February 27, 2008

Recently, I went on a Sustainable Study Tour to Issan ( The North East of Thailand) with a local farm ( Pun Pun Farm). Although this sounds quite cliche it was quite a life-changing and eye-opening experience. In so far, my view of agriculture has been quite market based, looking more at ways in which farmers can increase their income, which in turn we believe increases their individual welfare. After going on the Sustainable study tour, I'm not certain anymore whether focusing only on ways to bring farmers more money does in fact increase their well-being. On my trip, we focused on self-sustaining communities and individuals and the process in which they have been able to achieve this type of personal sustainability and in turn a greater well-being. Before I continue, let me give insight into what exactly the tour was and the history of Issan.

Pun Pun farm is located about an hour away from Chiang Mai, nestled against a National Park. The farm was started by a couple ( a thai man -Jo- and a american women -Peggy-). Jo grew up in Issan and had seen the effects of the Green Revolution on his family and himself. On a trip to the US, Jo found out about earthen building and brought it back to his family farm. At first people were taken a back by his techniques and didn't believe that his buildings would stay standing, but they did. Word got out about what Jo was doing and he then spent a fair amount of time touring around Thailand teaching earthen building techniques. Jo and Peggy started their farm, first as a place they could live subsistently and secondly as a place of education (focusing on earthen building, sustainable living and seed saving). On the Sustainable Study Trip, we visited an organic Fair-trade rice coop owned and started by farmers, a handful of Asok communities (subsistence communities based on Buddhist principles) and individual subsistence farm. Almost all of the places we visited had in some way incorporated earthen building (ie adobe, straw bale, waddle and dob). Almost all of the people we talked to, had once been part of the conventional agriculture network but at some point had reached a point where they could no longer depend on that systems to sustain them.

Issan, is by far one of the most inhospitable places in Thailand. The soil is very sandy, the weather is extremely arid and dry, availability of water is low and unpredictable therefore allowing only one season of rice growing (which in turn has made the people notoriously poor). All in all, Issan is a quite an inhospitable place for agriculture. When the green revolution came to Thailand ( about 50 years ago), it boosted production in Issan but quickly the effects of the chemical inputs were apparent. What that means, is that the Green Revolution Technology (ie conventional agriculture methods) was entirely unsustainable. Many farmers were in severe debt, some were suffering from illnesses which were products of chemical exposure, many were more or less starving and caught in a system of agriculture that pulled them into a downward spiral. The communities that we looked at, were a product of farmers and communities hitting rock bottom and remembering that although when they were children, they were poor, they were not starving and they were not drowning in debt. The organic and sustainable movement in Issan began out of those realizations of farmers, in many cases they banded together to create organic markets or individuals decided to live subsistently in order to escape the system that was only bringing them down. I felt empowered listening to the farmers we visited, hearing their stories and in many ways re-writing my view of how I believe we should be living our lives.

There is an underlying concept in this world that the only good life is that which mirrors the western world, that of consumption and monetary wealth. I have grown up in a very alternative thinking family but before this trip I didn't realize how stuck I was in believing that my happiness was rooted in the products of the western world and how unself-reliant my life is. It was almost as though a light went on in my head and I realized that so much fear in my life is derived from my inability to sustain myself and my lack of certainty that i will be able to create the comfortable life I have come so accustom to. I'm not really sure what my new found understanding means or how I will in fact incorporate into my life ( or for that matter if I have successfully communicated to you all about what is going on in my head) but I ask those reading this blog to take a moment and think about your own life and maybe only for one second question your own reliance on the western way and what it might take to make your own life or the lives that sustain you, more sustainable.