Published in Chiangmai City Life Magazine – September 2002

CHIANG MAI, Thailand – 27 June 2002

Re-uniting Lan Na – Part 2

When modern tourism policies and ancient cultures meet, who wins and who loses?  This month, I look at the effects of government-sponsored tourism policies upon the poorest parts of society involved in the tourism industry of Northern Thailand.

Last month examined the effects of various government policies directly affecting northern Thai tourism, including the Social Order Policy, the state airline’s fare-rises, promotion of the southern and eastern islands by the Tourism Authority, and official dual pricing policies at National Parks and other attractions.  (The latter also received attention, from Bangkok Post columnist “Gor”, concerned about a Padaung village in Chiang Rai Province; foreigners 250 Baht entrance, Thais free).

Last month also introduced considerations such as town & city planning, and the development of major historic sites.  What effect are these and other policies having on the underclasses of Thai citizens whose income opportunities come from tourism and it’s entertainment locations?

Decades ago, HM King Bhumipol realised that there were crops more profitable to the growers than opium.  Beginning with, “Small peaches are expensive and bigger ones more expensive”, the Royal Projects encouraged the Hill Tribe peoples to change their agriculture from opium to other cash crops.  To date, the success rate has been impressive, but now it may be under threat from current government policies in Thailand.  Hill Tribe income growth, of the last twenty years, may be reversing through an over-reliance on the sustainability of tourism.  For the Tai Hill Tribe peoples there is uncertainty coming from ongoing tourism successes.

A CMU Business Administration student’s report in 2001 cited increased exposure to foreigners for the evacuation of young women from the Hill People’s villages.  These women lured by the high spending of tourist “trekkers” enter cities in the hope of improving their families’ incomes.  Some unfortunately enter work in bars and brothels, gaining exposure to drugs, prostitution, and ultimately HIV/AIDS.  Those infected usually return to their villages to deteriorate and die.  There, often unrecorded as infected, they pass infection to husbands or other sexual contacts.

City lifestyles give access to knowledge they would otherwise not have, and a few remote villagers have learned both the ease of production of, and demand for, metamphetamines.  This in turn makes some villagers re-evaluate the drug vs. agriculture economic models.

Most of the women can only secure city work in menial jobs as housekeepers, office cleaners, and retail or catering assistants.  Many young men entering the cities find themselves in low paid work as security guards and similar occupations.  Poor levels of in-village education apparently limit their options to bypass prejudice from their lowland country folk.

Some highland villages, valued for easy access by ten-seat tourist minibuses, have changed economic productivity from subsistence and cash crop farming, to using traditional handicrafts for souvenir production and sales.  These “living zoos”, now crowded with thatched roadside huts, sell everything from embroidered items to silverware and city-manufactured “lacquerware” and dolls.

Some villages are so dependent on the tourist dollar that there is now little other activity in them, and no longer demonstrating traditional lifestyles, they experience falling visitor numbers.  Many of these villages are becoming reliant on supplying women to the cities, not as prostitutes or domestic staff, but as tourist “attractions” in themselves.  This is most noticeable amongst the Akha and Lisu peoples.

Within Chiangmai’s tourist areas, most especially the night bazaar, shoppers constantly receive items for sale in their faces, usually from the stallholders.  Away from that area, women dressed in traditional Hill Tribe clothing plea for their money by selling silverware and trinkets of the type Captain Cook offered Pacific Islanders centuries ago.

In competition with these silent and charming (usually older) ladies are very young, precocious, and demanding pre-teenagers selling flowers from chair to chair in the city’s many bars and restaurants.  These children used to be seen from dusk to dawn in the nightlife zones, as did their traditionally dressed elders, but no longer.  The primary effect of the Social Order Policy has been the early closing of their “salerooms”.

Further north, at Sop Ruak on the banks of the Mekong River, in the heart of Thailand’s Golden Triangle region, young children skip school and dress in tribal costumes to pose for, and with, camera toting tourists – the gratuity they demand is compulsory foreign tourists are told by their State-licensed tour guides.  Here, you can buy anything you’ll find in the cities’ ethnic markets and night bazaars; sometimes cheaper, sometimes not.

Visit Sop Ruak twice a year, in November and June, and you’d think it was two different towns.  During the tourist low season, it’s almost a ghost town.  In the high season at midday, it’s busier than a crowded night at Chiang Mai’s Night Bazaar.  The real difference is that along the Mekhong, a higher percentage of stallholders are genuinely mountain villagers.

One group not selling, but looking for charitable handouts, are the beggar women.  Allegedly sharing or renting a baby (opinion is still divided and proof scant), they dress shabbily in Hill Tribe style clothing, and frequently carry sub-two-year-old babies, to walk around the bars begging.  Members of Chiang Mai’s Hash House Harriers claim to have exposed the “baby-rental” system by “stamping” the sole of the children’s feet and “mothers’” hands with harmless and indelible ink over several nights, using various shaped stamps.  They found each baby appearing on the backs of several different women each night.

Various amputees, and other disabled persons, also beg for charity around the restaurants and bars.  Particularly frustrating to expatriates, these individuals (including the “blind”) never request help from Thai nationals, only from white-foreigners; another dual standard that is discouraging returnee tourists if overheard comments are to be believed.

