In July of this year, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha released his "Farmers' Soul-Soothing" poem to the press and the Thai public. He urged farmers: "Don't leave your home and farmland, leaving family behind, struggling to make a living locally."
His poem focuses on a number of prominent themes in rural development debates in Thailand: the migration of the young; the consequent ageing of those farmers left behind; the sustainability of agriculture; and the risks of leaving home.
Farmers in Thailand are ageing -- they are now, on average, over 50 years old. Over the 20 years between 1993 and 2013, the proportion of farmers aged 45 years old or more doubled from 23% to 52%, and 12.5% of farmers are now more than 65 years old. Not only are farmers ageing, but the size of their farms is declining. In 2013, farms averaged 20 rai, effectively too small to support a family. This apparent ageing of farmers on the one hand, and farm size decline on the other, is also evident across the Southeast Asian region.
The government and many agricultural economists see these trends as problematic. Elderly farmers, it is assumed, are less amenable to adopting new technology and, as a generation, are putting the brakes on the modernisation of the farm sector, the vitality of Thailand's agriculture, and in the long term threatening national food security.
These are major accusations to lay at the door of the "backbone" of the Thai nation. Two questions arise. First, does the ageing small farmer narrative accurately capture what is occurring? And, second, if it does, why do we not see generational renewal in the farm sector?
For the last three years we have worked in three villages across three provinces in Nakhon Ratchasima, Khon Kaen and Bung Kan in the Northeast. At first glance, the characteristics of the members of the 210 farm households we surveyed appear to chime with the national ageing small farmer narrative. The average age of farming adults was 52 years, and of farming household heads it was 60 years. We expected, then, that these data would lead us to tell a story of rural stagnation and loss of agricultural productivity, perhaps echoing the sentiments in Gen Prayut's poem.
The longer we talked to our respondent households, however, the more it became clear that not only is the "problem" of the ageing smallholder not as problematic as it is often presented, but the very basis of the problem -- that farmers are ageing, driven by the migration of the young -- is also not quite as it seems.
The elderly were neither stubbornly retaining their land rather than passing it on to their children, nor were they, usually, working solo. The challenge for a researcher is that the categories we use -- namely, farmer and non-farmer -- do not reflect the realities of rural work and living.
Take Suk Watthana. She is a 75-year-old widow, household head and farm manager with nine rai of rice land registered in her name. On paper, she is just the sort of ageing farmer seen as problematic by many policy makers.
But Ms Suk is not alone in her agricultural endeavours. A divorced son and a widowed daughter help on the farm as do her grandchildren. However, as Ms Suk stressed, she has to lead the way in the matter of farming. She explained: "These two kids of mine work in factories. They go to work in the factories as usual but also work on the farm in the rice farming season. They take days off from work to farm rice when it's needed. Any survey would count them as factory workers, not as farmers; yet they clearly are contributing to farming."
To understand why farm households so often perform this complex choreography of work across space, sectors and generations, especially in a context when most farms are too small to make a decent living, we need to understand how farm and non-farm intersect. When we asked Ms Suk why she didn't just sell her land, given that her children have full-time, non-farm work she replied: "If I sold my rice land, where would we get our food from? At least if we farm rice we still have rice to eat."
She said she has seen people who sold their farm land. None of them can get their farmland back. "No matter how many rai we have now, it's our parents' land and I won't sell it," she said.
This response highlights that many of the small holdings in our three villages, too small to sustain a living, are being cultivated as subsistence or semi-subsistence farms. Elderly farmers are growing rice to feed their families, and not for sale.
Applying a productivist logic to farms where profit and loss are not centrally at issue is not terribly revealing. When we asked Dao Chitchop, with 10 rai of land, why she continued to farm, after she had regaled us with rising costs, declining yields and uncertain rains, replying: "So we don't have to buy food! We want to have a store of rice to eat and secure our food needs. If we have to buy just one kilogramme of rice it's gone so quickly and if one day we don't have any money, where would we find our food? But if we have a granary full of paddy, we feel comfortable and have peace of mind."
The surprise of subsistence farming by elderly villagers becomes understandable when we view farming in the context of diverse household livelihoods. It is because some household members are working away from home in factory work and other occupations that others can stay behind and engage in subsistence farm work. There is a complex inter-locking of work, production, reproduction and redistribution and farming -- why and how it occurs -- has to be seen in the round, not in isolation.
This still does not, however, fully explain why ageing farmers do not sell their small holdings and give up farming altogether. After all, this is what happened in other countries as they industrialised. Once more there is no single answer to this question, but hidden behind the ageing farmer narrative lurks the precariousness of much non-farm work. As 74-year-old Thom Boonklang said: "Selling your farm is like cutting off your hands and your feet. Even though you might not get a job [at least] you still have rice to eat."
The elderly who stay on the land rarely have access to savings, social security or a pension sufficient to meet their needs; and younger household members who work away from home are always at risk of losing their job such is the precariousness of working in the modern economy. The livelihoods that gradually came into view as our study progressed revealed not ageing farmers stubbornly holding onto their land, thus preventing the modernisation of the agriculture, but households struggling to build secure livelihoods against the inherited vulnerabilities of farming, a thinly woven social safety net, and the precariousness of much non-farm work.
Monchai Phongsiri and Mattara Sripun are researchers at Khon Kaen University; Jonathan Rigg is based at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute; and Albert Salamanca is a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute (Asia), in Bangkok.