rubber in the future, were reported in the work of Andriesse and Puntita (Citation2018) for other districts of Nakhon Si Thammarat Province.
3 Dayley and Attachak (Citation2016) review the distinctions among different rural producers that Eric Wolf drew in his seminal 1968 work, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century.
4 See, for instance, Baker’s brief entry in New Mandala just after the 2011 election: newmandala.org/regional-voting.
5 Farmgate price data is available through Thailand’s Office of Agricultural Economics, http://www.oae.go.th/view/1/ราคาสินค้าเกษตรรายเดือน/TH-TH
6 Yellow Shirts, an anti-Thaksin protest group founded in early 2006 and composed principally of people from Bangkok’s middle classes as well as people from southern Thailand. Insightful analyses of the Red-Shirt, Yellow-Shirt divide in the mid-2000s can be found in such works as Aulino et al. (Citation2014), Pasuk and Baker (Citation2013), Strate (Citation2013), Walker (Citation2012), among many others.
7 facebook.com/Anusorn72508/
8 This particular conversation took place on a brief return trip I made in 2017.
9 While broad descriptions of such connections came through during fieldwork interviews, surveys of Thai-language media allow us to spell them out in more detail. Chamni’s relative (Withun Detdecho) was the head of the Nakhon Si Thammarat Provincial Administration Organization for three terms (mgronline.com/daily/detail/9520000153104); a short biography about his son, Chaichana, and his prior work with the Provincial Administration Organization is available on a webpage published for MPs (hris.parliament.go.th/ss_detail.php?sapa_id=82&ssp_ id=20913&lang=th). Thai Rath ran articles noting Chaichana’s association with the PDRC (e.g. thairath.co.th/content/409358, thairath.co.th/content/392498).
10 Prices are for Grade 3 unsmoked rubber sheets and provide a benchmark for related prices, such as liquid latex and cup lumps (latex left to harden after tapping). Unsmoked sheets are made both by households, although decreasingly so, as observed through the fieldwork, and in larger processing facilities that buy liquid latex directly from farmers or local intermediaries.