Quick judgements, about some of the people who beg, should be avoided.  Several instances of true hardship have surfaced recently.  One involves a family of Burmese refugees – mother plus several children, the father executed in a village clearance – genuinely starving and seeking any assistance at all.  They were easily identified as non-Thai by their willingness to do any type of work in repayment for assistance.  A long-term expatriate took them to Chiang Mai’s Burmese temple and their story, later verified, leaves me hoping they survive.

For most people in these groups, the nightlife is their office, and their sole income.  They are rarely heard to speak with foreigners.  Instead, using smiles and hand signals they indicate their wishes.  Arriving and departing in a resigned silence, often the only word said is, “hello”, which for many, is their non-native language vocabulary.  Many, if not all, have little formal education and may not even speak Thai let alone English.  For this reason, use of the universal smile and hand gestures dominate their “international trading”.

Also affecting northern tourism is dual pricing for national parks, waterfalls, and temples.  When tour operators fought the US$5 (200 Baht) entrance fee to Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, were they considering Hill Tribe souvenir vendors at the temple steps, or those higher up at Doi Pui?  How could entry fees affect them?

The March 2002 monitoring of the Doi Suthep waterfall, and the 16 foreign motorcyclists who rode away without entering is a strong case.  All of them arrived from downhill and returned the same way – they didn’t visit the temple, Royal Palace, or Hmong village on the mountain.

Did Thai Domestic’s 20% airfare increases (last year) affect arrivals in the northern provinces?  Whilst it is possible they did not affect foreign tourists travelling between Bangkok and Chiang Mai or Chiang Rai, I am convinced smaller, local-airport towns did suffer.  Chiangmai to Mae Hong Song, or Nan, was less than 500 Baht, but rose to over 1,200 Baht (= 20% increase as publicised?).  Now that Thai have dropped all northern local routes, and the private airlines have raised prices again – were the pundits correct?  (See last month).

With decreased foreigners arriving into, and moving around, the north of Thailand, the Hill Tribe villages are receiving lower rates of income from sales made directly to visitors.  The increasing reliance on non-Thai, Asian tourists, and family groups of all nationalities, shifts the visitor types.  In both sets, spending at village souvenir stalls decreases, as the former may have home country exposure to the handicrafts offered, and families usually have a tighter budget than individuals or couples.

In these mountain villages, profitable options for returning to agriculture look slim.

A year 2001 Masters Degree Thesis, by Suwattana Khuankham of CMU Faculty of Agriculture, examined the plight of northern strawberry agriculturists in detail.  Strawberries are a high value temperate crop, non-indigenous to Thailand, and earning potentials should be high.  Comparing incomes and profits between Royal Project Hill Tribe farmers, and lowland free-market Thai farmers, massive disparities were found.

Based on a 1998 economic survey, upland growers averaged 15,010 Baht (US$ 375 approx.) profit income per annum per family farm, whilst the lowland Thais achieved 119,943 Baht (US$ 3,000 approx.).

The thesis offered explanations including plant variety, storage and transport, etc. but the data intimated there should not be a greater than six-fold disparity because of these.

The inefficiency, it was revealed, lies in the marketing systems of the Royal Projects, which was admitted by HSH Prince Bhisatej Rajani, and discussed at the Year 2000 International Symposium for Agri-business Management (ISAM) held in Chiang Mai, hosted by CMU, and attended by ASEAN and worldwide delegates.  The Royal Projects are now trying to address this problem with strategic marketing partnerships and increased branding awareness.

Government policy therefore appears to be failing the ethnic-minority Hill Tribes of northern and western Thailand on every economic front.  Whether redirecting tourists southward, or potentially discouraging visitors from coming, less and less “new blood” is arriving in the non-Asian visitors’ ranks.

Now, the Asia-hardened, western, returnee tourists, and expatriates, supplemented by foreign Asian tourists, refuse the advances and begging hands of minority womenfolk working around urban entertainment areas.  That makes their role as breadwinners tougher still, and appears to be leading to increased numbers of child beggars and vendors, or worse – increasing child-prostitution.

Additionally, direct governmental intervention still affects huge numbers of Hill Tribe people.  Whether by forced relocation of thousands of Hmong, (Bangkok Post early May 2002), or enforced adoption of the Thai language in village schools to dilute cultural inheritance uptake, or simply the slow delivery of ID cards restricting travel and employment for villagers.  This year, several hundred thousand could be deported to Myanmar.

If twenty years ago, the founder of the Royal Projects recognised that opium production could only be reduced, or stopped, by providing an alternative income, why is today’s government strangling the current incomes of those people who abandoned the poppy fields?  Is there an agenda, hidden, yet tied to the increasing frequency of turbulence along the disputed border with Thailand’s western neighbour?

Grumbling in the hills by the men-folks, unable to suitably provide for their families through commercial agriculture, may indicate why the Royal Thai Police and their military colleagues seize and arrest ever-increasing numbers of drugs and traffickers.

How much suppression and diversion of northern tourism will it take before these voiceless people reluctantly turn en-masse to opium agri-business, or its amphetamine-based successor?  How long before they begin willingly collaborating with government backed drug lords in Myanmar?  Will mass deportations and splitting of family groups open new cross-border business relationships in that trade?

If that should happen, will the former Kingdom of Lan Na, today divided by modern national boundaries, become united again as an underground nation in the Golden Quadrangle of Narcotics?

If so, the new tourism promotion phrase for the region could be, “Lan Na – Four Countries on One Trip”.

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The Reuniting Lanna Series
Part 1 – A New Social Order
Part 2 – Voiceless in the Night
Part 3 – Missed Tourism Opportunities
Part 4 – Fair Shares?