Boom stirs backlash among rural poor
A protest by poor rural folk outside Bangkok's Parliament building was a symptom of their mounting frustration at being sidelined or demeaned by Thailand's economic boom.
The 6,000 farmers and landless poor living in a makeshift tent city have vowed not to move until the Prime Minister, Banharn Silpa-archa, himself promises to ease their suffering.
Nitirat Subsomboon, an adviser to the Forum for the Poor, said: 'We are sick of being fobbed off. All that ever happens is that politicians make promises, form a committee and forget about us. It won't do any more.' Working with World Bank projections, analysts at The Economist magazine calculated late last year that Thailand's economic boom could give it the World's eighth biggest economy by the year 2020 - bigger than France, Britain, Brazil or Russia.
Yet the boom is remarkably and perhaps dangerously lopsided, because it has left many people outside the cities struggling to keep up.
In 1981, the top 10 per cent of households earned 17 times as much as the bottom 10 per cent. A decade later - after the boom had moved into an even higher gear in the late 1980s - the multiple was 38 times.
The Thai Farmers Bank showed this week that people in Samut Prakan province, near Bangkok, were expected to earn, on average, more than 31 times what their compatriots in the poor northeast province of Si Sa Ket will during the Government's next five-year development plan for 1997-2001.
Between 1981 and 1986 the rich area's average earnings were 11 times more than the poor district's.
Duang, a farmer in his mid-40s, said he was sitting outside Parliament because he had been ejected from his family home to make way for 'a rich man's' plantation.
'All the Government has cared about is growth - it doesn't care what it has done to poor people like me,' he said.
The good-natured crowd which gathered in the capital on Sunday heard speakers describing how three decades of promoting farm expansion stripped away forests that used to provide a bare living for many.
A decade of industrialisation has added severe pollution to their woes.
An education system that left many rural children barely able to read and write has left much of the workforce stranded now that factories want more than cheap labour from their employees.
