[P2P-F] Local currency+Thailand and Self-Sufficiency

[michael gurstein]

A story...

A number of years ago I was doing some field research for economic
development in South West Nova Scotia.. a very rural and low income part of
the country (then and to a degree now...

I had in hand the income figures for the communities and they indicated that
most of the rural families had incomes at or below the poverty level
definitions at the time (as I recall around $20K per year...

But as I was travelling around administering my q'aire to people concerning
their skills and looking for possibilities for economic development I began
to notice something quite peculiar, that is that most of the people seemed
extremely busy and not very interested in "economic development" as we were
defining it AND that there were an awful lot of new pick up trucks,
substantial and very well maintained and comfortable houses and virtually no
signs of rural poverty. (Also, as an aside this was some 40 years ago rather
before the advent of certain modern types of income supplementation through
substance importation and sale... 

So, I decided to probe a bit deeper and started interviewing people on their
activities (and not just having them fill in the pre-formed q'aire). What
began to emerge was a quite different picture of the local economy...

If I included in family income statistics the money that they didn't have to
spend on store bought produce (they all had very extensive home gardens) and
purchase of service for home and car maintainence (everyone had a brother in
law or cousin who did roofing, plastering, simple plumbing, car mechanics
etc. and these services were freely exchanged within families) things began
to change quite considerably.  If one added in the informal barter for fish
and the fact that most of the families had a license to kill one moose for
food a year (a thousand pounds of meat @ the then equivalent of say $4/lb.)
then, rather than having incomes below the poverty line these folks had
"incomes" roughly the equivalent of wage labourers in the city.  If one
further added in the fact that these folks lived on land owned for
generations within the same family i.e. didn't have to pay either mortgages
or rent it turned out these folks could be seen as actually being in the top
quintile of "income" earners and the new pick-ups, vacations in Florida, and
continuing home reno's (participation in what King Bhumibol Adulyade calls
the "capitalist economy") were really quite intelligible.  

I think that translating these kinds of phenomena into more modern urban
life is difficult but not impossible and likely, as I argued in that
blogpost I pointed to yesterday, can be considerably enabled by ICTs and
only possible where the "non-capitalist" economy is facilitated by some sort
of alternative medium of exchange (given that you don't have the opportunity
for the implicit intra-community and inter-generational barter systems that
you have in rural communities such as in SW Nova and rural Thailand).

Best to all for the season.