Title:	Agrarian Angst and Rural Resistance in Contemporary Southeast Asia
Authors:	Dominique Caouette and Sarah Turner
Keywords:	Peasants — Political activity — Southeast Asia.
Issue Date:	2009
Publisher:	Routledge
Description:	Perched on the side of an iridescent green rice padi, an ethnic minority Hmong woman from Ta? Va˘n commune in upland northern Vietnam explains what it was like in the ‘old days’ when the collectivization of production was promoted by the country’s socialist state. With a shrug of her shoulders she comments that her family did not really change production notably during those times, but remained ‘under the radar’ and avoided the gaze of lowland state officials, so that they could continue working their land as they had for generations. Today, her family continues to prefer to remain away from the gaze of the state, and community members deal with any disputes internally, rather than calling on state authorities to address grievances. A few thousand kilometres away, in the highlands of Southern Mindanao, Philippines, members of the Merardo Arce Command of the New People’s Army are discussing their latest operations in response to the recent military offensives of the 1001st Brigade-AFP in New Bataan. For these guerrillas, most of them from peasant origins, genuine social and political change in the country requires a full-blown revolutionary takeover. Short of such radical change, breaking down the control of large landowning family clans and multinationals based in Mindanao and implementing land reforms is impossible, while open and legal activism can only bring about short-term gains and partial reforms. At about the same time, on the small island of Penang off the coast of Peninsular Malaysia, in the Third World Network office, analysts are finalizing a new issue of Third World Resurgence on the recent food crisis and its effects on small-scale farmers in Asia, while colleagues in Geneva are posting a Third World Network Info note on the internet that describes the latest proposals made by the G20 on sensitive products in agriculture. The posting reviews and analyzes, paragraph by paragraph, the highly technical documents presented to the World Trade Organization Secretariat in Geneva.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/44152
ISBN:	978 – 0 – 203 – 87494 – 3
Appears in Collections:	Rural Development Studies

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