1 Inaugural address by Mr Pakdee Ratanapon, Deputy Governor, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand
2 Welcome address by Dr Prem Nath, Assistant Director General and Regional Representative, FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific
3 Keynote address by Dr Anek Nakhabutr, Director, Social Investment Fund, Royal Thai Government, Bangkok
Mr Assistant Director General, Regional Representative for Asia and the Pacific, FAO, distinguished delegates, honourable guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is a privilege for me to officially inaugurate this important regional workshop on "Decentralized Rural Development and the Role of Self Help Organizations". I wish also to express a sincere welcome from the people of Chiang Mai to each and every one of you. I expect that some of you have heard of Chiang Mai while others may have not. Accordingly, please permit me to acquaint you with our province and our city, both of which share the same name. Ours is an old city with a proud history dating back some 700 years.
The most important asset of Chiang Mai is the hospitality of our people, their polite manner and their speech, well known throughout Thailand. Our economy is mainly based on agriculture, field crops and fruit orchards, livestock and forestry. Chiang Mai celebrates an annual festival that happens to be taking place tonight, so you can enjoy it. Loy kratong is our festival of placing floral offerings on our waterways. It is one of the main festivals of Thailand's cultural tradition, and Chiang Mai is famous for it. Thousands of people come here to celebrate because it is very special here. I invite you to try floating a kratong tonight on the river. During your stay here in Chiang Mai you can also enjoy various other activities of both agricultural and general cultural interest.
Mr Assistant Director General, delegates and guests. We are honoured that Chiang Mai has been selected for this workshop. I believe that in your deliberations you will make progress toward your goal of developing effective mechanisms to help our entire region. We need such a workshop and collaboration within the region to enhance decentralization and to development specific aims and objectives. If you need any assistance, please do not hesitate to let us know; I wish your stay here will be both pleasurable and memorable. May I also wish you safe journeys back home and I hope you will come again to Chiang Mai. I now declare the session open. Thank you ladies and gentlemen.
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
I am pleased to welcome you all to the Regional Workshop on "Decentralized Rural Development and the Role of Self help Organizations". I would like to thank Mr Pakdee Ratanapon, Deputy Governor of Chiang Mai, for so kindly accepting the FAO invitation to inaugurate this important event. I also welcome a special guest, Mr Anek Nakhabutr, Director of the Social Investment Fund, who has consented to deliver the Keynote Address, sharing with us experiences and lessons of the Social Investment Fund of the Royal Thai Government.
I express my sincere thanks to each of the distinguished participants from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam for participating and contributing to the deliberations of this workshop. I appreciate the support of the Ford Foundation, and our United Nations colleagues from ESCAP and ILO, the Asian Productivity Organization and the SDA Division at FAO Headquarters, Rome for their support to this FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP) Rural Development activity.
This meeting takes place amid a major economic crisis in which affects large sectors of the population both in rural and in urban areas in Asia, in particular the poor, those who are food insecure. The Food and Agriculture Organization has a mandate, historically based on very similar crisis circumstances in Europe during and after the Second World War, to assist member countries with advice and technical support to overcome food insecurity within their populations. Once again in this region, malnutrition and hunger are on the rise, mainly due to poverty, affecting three-fourths of the rural population, most of whom are children and women. Figures suggest that one of every five persons in the developing countries is chronically undernourished. An undeniable fact is that 74 of the poor in the developing world are living in this region, mainly concentrated in rural areas. A second fact is that, in most Asian countries, 50 of the rural population depends upon income generated in the agricultural sector.
Agricultural and rural development must be given high priority in national development policies and programmes aimed at elimanating food insecurity and rural poverty. These facts are being given fresh attention by policy makers both at country and regional levels. In this decade, the role of the public sector in solving such development problems has changed fundamentally, based on the hard lessons of both the high cost and limited impact on poverty and social inequity of public sector programmes at community and household levels. It has been realized that the "top down approach" in planning and implementing development activities mainly through national public agencies has been much less effective in poverty alleviation than the "bottom up approach" largely conducted by non-governmental organizations and self help local groups and organizations at community level.
Such issues in development planning are somewhat different in agricultural development, but a new thinking of farmer-needs and demand-driven agricultural research, the delivery of production services, and extension and education activities, emphasizes the importance of rural self help organizations, particularly those that represent local rural producers and specialized NGOs servicing them. Recent developments in terms of institutional frameworks to support local good governance and legislation make it increasingly important to assure the participation of local people, their associations and their organizations in decision-making for rural development.
