My Journey
In the packaged grains aisle, we find the reason for our visit: three one-pound boxes of fair trade rice. Through my new eyes, the bright boxes produce a “so-this-is-what-it-looks-like” epiphany mixed with a great sense of pride because behind the fair trade label is a product that took months to cultivate and years to gain a spot on supermarket shelves. The grains are also the reason Kanya, Arat, and Pahkphum find themselves in such unfamiliar surroundings. This trip to the supermarket is part of a three-week tour of the U.S.—designed to raise awareness about both the injustices of global trade and the alternatives of fair trade and organic production. I first tasted fair trade organic Jasmine rice in Thailand while living with Pahkphum in Surin, a province near the Cambodian border. I was finishing up a study abroad program in northeastern Thailand that focused on international development. Most of the villagers I spoke to during the semester relied on agriculture as a source of livelihood; it’s an occupation that employs half of Thailand’s labor force and one-third of the world’s population. In each community I visited, people were fighting different things—a dam, a mine, pollution—yet they all shared one hardship: they were in debt and losing their rice farms. Although Thailand is the world’s largest rice exporter, in 2004, 68 percent of landholders in the rice-growing region were in debt due to increases in the costs of chemical farming and decreases in rice prices. Often in debt up to three times their average annual agricultural income, farmers have migrated to overcrowded cities to work in sweatshops, the sex industry, and construction. As a result, rural communities have deteriorated. To learn more about the realities facing Thai rice farmers, I harvested rice beside Pahkphum for a week. I repeated a grab-wrap-cut motion with a sickle each day until the sky turned purple. Determined to experience Pahkphum’s livelihood as best I could, I continually refused to take a break even though my back radiated with pain from the hunched harvesting posture and my head pulsed from the heat. The crisp chit-chit-chit of breaking rice stalks was continuously disrupted by my questions aimed at understanding how his tiny village had managed to develop and maintain an agricultural way of life. For, from the moment I arrived, I noticed a startling difference between this village and the others I had lived in. I quickly learned that Pahkphum had stopped worrying about losing his ancestors’ land because he is one of 7,500 families in Thailand currently selling fair trade organic rice through a farmers’ cooperative. The cooperative owns its own rice mill, which ended Pahkphum’s reliance on middlemen who paid below-market prices for his harvest. Receiving the fair trade price for his rice allowed Pahkphum to transition to organic farming while workshops offered by the cooperative helped him learn the sustainable techniques once used by his ancestors. Sustainable farming then raised his standard of living by increasing his self-sufficiency. It also cut out the costs of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (which rose each year as his soil degraded), as well as the medical costs associated with spraying pesticides. During my week living with Pahkphum, I followed him diligently. I toured the rice mill, where a woman proudly showed me the sorting and packaging process. I attended a community meeting where the farmers set their rice price, enforced organic standards, and discussed how to apportion their yearly dividends and community savings fund. Each new experience fueled me with questions for our time together in the rice field. With each answer, Pahkphum chiseled away at my ignorance. As much as he talked about the logistics of farming, he also talked about topics I initially assumed were beyond the comprehension of a man with a grade-school education. We found interesting ways to overcome our language barrier while discussing the World Trade Organization, subsidized U.S. agribusiness, and current negotiations under the Thai-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA). With body gestures and stick figure drawings, Pahkphum helped me understand that the Thai-U.S. FTA threatens to increase importation of products from the U.S. that sell at artificially low prices. These goods can sell at such cheap prices because of the subsidies the U.S. pays out to support its agricultural sector, which valued $113 billion for agricultural commodities from 1995-2003. Thai farmers simply can’t compete against this special advantage. So as heavily subsidized goods flood into their markets, more Thai farmers are pushed off their land and into debt. Pahkphum also told me that Thai farmers oppose the intellectual property rights (IPR) package favored by the U.S., which strengthens rules that allow plants, seeds, and animals to be patented by multinational corporations. This IPR system favors technologically advanced countries because, to be eligible for a patent, the plant variety must be altered by specific scientific techniques. Therefore, these rules result in a system where companies profit off of the traditional knowledge and biological resources of other countries without receiving prior approval or sharing benefits. “If we lose Jasmine rice, then we are losing the most important resource of the poor; we’ll lose our livelihood,” Pahkphum stated one evening. The IPR package put forward by the U.S. would weaken Thailand’s ability to protect its most prized plant and seed varieties, including Jasmine rice, he said.
In this scene, I see the reason I work to expand fair trade: to create a system that respects both farmers and consumers and in which a village like Pahkphum’s is not an exception, but the well understood status quo. Ellen Roggemann, Project Coordinator, Engage |
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