Rural Development In Southeast Asia

Conference report on rural development in South East Asia and hong kong - covers sponsored internal migration to rural areas, rural migration, land settlement, the role of ruralelites and industrialization as well as development plan implementation. Diagrams, maps, references and statistical tables. List of participants. Conference held in Kuala Lumpur and penang 1975 jan 1 to 7.

More than the Soil focuses on the social, cultural, economic and technological processes that have transformed rural areas of Southeast Asia. The underlying premise is that rural lives and livelihoods in this region have undergone fundamental change. No longer can we assume that rural livelihoods are founded on agriculture; nor can we assume that people envisage their futures in terms of farming. The inter-penetration of the rural and urban, and the degree to which rural people migrate between rural and urban areas, and shift from agriculture to non-agriculture, raises fundamental questions about how we conceptualise the rural Southeast Asia and the households to be found there.

Using examples from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, the book considers what scholarship has defined as a village within the rapid changes taking place in rural Southeast Asia.

Rural areas and rural people have been centrally implicated in Southeast Asia's modernisation. Through the three entry points of smallholder persistence, upland dispossession, and landlessness, this Element offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside has been transformed over the past half century. Drawing on primary fieldwork undertaken in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and secondary studies from across the region, Rigg shows how the experience of Southeast Asia offers a counterpoint and a challenge to standard, historicist understandings of agrarian change and, more broadly, development. Taking a rural view allows an alternative lens for theorising and judging Southeast Asia's modernisation experience and narrative. The Element argues that if we are to capture the nature – and not just the direction and amount – of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, then we need to view the countryside as more than rural and greater than farming.

Presents a reinvigorated agenda on agricultural and rural development in Asia both for research and policy discussions in the coming decades.

Three billion people live in rural areas in developing countries. Conditions for them are worse than for their urban counterparts when measured by almost any development indicator, from extreme poverty, to child mortality and access to electricity and sanitation.