Search

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on rural field research in three provinces of Northeast Thailand, the paper seeks to understand the ways in which life course, generational, era-defining and developmental change intersect, and why rural smallholders and smallholdings continue to persist notwithstanding deep structural change. We outline the creative ways that households and their members have sought to address the scissor effects of declining land holdings, rising needs, reduced relative returns to agriculture, and often precarious non-farm work. We posit, drawing on this work from Thailand, that while Asia’s ‘truncated agrarian transition’ goes some way to explaining the current empirical fact of persistent smallholders, we raise doubts whether the rural development agenda of modernisation, marketisation and rural exit will have the traction that governments and some scholars anticipate. A focus on production obscures how rural livelihoods also embody acts of consumption, care, reproduction and redistribution. Our study finds that the current experience of occupational multiplicity where households’ livelihoods comprise farm and non-farm, commoditised and quasi-subsistence, in situ and ex situ , production and care, and reproduction and redistribution will likely also persist, if non-farm occupations remains classically precarious and social safety nets thinly woven. The paper contributes to debates over agrarian and rural livelihood transitions in Asia, and sheds explanatory light on why the farm-size transition has not taken hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Following 77 households over 25 years, the paper traces agrarian change in two settlements in Northeast Thailand. This is distilled into three processes: a delocalisation of living, a disembedding of households, and a dissociation of the village-community, seen in a geriatrification of farming, the re-working of livelihood footprints, the generational drift of non-farm work, and increasing complexity in household form. Policy interventions need to acknowledge the mixed and mobile nature of rural living, the split personality of households, people’s hyrbrid identities, and the diversity of activities in the countryside. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Transformation needs to be considered as part of resilience if issues of equity and social justice are to be addressed. • Tacloban offers an example of deliberate transformation through an integrated development and disaster risk reduction plan. • Political capabilities places focus on underlying conditions, attending to narrative, voice, authority and subjectivity. • Planning overlooked histories of marginalization, reflecting instead the interests and values of powerful stakeholders. • Political capabilities are found to be significant in directing transformation, reinforcing or challenging subjectivities. There are increasing calls for transformation to be considered as a means to address the effects of social, cultural and political conditions on vulnerability when resilience is applied in practice. Yet transformation does not necessarily lead to more equitable social conditions. Here, we draw on the analytical framework of political capabilities to reveal aspects of the underlying politics of transformation. Our focus is on the relocation of communities in Tacloban, Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan, as an example of a deliberate transformation enacted as part of an integrated development and disaster risk reduction plan. A household survey, focus group discussions and individual interviews are applied to rank households in terms of their perception of household resilience four years after the disaster. Analysis of the drivers and consequences of differentiation reveals an uneven distribution of resilience among residents, with many facing difficulties despite a focus on livelihoods embedded in the relocation plan. While some were able to leverage pre-existing human and social capital, others found that the shift from coastal livelihoods left them struggling to find a valued role. Relocation reinforced underlying subjectivities with new layers of meaning, reflecting experiences of success and failure in adjusting to a more commercial culture and cash economy. The plan sought improvement through commercial opportunities, reflecting the authority and worldview of dominant city and international stakeholders. While the deliberate transformation that followed sought to be just in the distribution of risk and opportunity, poorer residents lacked the political capability to influence the relocation narrative, which in turn overlooked histories of marginalization and the lived experience of the poor. The case highlights the significance of engaging political capabilities if transformations are to support those in vulnerable communities to make valued life choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]