This workshop was organized by FAO to join partners and stakeholders in development - such as government and United Nations agencies, NGOs, researchers and academicians - to deliberate on the role of self help organizations in the decentralized institutions for rural development, poverty alleviation and food security in countries of the Asia Pacific region.
This event is a follow-up of the Joint FAO-UNCDF-IFAD-GTZ-SDC and World Bank Technical Consultation on Decentralization held at FAO Headquarters, Rome in December 1997, and is aimed at providing an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms promoting local peoples participation in decentralized institutions for rural development in the Asia Pacific region.
The key outcome of the regional workshop is expected to establish strategic partnerships for possible technical collaboration in research, assistance in policy formulation, programme design and implementation, and in strengthening the capacity of local people's organizations (POs).
In addition, case studies from participating countries and information materials from other relevant agencies document the issue. Such contributions from the ten participating countries of the region will feed into the development of an Electronic Guidebook on Decentralization jointly undertaken by FAO and the World Bank.
I am confident that your deliberations will bring forth a wealth of information and ideas on decentralization and local governance in the region, which will contribute to follow-up action at country level. I hope that the following three days provide an opportunity for strategic partnership building and collaborations for formulation of policies, programme design and implementation and most importantly for the strengthening of local peoples capacities through promotion of peoples organizations at the community level.
Once again, I welcome you all to the Regional Workshop on Decentralization and the Role of Self help Organizations and to Thailand. I wish you positive and fruitful deliberations. If there is any way that I or my colleagues from the FAO Regional Office can assist you during your stay in Thailand, please feel free to approach us.
Thank you.
I will outline the present financial crisis and how we became common stakeholders, victims of the situation and how we can move our people - particularly at the grass-roots level - to safer and more secure livelihood systems. I think we are in a very critical crisis period in Thailand. I call it not only an economic crisis but a political, social and cultural crisis; it is not just a financial crisis. I am not an academic but I will try to synthesize and challenge myself and you as to how we can understand the situation that we are now facing. This is the issue that I will address, which, in fact, is common in South East Asia: Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. I will focus on these because I have found that Thailand's rural community is now affected and dominated by the so-called global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the global economy.
The second issue I will address is that we must rethink ourselves. So I will lead us first toward rethinking ourselves - no matter who we are, where we are, and how we are going to work - in relation with those at the grass-roots level. We need to reposition ourselves. Second, we need to reposition our paradigm, our management, our organization and ability to work at the grass-roots level. We must challenge and reorganize our systems so that we are not dominated by government systems. Self help groups have become more active and are spreading into cultural, political and bureaucratic spheres. Now Thailand has a five-year plan. We have focused on shifting from economic growth centres and macro economic centres to a people-centred approach. Again, we put human rights and development in Thailand as a strategy and plan. Again I say that we are facing many challenges as we try to shift our focus to more human-oriented development.
After the mid-1997 currency crisis regarding the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Thai baht, we faced a social crisis as a consequence. I will discuss the latter and outline the strategy that we have developed so far in Thailand, so that we can learn, share and debate, and - if possible - compare ourselves to other countries. Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines have the same financial crisis in common with the region. There are some trends that represent a common turning point where we can see opportunity, and where we can see our constraints in terms of grass-roots responses.
First, we see here in Chiang Mai how the economic downturn affects tourism. The economic crisis affects our exports, so it affects grass-roots people in this country. The economic downturn is a situation affecting our export potential. Now, many people are being laid off and need to return to the rural sector, because of the global and regional economic crisis. Might I mention deliberations of the last G-7 summit. They tried to focus on new trends, on good governance and governmental transparency in developing countries such as ours. But to me they were first, talking about how to be more transparent among themselves; then how to restructure and reform their global institutions and financial sectors; and then how to provide their financial inputs into the Asian region where we are facing financial crisis. They are talking about how to allocate more money to IMF and World Bank model in order to support these countries and alleviate poverty at the grass roots.
This is an opportunity as well as a challenge. We should know how to cooperate with the big seven power centres. In Thailand, the World Bank supports our projects. But we need to build our social capital and our social strength to work with the World Bank. In any case, we talk a lot to the World Bank but we have to have our own social capital as we manage our own social system. We must not rely on the money system alone, but we recognize that the world economy affects our rural sector which is now part of the free market all over the world. That is why our rural economic sector has changed so rapidly. The same media in Bangkok is found throughout Thailand. We have e-mail systems in Thailand's business, some government and in in the NGO sectors. It has been said that in the near future in Asia this electronic marketing will be even more pervasion through satellite communication. This is the turning point. This situation may affect our rural people directly and indirectly. We have a common economic crisis. That is why World Bank and IMF intervened in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and other countries.
