Welcome to JP Melville's review, experience, and statement on foreign aid and the international development industry. A conservative faith in family. A love affair riding the riotous tensions between money, personal freedom, the majestic travesty of our specie's ecological footprint, and economic politics. Selected writing of both prose and poetry, anecdotal travel log to rhetorical essay, dating back from the 1980's to the present. Enjoy!

Friday 30 November 2012

Rural Development – A Naïve Gestation of Terrorism




A Sunday.  Sitting at my desk at the field crops research station, back to the window, rain falling in sheets for days.  Nothing at my house.  No one venturing in the downpour.  So I skipped to the office and let myself in.  Coffee.  Letter from the mom waiting.  So much, so many things happening back home.  A friend's wife is having a baby (is it my friend's also?).   World tumbles on.
The agricultural tour.  Three old farts well into their sixties changing their ways of farming to systems more suited to the environment of the Esan, Northeastern Thailand.  Mixed farming, water ponds for fish, a fruit tree forest, mulched rice fields.   The three farmers say they are a bit isolated from all their neighbours.  Persons of change.  Shrugs of shoulders. What do they care.  They are changing for themselves.
The second day a day of drunkenness.  The villagers and the monks in one of the poorest villages brought the homemade rice wine.  Holding hands with the men and talking about farming and water.  A huge reservoir of 13 or 14 hectares, lots of water problems, flooding backing up into the next village, inadequate holding capacity during the dry season.  Three or four different varieties of rice wine.  Dancing along the bunds of rice paddy.  That night to the Grass Roots Integrated Development (GRID) project, run by Thai nationals.  An argument with Charlie from Australia, because, he said, I am argumentative for the sake of argument rather than the resolution of a question.  The rich fat cats know what they are doing, he said.  I figured that a rich fat cat guy about my age who grew up with nice cars probably did not think much past the car and the girls.  A very late night.
Next morning off to visit a community forest.  They had planted thousands of trees.  A great happening.  Who owned the land?  There seemed to be some question about this.  And sly smiles, too.  Laughter and winks and invitations: when the government comes to give them trouble we may come and fight too.  It was the first mention of the word fight, of which I was to hear more.  Better translated as war.
To a village where we had supper. To a house where I bought a traditional pakama, for sleeping.  Then to the home in the darkness, upstairs and I crawled under a mosquito net.  A black pig lounging about below, snuffling, loose to go where it pleased but wandering nowhere.  A dog trotting past in the dark, a growl, gone.  Ducks tucked away in a corner, gentle sing-song gurgles.  A calf, also loose, stirrings of straw as it turned in small circles looking to lie down.  A breathy humpf from the water buffalo, glassed eyes watching from behind his gate.  Silkworms knitting cocoons in a wire cage suspended from the ceiling beneath me, a whisper of mulberry leaves shuffling as the worms fed.  Each of us all keeping  company in the silence of night.
Fourth day on tour.  More of the usual.  A failed fish nursery.  Pretty much brand new, but disused because the concrete was poured poorly and the fish tank split.  A water pump display.  More like a bicycle pump bolted to the earth.  Pump, pump, pump out comes a trickle of water, fun for five minutes, slave labour by ten. I took notice of a pig in a harness, harness attached to a rope, rope to a bar, bar stretched between two trees.  Pig jogs happily back and forth with that odd grin they have on their face.
Back to the GRID project office.  There was Khun Nat.  Maybe twenty eight years old.  A moustache.  Deeply tanned brown face already wrinkled around the eyes.  Nat was leaving the organization in two months.  His story was that he would be going to Khorat, north of Bangkok, to work for a friend who makes hydraulic components and ships these to Canada.  Nat kept saying that his friend just needs help so he is going.  Nat knows nothing about what he will do or what he can do to help.  It was Nat who talked about the war.
We sat down with a guitar and a bottle of whisky and we sang and Nat sang about the war - about the students and people who died during and after the Thammasat University uprising.  War as an economic war, a war of poverty, farmers fighting literally for their land.  GRID was a political base, a nucleus of communication.  Workers and farmers who will fight the war, the violence inevitable.  Nat said a losing war.  The government has the guns.  But, what can you do, the war is already being waged against the people.  It was not our choice, said Nat.  A young woman came and filled our whiskey glasses.  She spoke angrily to Nat, looked with stillness at him, dark eyes, for just a brief moment, and left. 
Nothing more to the tour after this.  A meeting.  An evaluation.  Plans for next year.  We white people slipped away from the villages and fields, back to our jobs, our projects, back to our plans and our organizing and busyness.  Really, who among us would turn our backs on our wealth and to join a war?  Who among us could imagine that environmentally sustainable and economically subsistent agriculture was a weapon?  No, no, no… everyone, of course, has the best of intentions.
It was strange to return to the agricultural research station.  It was like a cul-de-sac in a suburb, a place that turns in on itself leading nowhere, lined by houses in which people live without relation to each other except their work and allegiance to their salaries.  I knew people there.  People with titles and objectives and mandates.
Khun Nat disappeared a month later.  I contacted the woman with still, dark eyes.  She said she did not know.  Things happen, she said.  So they were closing down their Grass Roots office.  Nat was never heard from again. 
I looked at the empty desks of my government colleagues while the rain continued to pour down outside.
Hollow space in an imploding world.

