Northern Thailand

View westward across the mountain ridges into the headwaters of the Irrawaddy drainage and Myanmar in the far distance. As recently as fifty years ago this was virtually trackless "Golden Triangle" country across which different Hill Tribe groups moved freely, cultivating the opium poppy, maize, hill rice, and a wide variety of lesser crops. The period of forest fallow after burning and cropping was often as long as twenty years or more. Rapid population growth after about 1950 progressively suppressed the period of fallow required for forest regeneration causing the spread of Imperata grassland and a host of related problems. Many of the assumed cause-and-effect processes leading to deforestation and downstream damage were not based on solid evidence. Ethnic prejudice fueled concern about the perceived environmental degradation and influenced the application of policies that were sometimes repressive and often ineffective. Today the problems are much better understood although there are no simple solutions.

 This Lisu lady is carrying a basket of hard won produce from her swidden field. She chews betel nuts for solace since subsistence work is extremely burdensome. I met her on three different visits and each time was graciously presented with a double handful of sunflower seeds, but neither betel nor opium! The Lisu live in the middle altitudes and are slowly being encouraged to grow alternate cash crops to the opium poppy. Their colourful costumes and traditional way-of-life (now rapidly changing) have attracted considerable tourism development. Lisu swidden fields are usually quite small and surrounded by secondary forest growth. While the dominant crop is hill rice, some twenty other edible species are inter-cropped with the rice. The baskets are used for carrying the hand-threshed rice, vegetables, nuts, and other seeds back to the village which may be a kilometre or more distant.
1 The mountains of Northern Thailand merge into those of Myanmar    in the blue evening light (April, 1978)

2  Lisu lady with basket (April, 1978)

 3  Lisu swidden fields and the distant ridges ­– extreme outliers of the Himalaya (April, 1978)  
The traditional Lisu village, in my estimation, is both beautiful and functional. During the hot weeks of April, before the monsoon breaks, the dark interiors are cool and restful. Here I was served a precious delicacy – roasted termites and other morsels unusual to a stray Western intruder, but as tasty as the gift of sunflower seeds. Regrettably, many of these village homes have now been replaced with cinderblock walls and corrugated iron roofs – desperately hot in April and cold and damp during the winter – in the interests of order and modernity. Is this progress? This Karen girl attends to her traditional labours. Her people generally live lower on the mountain slopes than their Lisu neighbours, while the Hmong occupy the highest reaches. The Karen are the largest ethnic minority group in Northern Thailand and have become much more closely integrated into the ethnic Northern Thai ways of life. For decades they have been adapting into a sedentary agricultural pattern. These extensive study plots were set up by Professor Hans Hurni and his co-workers; they support an impressive array of hydro-meteorological instrumentation. They were planted with a range of crops: a poppy/maize cycle, coffee, hill rice, lemon grass, and a variety of other actual and potential crops. We believed that any attempt to replace the opium poppy with alternate cash crops should be preceded by determination of the relative rates of soil loss that each cropping pattern would incur. In practice, we found that conversion to permanent terraced fields, essential if the opium poppy was to be replaced by intensive cultivation, was constrained by labour availability for cutting the terraces. Imported labour to complete such a task merely added to the local population, thereby neutralizing the aim of intensifying agriculture as the very process produced more mouths to be fed.

4  Lisu traditional village of bamboo and thatch (April, 1978)  

5  Karen maiden sewing (April, 1978)  

6  Soil erosion study plots in the middle slopes, Northern Thailand (July, 1981)

     

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