New Mandala

Not Not The Nation but The Nation itself:

I’m off to have mine checked!

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“You have to first survey and study your land and jot down input and output information such as budget for fertiliser, seeds and labour needed. And then consider the balance between production cost and income.”  To achieve this, Mr Chantee said, thorough study and understanding are essential.
Thanks to the Bangkok Post for this extraordinary sufficiency [...]

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As poor Thais learn more about their rights, demand greater transparency and exhibit less tolerance for privilege-based behavior and extraconstitutional interference in government by the army and other quarters in the elite, the pressure to reconcile the needs of different sections of Thai society will increase.
That tipping point may yet be some years off. Yet [...]

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…Members of the public will be encouraged to join different projects initiated by His Majesty the King, particularly ones involving the philosophy of Sufficiency Economy. The goal is to prevent people from becoming too obsessed with political conflict.
- A quote from Suthep Thaugsuban (Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister with responsibility for security), “I underestimated the red [...]

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We haven’t had much discussion of $ufficiency economy here lately, so I was pleased to see this short article in The Nation:
Govt approves 2nd phase of sufficiency community project.
The government has approved the second phase of the sufficiency community project worth Bt5 billion, Deputy Prime Minister Korbsak Sabhavasu said Thursday. The second phase covers 17,000 [...]

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After SOAS, Giles’s second stop of his tour of major UK campuses to deliver his critique of contemporary Thai politics brought him to Oxford, where he now lives in exile with his wife and son. Around 60 people attended his talk, which I chaired, virtually all of them Thai, some sympathisers and some hostile. Before [...]

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The suffiency message is spreading. Here is a report from the Vientiane Times (27 Jan 2009).
The agriculture-based, self-sufficient nature of the country’s economy will protect Laos from any major fallout from the global financial crisis, according to a senior economics lecturer at the National University of Laos. Vice Dean of the university’s Economics and Business [...]

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A recent report of people killed and injured by fireworks in northern Thailand reminded me to dig out some of the images I have of local fireworks in the northern Thai village of Baan Tiam. For some time (I am not sure how long) firework competitions have become a feature of loi krathong celebrations in Baan Tiam (and, [...]

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We haven’t featured anything on sufficiency economy for a while (at least not since its principle architect was identified by Forbes as the world’s wealthiest royal) so I was very pleased yesterday when a colleague passed me information about a scheme to take sufficiency economy to the world. It’s been organised by the Thai Research [...]

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For about half a century, northern Thailand’s Royal Projects have been a frontier institution transforming the agrarian landscape through various “hill tribe” development schemes. This institution has been established not only through development/humanitarian processes, but also through political processes to the extent that popular (and academic) discourses seem to have been limited to representing the [...]

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