Secondly, political parties in Asia are now under stress. They are forced by the crisis to become more transparent, to become more open, to monitor corruption, as is the case in Thailand. Autocratic leadership as in Malaysia and Indonesia is under attack. Thailand is stable for now. The political leadership must cope with the crisis. Now we have a new movement in Asia - so-called participatory democracy. Self help groups, civic groups and economic groups are seeking their civic rights, human rights, women's right to recognize themselves towards their own development. This is the emerging trend, I believe, in Malaysia and Philippines, and more widely in Asia. It affects our grass roots in Asia - yet we are dominated by so-called government systems, our political systems. This affects our rural sector or grass-roots democracy. In these countries in Asia, we are now facing how to adjust to survive this crisis with the help of the IMF and World Bank. But I find here in Thailand people want to reform the crisis by themselves - I call it self-reform. This is the trend in many countries. In Thailand this trend has come from rural self help groups, but they do not talk about democracy - they talk about their own destiny to manage the forest, the right to manage production their own food, their occupations, their local governance, etc. So people request the right to comment, reform and practice for themselves this so-called development. But the point is that social self-reforms and economic adjustments are occurring in parallel. In Thailand, we are just trying to survive. In the Northeast we are facing drought, poverty and emotional reactions. There are poor people all over Thailand.
My third point relates to Thailand now. Our current social reform strategy was initiated by NGOs in cooperation with government agencies resulting in the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB). I have been involved for four or five years. We asked the NESDB to "mirror" the country's five-year plans from the perspective of the poor so there is one from the bottom up as well as from the top down. So for the first time in Thailand we have two processes - top-down planning and participatory planning. Hence, NGOs help strengthen our five-year plans. As a consequence, people-centred development became the principal and spirit of the NESDB plan. We now have this plan as a turning point. The second turning point was last year when, as a consequence, people experienced a plan that could be addressed, advocated, determined and delivered by themselves, no matter who they were: grass roots, middle class, white collar academicians, mass media or civil society. This was the first constitution in Thailand in which grass-roots people can articulate their problems - so we asked the lawyers to interpret the legal language. This was the turning point for us.
We are talking about human rights, community rights, women's rights and children's rights in development. We need to protect ourselves not only from international control but also from national control. So we put this into consideration: do we have the right to protect ourselves as a nation? We put it in our master plan here, but yet in general, among the middle class and grass-roots people, we need to wait to learn the process to become alert and active. It is our turning point. Last year our middle class made more money than before the crisis, but now I find in post-crisis Thailand that everyone speaks the same language - how to solve the crisis together for the grass roots and for the poor. In Thailand, the middle class is emerging as a civil society. I mention this because it is our social capital. The international community should know that though we are facing a financial crisis, we are not broken on our social front - at national and grass-roots levels. How to mobilize our people and use them as our capital to return to the pre-crisis period in terms of social transformation is the critical challenge.
When we speak of people-centred development as our focal point, national strategy, five-year plan, grass root action, and the like, people-centred development has deeply influenced our social reform programme by using World Bank money to activate and not wait for government to act. We want to tackle our social crisis. We utilize, mobilize and cope with the crisis. We do not see the crisis as a threat but we see it as an opportunity to use our capability: our brain and our body. We are networking and mobilizing people more and more through this crisis. The micro-economic reform gets low priority among national plans. So we are now focusing on people-oriented action to empower them. The northern Thai and our ethnic populations have the right to live in and with the forest. So we are trying to work on human rights with development work in this area.
I find that very few people understand the complexity and dimensions of this crisis. Social investment funds are needed, and this may not be the same as understood by World Bank. We do not focus on infrastructure construction, whereas the World Bank does. So we must have a social investment fund in collaboration with government agencies. First, we would like to restore the social capital we believe exists in our nation - and in our local communities - to use to strengthen our values, traditions and organizations such as self help groups, NGOs, women's groups, civic and third sector groups. That is why we are seeking how to apply social process to crisis management by not asking money from World Bank, but by working together as a community. Informal sectors do not play great roles when compared to formal sectors. It is time we promoted the informal sector to play a major role to overcome our crisis. Finally, it is necessary to restore diversity and pluralities to our social capital.
Urban and rural sectors should be linked to work together. We must build up the social infrastructure. We should promote self help group and community based groups to manage themselves. Social funds are interested in having networks among the groups to plan and overcome the crisis, which can be solved, together at the local level.
