From Farm to Plastic Bag: Papaya Salad Loses Its Locality

Corinne Kisner
Thailand
Every morning at 4 AM, long before her customers are hungry, Matyuree, 46, can be found browsing the markets of Khon Kaen in northeastern Thailand for perfect produce. Wearing a grey t-shirt with the slogan “College girls have all the fun,” Matyuree rattles through her morning shopping list: chili peppers, sugar, lime, MSG, tomato, shredded papaya, fermented fish and tamarinds. When asked what flavor MSG adds, Matyuree smiles from under her white conductor’s cap. “Arroy (delicious)!”

She earns her living selling som tam, a Thai papaya salad traditionally prepared with homegrown vegetables from the family farm. However, most Thais no longer grow papayas and ferment their own fish. Instead, urbanites rely on individuals like Matyuree to put traditional dishes in plastic bags.

This disconnect from meal preparation means that fewer people understand the origins of their food. Consumers may intuitively associate the vendor with production, but few vegetable merchants have a hand in the farming. In fact, the chain from producer to consumer is riddled with middlemen, shifting hundreds of kilograms of papayas and limes.

“I just sit here and make a phone call,” explains a woman in a beach chair at the wholesale market, her voice emerging from a sea of unripe bananas, red chili peppers, and shrink-wrapped papayas. She buys chilies from middlemen for 23 baht per kilo and sells them to market vendors for 25 baht a kilo. Her knowledge of the peppers’ origin is as sparse as the consumer’s.

Another woman wearing Converse sneakers and cuffed jeans perches alone on a blue plastic crate while men drink rice whiskey and gamble behind her. She buys papayas directly from farmers in villages 400 kilometers away. “The soil is bad here for growing papayas,” she notes. She pays drivers 5000 baht (150 USD) roundtrip to deliver papayas, and pays 2000 baht (60 USD) a month to rent her space in the market. For every kilo of papayas she moves, she earns one baht.

Some vendors at the wholesale market are more invested in the produce’s transport path. Lakara, 40, has been selling limes for 21 years, and knows by looking at an unmarked sack of limes where they were grown. Today she sits in a lawn chair wearing a plain white t-shirt and jeans, jotting quick calculations in her notebook. “On a good day, during a festival, I can sell 500 sacks of limes,” she says.

Lakara owns three pickup trucks and hires several drivers to make the 1600 kilometer round trip to collect limes from central Thailand. “I buy directly from several villages,” she says, and her clientele consists of people from all over the Northeast. “I have regular customers, but still, competition from six other lime salesmen is my biggest challenge.”

Although Lakara has only been to the lime farms once, she keeps busy at the wholesale market. “I work from 3 am to 6 pm every day. Selling limes is a big headache.” She smiles at her connection to the som tam sold in restaurants. “I prefer som tam Thai with crab and extra lime.”

Despite the loss in locality of a traditional dish, Matyuree maintains the homemade touch in her restaurant by boiling tamarinds and fermenting fish every morning. She has acquired tricks over the years and never measures the ingredients. “Nobody taught me to make som tam. I learned on my own,” she says. With a reliance on pre-bagged meals, future urban generations may have to teach themselves too.

The Disconnect of Food

Anna Yalouris
Thailand
Thailand is one of the largest global exporters of rice - the staple food for more than half the world’s population. However, less than 50 years into the business of feeding the world, the strain on Thailand’s resources threatens environmental exhaustion and social unrest.

In the late 1960s Thailand’s agricultural production shifted focus from a local to a global market. Thousands of rice specimens were initially examined for hardiness and export versatility before Jasmine 105 was determined the model strand. Jasmine 105, the species that would supply the void in the global export market, would soon be implemented as the new standard grain of production for Thai farmers.

Surin, a province in northeastern Thailand, was once home to thousands of indigenous rice strands, unique to the region. In the great shift to contend in a global market, the people of Surin lost more than just the rice biodiversity of the region. They lost ownership of age-old cultural practices inextricably linked to the indigenous grains of rice. They lost the ability to pass on these practices and gained a culture of mono-cropping, aimed at feeding a global demand.

