Who will tend the farm? Interrogating the ageing Asian farmer

ABSTRACT

Farmers are ageing across Asia. This is presented as a ‘problem’ with implications for agricultural productivity, rural poverty and elderly care. Drawing on fieldwork in Thailand we interrogate this assumption. By examining farming as an activity within households that are occupationally diverse and spatially promiscuous, we argue that it is necessary to see farming not as a singular occupation but instead as part of livelihood complexes. We question the raw data used to construct the ageing farming problem and the causalities that flow from it, in rural Thailand and in smallholder farming across Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Farming
• ageing
• Asia
• Thailand
• livelihoods
• mobility

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the support of Khon Kaen University in Thailand and the villagers of Ban Kao, Ban Lao and Ban Nam.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jonathan Rigg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6563-4640

Jonathan Rigg is Professor of Geography in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. He has been researching agrarian change in Thailand since the early 1980s and has also undertaken fieldwork in the Lao PDR, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. His book More than rural: textures of Thailand's agrarian transformation has recently been published by Hawaii University Press (2019).

Monchai Phongsiri is a researcher with the Center for Research on Plurality in the Mekong Region (CERP) and the Research Group on Wellbeing and Sustainable Development (WeSD) in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University. He has had over 20 years of experience working with international NGOs on community development in the northeast region of Thailand and as a training consultant, field supervisor and project advisor. His research interests include the diaspora, livelihood strategies, land and sustainable development. He has a PhD in Sociology from Khon Kaen University (Thailand).

Buapun Promphakping obtained a Ph.D in Economics and International Development from Bath University, UK in 2000 and is based in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Khon Kaen University. His research interests focus on well-being and sustainable development. He is Chair of the Development Science post-graduate programme (PhD). More recently, he has expanded his research interests into urban growth and civil society. He is a co-founder of the Center for Civil Society and Non-profit Management, and is currently Director of the Center.

Albert Salamanca is a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute's Asia Centre where he leads its Climate Change, Disasters and Development Cluster. He has over 15 years of experience working on natural resources management, conservation, development and sustainable livelihoods issues in Southeast Asia. His current research interests are on the themes of resilience, risk and vulnerabilities, mobility and spatial linkages, agrarian change, climate change adaptation, and sustainable livelihoods. He has a PhD in Geography from Durham University in the UK.

Mattara Sripun is a researcher working with the Research Group on Wellbeing and Sustainable Development (WeSD), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University. Her areas of interest and research are community-based sustainable tourism and alternative development. She also has experience as a PhD candidate on the GMS Exchange Program at Can Tho University and has a PhD in Development Science from Khon Kaen University (Thailand).

Notes

1 See, for example, Huang (2012) and Guo, Wen, and Zhu (2015) on China, and Akatiga and White (2015) on Indonesia.

2 With reference to Australia, Rogers et al. (2013, 251) write that ‘ … as farmers age, many with little prospect of inter-generational succession, there is growing concern that some farm families are beginning to experience extraordinary isolation, reduced health and quality of life, and increasing vulnerability with seemingly no choice but to stay on the farm and soldier on’. For concerns of this nature in China, see Ye et al. (2017, 972; and see Jacka 2017) who state that ‘the outmigration of young people often has negative consequences for ageing rural parents, including loneliness, isolation, depression and even the loss of basic physical and economic support … ’

3 Exemplified in EU documentation, see Zagata, Hádková, and Mikovcová 2015.

4 The World Bank's 2008 World Development Report on agriculture makes a case for more efficient land markets to facilitate exit from agriculture: ‘As farmers age, as rural economies diversify, and as migration accelerates, well-functioning land markets are needed to transfer land to the most productive users and to facilitate participation in the rural nonfarm sector and migration out of agriculture’ (World Bank 2007, 9).

5 The Challenges of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia project (ChATSEA, 2005–2010), funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and led by Rodolphe De Koninck, was a particularly notable attempt to explore these issues in a Southeast Asian context leading to numerous articles and a book series with NUS Press (see https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/collections/challenges-of-the-agrarian-transition).

6 By ‘productively’ attached, we mean through remittance flows and income allocations and, sometimes, also through farm labouring.

7 According to the WHO, an ageing society is one where the proportion of the population aged 65 years or more exceeds 7 percent; an aged society when the figure exceeds 14 percent; and super-aged when it is in excess of 21 percent.

8 Village names are pseudonyms, as are all interviewees mentioned by name.

9 Rerkasem (2016, 111) has estimated that households require 62.5 rai (10 ha) of irrigated (double cropped) land, to make a ‘decent living from rice in 21st century Thailand, when self-sufficiency no longer means producing enough rice to meet the family's requirements’. Few of the surveyed households came close to this figure and land quality in the Northeast is poor and conditions largely rain-fed (so, single cropped).

10 Encouraging older farmers to exit farming has also been a policy concern in Australia (Rogers et al. 2013).

11 Although it has been noted, for example, in Malaysia (Ngah and Kamarudinm [forthcoming], Ngah, Kamarudin, and Saad 2016).

12 There is also the concern that farmers working into the later years of their lives present a range of health and safety issues for the individuals concerned, directing attention at the social agendas of care and healthy ageing (Rogers et al. 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National University of Singapore (‘Living off the land in Thailand’) [grant number R-109-000-164-133].