Friday 23 November 2012

Nai Onsi - The Climate Change Apocolypse and a Farmer from Khoo Khad Village, Thailand



 After a while the ideas get very confused.  You go to a developing country as an agricultural development worker thinking you are going to help farmers.  So many ideas that you have.
But when you arrive, nothing is the same.  The weather is not the same.  The soil is not the same.  The crops are not the same.  The economy is not the same.  And the culture is not the same.  More than anything, the fact that the culture is different, that the people's way of life is different, this puts your ideas on hold.  Before anything you have to learn to see with a new pair of eyes.
I gained my farming experience on a dairy goat farm near Guelph, Ontario, Canada.  I had been a member of an ecological farmer's association for about four years and a member of a national organic gardening organization.  For a time I hung about with a rural learning group.  I helped a bit with instituting a chapter of an international organic crop improvement association.  All these community oriented, organic, biodynamic, rural and alternative economic ideas floating around in my head were then spurred to furious heights by studying international development at university.
But what would any of this mean to small farmers turning over the dirt and scattered all over the world in countries on the periphery of the global scene?  Probably very little, at least in technological and biological terms.  This should come as no surprise.  In Canada, no farm environment or farm system is really the same.  The context around the world is completely different.  But what of the principles of organic farming?  Perhaps the principles would apply in other countries?  Perhaps they would not?  The following story, sketched as I understood it, is that of a man I met, his family, his neighbours, and the land he had worked his entire life.

Nai Onsi lived in Khoo Khad Village in Northeastern Thailand.  Khoo Khad village had a population of more than two hundred families.  Few people considered the number of individuals in the village as an important figure.  The village was about fifteen minutes off the main highway.  The dusty road to the village was built around 1970.  Nai Onsi felt that the road had been a good thing.  Access to the market in the nearby town made it possible to both sell his crops and buy factory made pails, rope, clothing, tv's, and soap etc.  The road also brought the government, electricity, and the industrial world.  He had built his new house three years earlier.  It had cement posts instead of wooden poles, a tin roof instead of thatch, two separate rooms upstairs, a storage room downstairs, and a cooking area.  This was one of the nicer houses in Khoo Khad.  Not much for privacy.  But then who in Khoo Khad was interested in privacy?
People worked together, ate together, slept together, did everything together.  There was a general rule that men and women's functions were separated - even eating separately - but in practice this did not always hold true; when there was work to be done, especially in the paddy, there was work to be done; women could plow and men could cook.  November and December were allocated for the rice harvest.  Virtually everybody was in the paddies.  Nai Onsi, his brother, his wife, his son, and one of the younger children (school closed for the rice harvest) worked together.  One of his daughters worked with a crew of young people who shift from farm to farm, a sort of community self-help labour redistribution and courting process.
Harvesting was done by hand with one tool, a sickle.  Sheaves of grain were bound together by a thin strip of bamboo.  Separation of the grain from the straw was done by hand also; a sheaf of grain was quickly bound into a rope tied to the ends of two sticks and swung against a board.  Rice for the family and a portion for the village Buddhist monks were stored in a shed by the house.  This rice was a glutinous variety, indigenous and well adapted to the environment - not a high yielder, but stable; it sticks together when cooked and is eaten in the palm of the hand.  Conventional rice was grown for sale and/or used for payment of debts to the local moneylender.  Milling was done at the local mill (made in Japan) and the bran was given to the miller - no one ate whole grain rice.
Nai Onsi had about six hectares of rice paddy and six hectares of upland.  This was usually tilled with any of his three buffalo.  They pulled a single small, six to eight inch ploughshare.  Sometimes he rented a walking tractor.  The buffalo also produced manure, of course, which was very important because the sandy, acid, and saline soil had a low inherent fertility.  The animals also processed the rice stubble and straw.  These somewhat nutrition-free foodstuffs comprised the gross portion of their diet, given that after rice planting and the planting of necessary cash crops on the upland, little land remained for grass or forage production.
Nai Onsi's farm system was, however, even more complex than this.  Small ponds had been dug in some of the paddies.  Fish fingerlings were raised in these and in the rainy season the fish were released to flooded rice paddies.  The fish fed on rice plant pests and fertilized the water at the same time.  Nai Onsi did not use biocides on the rice because they killed the fish, the main protein component of the family diet.  The biocides would also kill the many kinds of edible insects living in and around the paddy.  Synthetic fertilizers were too expensive to buy in adequate supply to profitably invest in the farm system.  Besides, such quantities of fertilizer were also not good for the fish.  Vegetables were grown in small patches close to the hand dug well for easy watering.  The vegetables were fertilized with manure and rice hulls.  Bamboo shoots, some bush and tree leaves, and chillies were eaten.  About thirty chickens scratched around the house cleaning up litter.  During the rice harvest they ranged in the paddy picking up any loose seeds that had fallen from handling.  A sow was raised and bred to have her litter when the rice harvest was underway - bran was cheapest at that time of year and the sow needed the extra feed to raise her piglets.
In essence, Nai Onsi's farm was self-sufficient and natural, though perhaps more by default than by intent.  Nai Onsi would have liked to buy a walking tractor for himself and to increase crop production of his limited land base, perhaps with synthetic inputs, if he could have afforded them.  His decisions, nonetheless, were rational, based on his needs, conditions, and opportunities.