There are those, like Nok and Than, NGOs at Rice Fund Surin- Organic Agriculture Cooperative, Ltd. who are actively seeking to take back ownership of the food they eat. The Rice Fund was established in 1992 by a Surin Natural Farming Group looking for a market in which they could sell their products and receive fair prices. Many farmers have found themselves in great debt after investing in chemical fertilizers promoted by the government, but as Than explains, money is not the heart and soul of the Rice Fund. “Fair trade is good, but if farmers only hope to get more money from fair trade, it is not enough to strengthen family and community.”

Indeed, strengthening community and promoting self sufficiency is a major pillar of the Rice Fund. Small farmers looking to reconcile traditional farming methods can find a supportive network that now boasts close to 600 member families. This support system helps farmers in the transition back to integrated agriculture and producing for the family, while not leaving the market completely behind.

Nok laments that when farmers gave up their traditional practices of planting a variety of crops in favor of the single, highly exportable Jasmine 105, they gave up a part of their identity. In addition to the loss of specific cultural practices that accompanied certain indigenous strands of rice, a great disconnect has since formed between the consumer and the origin of their food.

Even the organic rice milled at Rice Fund Surin will sometimes travel thousands of miles, to Europe or the USA before it finds a viable market. The fair trade icon marks the package like a right of passage certifying "yes, this is 100 percent organically grown Jasmine rice from Thailand." But, it does not tell the whole story. As Nok explains, “when you see food on the table, you don’t see the struggle of all the farmers who have been oppressed.”

Efforts of NGOs like Nok and Than have help farmers reclaim ownership over the food they produce and have paved the way for an eventual reunion of producer and consumer. But Thailand is not yet there. “Food comes from farmers but farmers now occupy a small role in the background,” says Nok. “Companies own food. Food and nature have been separated in the modern world.”

Send Kovit to America

This short film was made by and for ENGAGErs on behalf of our dear friend, colleague, and mentor Kovit Boonjear.

This film was created as a way for Kovit to communicate with his friends in the States about his potential exchange trip to the US and what it would mean for him and his work in Thailand.

The creators of this film hope that it will inspire ENGAGE members to get involved and strengthen the effort to make this trip possible.

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Kovit Boonjear has been a mentor for the CIEE-Thailand program for many years, serving as a link between students and local people's movements, particularly the urban poor. He is planning to do a study trip to the States to further develop his skills and gain new experiences in his field. He is hoping to work with social activists, grassroots leaders, community organizations,educators, and students to learn more about the movements in the US to bring back and apply to his work in NE Thailand.

World Wetlands Day: A Celebration of Local Knowledge

Vanessa Moll and Stephanie Teatro
Thailand
An old woman surrounded by friends and family sits with her legs slightly apart. Her left arm is hidden inside a light grey, urn-shaped piece of pottery, which she holds between her legs. With her right hand, she uses a long, thin wooden paddle to shape the clay.

On-looking students watch and take notes. They are taking in ancient, local knowledge. For the clay that the woman is shaping is the same type that villagers have gathered for generations from the wetlands surrounding the Mun River.

The students came, “and they received all the local knowledge, like pottery, which is barely seen nowadays,” said Mr. Pradit Norasarn. Mr. Pradit was one of many villagers that came to the Rasi Salai District Office on February 5th for Rasi Salai’s first ever World Wetlands Day celebration.

Globally, World Wetlands Day is celebrated annually to commemorate the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands signed in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran. This convention provides a “framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources.”

At Rasi Salai villagers from Sisaket, Surin, and Ubon Ratchatani provinces joined school children, various NGOs, representatives from community organizations, and local and provincial government officials in order to discuss and celebrate the past, present, and future of the Mun River and its surrounding wetlands.

Villagers living off the Mun River have struggled to hold onto their livelihoods and culture in the face of large-scale development projects, which have often led to drastic changes in the river’s watershed.

“I think this is the first step of the work between the state, the villagers, school, and NGOs to raise awareness of the wetland along the Mun River. Every party got to come and exchange their ideas; children got a chance to come and study outside of class, and adults got to see the activities done by children,” said Sodsai Sangsok from the Network of the Mun River Community.

