The Rubber Boom Assemblage and Internalized Friction: Attitudes of the Government, NGOs, and Farmers in Northeast Thailand

TitleThe Rubber Boom Assemblage and Internalized Friction: Attitudes of the Government, NGOs, and Farmers in Northeast Thailand
Annotated RecordAnnotated
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsWataru F
Secondary TitleSoutheast Asian Studies
Volume9
Issue3
Pagination381-411
Key themesAgriculturalModernization, Environment
Abstract

Northeast Thailand experienced a rubber boom that began in the 2000s with a sudden swing away from the trend toward sustainable forest management that had been widely accepted by society in the 1990s. The rapid expansion of rubber cultivation caused various ecological changes in the farmers’ living environment. Faced with environmental issues, various actors in society were reluctant to take the measures necessary to stop these changes, even when there were legal provisions to do so. Among the bureaucracy, agriculture agencies were indifferent to deforestation and, in some cases, gave subsidies to non-titled lands despite regulations against this. Conservation agencies hesitated to regulate illegal cultivation strictly in the forestlands. At the study site, the Tambon Administration Organization stressed the importance of forest conservation but never criticized or prevented rubber cultivation. Villagers reached no consensus on regulating forest clearing or herbicide use but changed their customs to allow the enclosure of non-timber forest resources in private forests. Various actors, without mutual communication, perceived a political atmosphere in which poor people’s hopes of a socioeconomic upgrade via rubber could not be denied under the conditions of electoral politics, despite environmental degradation. These were all elements of the rubber boom assemblage. The friction arising from rubber cultivation combined with anxiety regarding environmental degradation became internalized in the actors because the forces driving the rubber boom were so powerful. Therefore, at a glance, all actors suddenly seemed to become optimistic about rubber.
URLhttps://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/seas/9/3/9_381/_pdf
Availability

Available for download
Countries

Thailand
Document Type

Journal Article

Annotations

Overall relevance: 

Focusing on rubber in Northeast Thailand, Wataru gives an overview of assemblage formations in environmental issues, showing how frictions and assemblage theory have been applied to top-down and bottom-up assemblage formations, involving human and non-human actors on a global scale. However, whereas previous studies assume a human actor holding a consistent idea, Wataru shows individual human actors are also assemblages in formation. Wataru’s study suggests that the rubber assemblage grew from a range of factors including experimental plantations, the fact that rubber could grow in Northeast Thailand, the rubber promotion policy of the government, increases in the price of rubber, and economic success for the growers. Wataru argues that dependence on the market economy increased as a general trend regardless of villagers' engagement in rubber cultivation.

Key Themes: 
  • Agricultural modernisation: key ideas and debates relevant to land tenure security - The growing of rubber ushers in an agriculture that eats away at parts of the existing environment – the disappearance of cows and cow manure, and also the disappearance of phak kadon (shoots of the Careya sphaerica, a popular wild vegetable) as the use of tractors has changed the germination environments that the shoots need to grow. Rubber gardens mean reduced herding land for cows and buffaloes, leading to increased input costs for fertilisers. The use of herbicides becomes necessary for rubber, with environmental and health impacts. The crop also draws in new actors as the desire to cash in on a crop boom increases. Businessmen from the South buy land cleared by locals, buying up SPK deeds and claiming them as rentals, or employing locals to clear land illegally. The temporality of payments hides the actual timepoint of land clearance.
  • Land and the environment: pollution, deforestation, climate change, conservation zoning - The rubber assemblage traces how a disappearing landscape for cow and water buffalo herding is interrelated with an increased anxiety over the effects of herbicides on land, water, fish stocks, and people. This anxiety—one might call it an “eco-anxiety”—is traced to the loss of knowledge and disconnection with a land that was once familiar through a deep cultural knowledge of its inhabitants. The threat of herbicides is connected to the loss of control over dispersed substances that villagers do not have the means to regulate or keep out of their food sources, farms, and gardens.
Research basis: 

Wataru bases the work on field research in villages in Ubon Ratchathani Province since 1997, and ethnographic research on relationships between villagers’ livelihoods and natural resource use. The article’s arguments draw on ethnographic data from participant observation prior to 2015, as well as questionnaire surveys conducted in 2012 and 2015, interviews with key informants in both Bangkok and the area around the villages, and analyses of documents such as newspapers and websites. (Provided by Huiying Ng)