This snapshot of Nai Onsi’s farm by no means implied that his situation static.  Although traditional in many respects, the farm had experienced many changes since he and his ancestors first began farming.  Rice has been exported out of Thailand since the mid-19th century.  Peasant farmers were, in this sense and in living memory, always linked to commercial production.  Since the 1960's, roads built into the Northeast accelerated the rate of export remarkably.  Thailand competes with the United States in terms of rice export.
Increased production in Thailand, however, had been largely due to putting the plough to virgin soils, not through per unit area increases.  Consequently, much less than twenty percent of the original forests remain.  Rice is planted anywhere it is possible to flood the soil.  Non-traditional crops (maize, cassava, kenaf) are planted on the uplands.  More than ninety percent of the farming in the Northeast is dependent entirely on rainfall, which is high in volume (around 1400mm/annum) but restricted to June through October with the majority falling in August.  Precipitation is sporadic and often there is drought.  The sandy soils also erode easily and on the uplands the erosion problem is severe.  To make matters worse, the near elimination of forest cover has increased temperatures by three to four degrees so that daytime temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius are now common.  These high temperatures have degraded organic matter in the soil.
A persistent trend in the weakening of real value in cash crop prices from the mid-1970's had affected Nai Onsi's family and farm.  When the road first came to Khoo Khad village he could buy the manufactured clothes and pails with his then strictly traditional farm output.  With some optimism, he had expanded his rice paddy even into marginal areas and begun to grow cash crops on the upland (first cutting down the forest).  He had done this to earn more cash to support a surprisingly healthy and large family (introduction of modern medicines) and to continue paying for the manufactured goods, on which the family had come to depend.  The natural environment that had once supplied medicines, clothing, protein, building materials, even forage for the buffalo had largely disappeared.  Four of Nai Onsi's children had already gone to Bangkok, the terminus of Thailand's economy, to support the increasing cash needs of the family farm.  And to fend for themselves.  A fifth was planning the same move.
As of 1990, Thailand's export economy experienced a rapid growth rate of ten percent in GNP.  Exports were chiefly of manufactured goods.  Agricultural exports constituted about fifteen percent of total export value.  The export of manufactured goods had its competitive edge based on two critical factors: 1) cheap labour migrating from the countryside and 2) cheap agricultural products.  Cheap labour, because oversized families increasingly dependent on the cash economy have had little alternative but to send their children into the industrial labour force at whatever wages were paid.  Cheap agricultural products, because, in what was still characteristically a subsistent agricultural economy of segregate and independent villages, there was neither the absolute need for better cash returns nor the collective power to change anything.
Today, no more land exists into which food production can be expanded, to feed an increasing population or to increase supplies to the agricultural export sector.  Migration to Bangkok continues and labour shortages occur in rural areas.  The response to labour shortages by farmers appears to be increased mechanization (increased dependence on fossil fuels).  The response to the need for increased agricultural production per unit area is, for the most part, to increase the use of synthetic chemicals, hybrid high yielding seed, and commoditization of all on-farm activities.

