The Little Engine Who Could: How a Small Village is Creating Green Jobs

I just got back from visiting another province, Chiang Mai, here in Thailand. I went to observe an organic farming project that my friend Mike worked on and came away very impressed.

Mike's Thai counterpart, Pe Chai, effectively "greened" his community's entire economy by finding a way to make organic farming profitable and then organize all of his neighbors to do it too. As a result, he was able to create a organic farmer's union that represented 83 families and with enough farm product bulk to export their goods directly to Europe and Asia without the help of a middleman, which increased the average family's profits by over 50 percent.

Also, the profits from the organic farming business has increased the tax base of the community. Therefore, more money has also flowed into daycares, school, local health clinics, elderly groups, and other community assistance programs.

Moreover, just about every job in his village is based on organic farming. There are the actual farmers who grow and harvest the corn, rice, peanuts, etc. and then they have a bunch of small food manufacturers that make banana chips, peanut snacks, and other small packaged goods. They also invested in their infrastructure by building a brand new storage facility and rice mill. His village's local economy is booming and he is doing his part to help the environment.

This is an example of the power of using community organizing to create value, and not simply extract something or redistribute the same resources. Pe Chai took a community strength (farming) and applied it in a new way to meet a specific need in the marketplace (organic foodstuffs) to create even more value (essentially grow the pie) for his community to export to the world.

Oh! I have pictures this time too!!


Organic lettuce heads in the field


Pe Chai outside of the banana chip manufacturing
plant.


Mike outside of the new storage facility


The brand new rice mill

A Question of Ownership

It's becoming all too apparent that one of the biggest problems everday Thais face is lack of ownership. Everywhere I go and with everyone I speak with it seems that either villagers work for the profit of another or are working for the profit of the bank.

Most villagers are under heavy debts. People owe money to the bank for motorcycles, educational exspenses, property, etc. while others may owe smaller "gentleman's agreement" style loans for seed, farming equiptment, or even a new car stereo. The heavy debts people face make it virtually impossible to build wealth. Combine this with an ignorance of basic financial management and you have a wicked brew called generational poverty.

Interestingly, villagers do have a strong entrepreneurial spirit. It seems like every other day someone is opening a new noodle stand, restaurant, or shop. Unfortnately, lack of planning and other basic business skills leads to a higher than usual business failure rate. If villagers could learn to manage their debts and implement good business practice I believe many villagers could turn their financial fortunes around.

It's All About Trade

As an American Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Thailand, I spend my days sharing life with common villagers in humble surroundings. Harvesting rice patties, biking up and down rocky mountain roads, eating sticky rice with fried pork with neighbors, and navigating cultural and language differences are just a few of my daily tasks.

I am charged with the duty of organizing my community so that they can better empower themselves. So far, I have been pretty successful with my job. I created a community organizing model named Project Hope that allows a team of student leaders to organize their classmates to help develop real projects in the larger community. We’ve done clothing drives for poor families, trainings for villagers, and launched clubs within the school. Other volunteers throughout Thailand have begun replicating this model with success as well. One volunteer was able to raise 10,000 baht through local business, school, and government support in order to do an HIV/AIDS and English training for hill tribe kids.

However, though these efforts to improve civic life, I kept noticing one of the fundamental problems we faced was a lackluster local economy. The production is there. People will constantly create and manufacture various products from purses to furniture to leather belts. The entrepreneurial spirit is there. It seems everyone wants to own their own shop. People are always opening new noodle stands or jewelry shops or small bamboo production plants. The only thing that seemed missing was trade. Local businesses had everything except for a market that could sustain them. As a matter of fact, the local market is oversaturated with locally made products that it drives prices down and squeezes profit margins.

This leads me to openly wonder about how the village can successfully meet the marketplace? The best bet would seem to be to find other markets that would support these products more profitably, but how can one engage these markets? Also, the level of education in the village is alarmingly low. So, even if there is the opportunity, how can they enter and stay in these markets without being in over their heads? Although I yet to come up with answers to these questions, my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer showed me that it’s all about trade if poorer communities are to ever sustain any economic growth that will spill over to other civic benefits.

Quilen Blackwell