Villagers in Rasi Salai set up photo galleries with pictures of themselves smiling and holding fish that went from above their waists down to their feet. Other photos caught fishermen in action, casting reed nets twice the length of most human beings. At booths lining the lot outside the District Office, villagers sold and gave away herbal medicines and teas, rice and potatoes, and other vegetables they had gathered in the wetlands; one group taught traditional methods of boiling salt.

In the afternoon, led by students from Rasi Salai Elementary School tooting horns and tapping drums, villagers marched through the city streets, holding banners declaring the crucial role of the wetlands. “Wetland, womb of the Mun River, kidney of the land,” they said.

Organizers of the festival originally anticipated 100-200 people to attend the day’s activities, but Mr. Pradit Kosol, a representative of the Assembly of the Poor in Rasi Salai, smiled proudly and reported that 600-700 people had actually come. “I’m very happy; people are interested in the way of life [in the wetlands],” said Mr. Pradit, “We should continue this every year.”

Mae Thong - Mother, Scavenger, Community Organizer

Dylan Cook
Thailand
At night, before tucking her two boys into bed, Mae (Mother) Thong sits them down for a serious talk. She makes sure they have their homework done and reminds them of the importance of school. She then jumps down on her boys’ bed, a thin mattress on the floor, and smothers them with motherly affection, tossing their hair and ignoring their protests.

Although she only attended formal school until second grade, Mae Thong believes strongly in education. “I don’t know how to read and write,” she says, “but I don’t want my kids to be like me...I tell them to study hard so they won’t have a hard time like their parents.”

Mae Thong has moved in and out of Khambon Village, in the outskirts of Khon Kaen city, since she was seven years old. She followed work to Bangkok twice, before permanently settling next to the village with her new family. Mae Thong is a mother of two, a wonderful cook, and her community’s accountant.

Khambon village flanks a ninety-eight rai landfill twenty kilometers north of Khon Kaen City, a major development center and the heart of Northeast Thailand. The stench in Khambon is potent, overwhelming at times. Rotten food putrefies in mass. Pools of toxic runoff stagnate in outdated drains. An adjacent Danish-built incinerator burns noxious medical waste.

The few hundred community members of Khambon are aware of their situation, aware of the hazardous and unflattering living conditions.

Yet the landfill provides an indispensable livelihood. Khambon villagers are scavengers – informal workers that spend day and night combing the landfill’s refuse for recyclable materials.

In spite of their circumstances, Khambon community members seem happy. Every glance exchanged is accompanied with a wide smile. The smallest joke yields ten-minute romps of laughter.

The scavengers are happy, but not content. Recently the villagers began to organize. They want clean water, social security, and social welfare. They want to be recognized by the government, at least as informal laborers.

“Whether people are rich or poor, they are still people,” says Mae Thong. She, along with three other village leaders, has been working tirelessly for the past few years to focus her community’s energy and strengthen its voice.

Mae Thong is a true community leader. She believes in the power of individuals to confront and overcome the challenges of their present situation. This belief motivates her current activities and renders inspiration in community members.

A constant stream of people flow in and out of Mae Thong’s home. Friends ask advice, repay loans, or come for the good company. She speaks to everyone with an innocent smile on her face and eagerness in her voice. “Maa gin khao,” she shouts to passerbys, inviting them to eat with her.

In the past ten years, Khambon scavenger wages have decreased exponentially, from 800 Baht per day to the current 100 Baht per day wage.

Despite their meager wages and thanks to the “One-Baht-a-Day” program, an emergency fund recently started by Mae Thong, Khombon villagers have saved a staggering seven-thousand Baht in eight months. As of now, thirty-four villagers have joined the program. Members receive financial aid when they are too sick to work, pregnant, or in need of a loan.

Mae Thong and other community leaders have high hopes for the future. Presently, they are working towards a network of scavenging communities in the Khon Kaen area. In the long term, they hope to become part of an international network of scavengers.

Khambon Community, with the help of leaders such as Mae Thong, is fighting for new life. When asked about the future of Khambon, Mae Thong replies with a spark of determination in her eye. “Dii maak! (very good!)”