Nai Onsi has been farming in the midst of a widespread phenomena of socio-economic change.  The fundamental basis of his subsistence system was translating to a production system.  Because he did not have the capital to buy more land it was probable that he would have to intensify production.  Other farmers have had the capital to buy land from farmers who have had to sell.  Likewise, companies increase their own holdings of land,  buying from farmers who choose to or must sell.  Companies also make arrangements in some areas to supply all the inputs for specific crops to farmers and agreed to buy the crops from the farmers (contract farming).
Of course, there are folks who wish to reverse, stall, or redirect these trends.  Non-government organizations and some government institutions try to re-establish the independence of the small farmer.  Activities range from farmer initiated, cooperative, animal and rice banks, to weaving, to integrated and diversified farming projects, to village industry marketing programs, to appropriate technology.  Some of these activities engage high paid foreign consultants.  Some engage international volunteers.  They have worked with leguminous alley cropping systems that can significantly reduce erosion.  Others research green manures and nitrogen fixing crops.  Some work with integrated farm systems.
Nai Onsi himself felt that he had benefitted from these investments, especially where they introduced leguminous trees and rice-fish culture on his farm.  In many respects, these relationships with previous experts paved the way for my introduction of goats.  Both Nai Onsi and his wife were interested in the idea of diversifying their livestock without any significant changes in how they operated their farm.  Although neither of them had ever seen goats or eaten goat meat or milk, they were willing to experiment.
How would this small livestock project evolve?  Would it be accepted?  Would it benefit Nai Onsi?  I did not know.  What I did know was that my experience was with hundreds of goats, not three.  I came from a farm with a highly mechanized milking parlour where twelve goats were milked at once, not one beneath the house.  I knew how to operate a combine and harvesting in ten minutes the amount of grain which four or five people in Khoo Khad harvested in a day.  I purchased imported sisal in the store for mechanically binding hay bales, whereas with his own hands Nai Onsi made from bamboo which grew on his own land, a thin strip for hand binding sheaves of rice.
No question that Nai Onsi was the expert.  Far more than I, he knew what the machinations of the modern world had done to his farm and family.  Sure, some of this change he felt was good.  Some probably not so good.  And some about which there was little he could do.
What I did know, was that with his calloused feet and hands, his weathered face, and his patience he lived closer to the land than I have ever even dreamed of knowing.
In our apocalyptic world of climate change, is it not Nai Onsi’s relationship with his land of critical importance?  What tractors and accounts and chemistry have turned so many of us so very far away from?
I do not really know.
It is just this feeling that I have.

Babel

I remember a work trip.  Called field work.  Or a site visit.  Or rapid rural appraisal.
What I remember…
Four or five days of passing faces, passing places.  This preceded by months of planning.  This preceded by years of education.  All long gone now.
What is it that I wish to recall?
I do not know.
So I shout.  Loudly.  I shout into the wilderness of my memory.  And I find myself slipping dangerously into the arms of a flowing collage...
An afternoon.  A roadside village.  Table in front of a small wooden hut.  Thatched roof overhead.  Heat.  Anaesthetic wind caressing.
Three of us.  Myself, a friend, a woman, laughing.  All of us squinting at sunlight pounding into the thick green of a banana grove, ignoring the dust billowing up from occasional motorcycles rattling by.  We are drinking whisky, soda water, over ice.  Afterwards, I fall off my own motorcycle.  Slipped sideways in the sand.  A burnt foot from the muffler.  I get up.  Go on.
We are eating the goat meat with the men in the village, laughing as a knife slipped small pieces of raw liver away from the carcass, each of us taking and chewing and exclaiming.  Sweet milky wine chased by shots of clear whisky, voices, meat pounded raw in blood and salt, and the blind man's fingers, his breath, his body droning through the reeded pipes he played and dull pounding pounding drumming hands bodies in a circle the floor dull blooded heated drumming afternoon arms and bodies rising falling bodies sweat... a god forsaken sickness the day following.
Yet, again drinking whisky, this time with coffee, talking with the old man in his garden.  Watching through his memory's eyes.  His hands shaking as he lit a cigarette, stories of people, places, praising the children, and stopping to call, "Come here little Nana!"  A little girl came running to his outstretched hands.  This old man a Jesuit.  Once upon a long long time ago from some other land.  Now with his whisky and coffee.  Two hands holding the face and smiling at little Nana.
Then, on the back of a motorcycle, too drunk to drive, winding on a mountain road, hours passing by, sunlight spattering through the trees, buffalo in sparkling river waters, wind, heat, and later, watching the stars with head tilted back, then a bed, heat, darkness, overcome and dissolving into writhing sexuality.
Images photographed inside my head, eyes smouldering deep somewhere inside a camera but seeing places that were not there.  Incidents which are images.  But it was supposed to be real.  I was there.

Third World Development.
Underdevelopment.
Stages of take-off.
Participation.
Gender.
Progressive farmers.
Poorest of the poor.
Structural readjustment.
Appropriate technology.
Micro credit.
Partnerships.

Words and language degraded into Babel.

I SHOUT!

“Has anything changed!”

The words slip from my tongue.  An echo of emptiness bouncing back.

Babel.