POLITICS-THAILAND: Thaksin May Reap From Pro-poor Policies

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar 10 2006 (IPS) - Chinda Pintakan’s graduation from the bottom of Thailand’s social pecking order, as a poor rural farmer, to a step higher, as a waitress in a restaurant, has brought with it material benefits that have given her hope to believe that more is possible.

The 43-year-old mother of two sons has been enjoying an income of over 7,000 baht (175 US dollars) every month, on average, for the past five years. Prior to 2001, when she was part of her farming community in the village of Pong Samaki, some 30 kilometers beyond this northern Thai city, she brought home about 4,500 baht (112 dollars) per month.

For Chinda, as with the other members of her community who are earning better as rice farmers, there is little confusion about who has helped transform their lives. It is Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, she says. ”He gave a lot of opportunities for the poor people with his new programmes.”

Such praise for Thaksin – heading a caretaker government after a February decision to call for a snap parliamentary election on Apr. 2 -is also echoed by others living beyond Chinda’s village of 200 families.

Sakorn Uwaiporn is typical. This 40-year-old woman, who earns a living as a food vendor near one of the entrances of the ancient fort that wraps a part of Chiang Mai, talks of other benefits that came after Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai – TRT) party triumphed at the January 2001 elections.

”It is easier for us to get loans. We don’t have to go to the loan sharks,” she says. ”The 30 baht health scheme (where Thais can get treatment for any ailment by paying 30 baht (0.75 cents) per hospital visit) is better for us than before.”

The endorsement of Thaksin’s policies by these two women, who voted for the TRT at the January 2001 and February 2005 polls, is in stark contrast to the hostility the premier has been facing for weeks by demonstrators on the streets of Bangkok. Even other members of the rural poor who live in and around Chiang Mai offer views in support of the TRT’s pro-poor policies that the capital’s protesters, who are largely middle and upper-middle class, pooh-pooh as ”vote buying measures.”

What they have exposed, consequently, are political faultlines in this South-east Asian country that are pitting the rural poor, who make up a majority of the country’s 64 million population, against sections of the richer populace from Bangkok and other urban centres.

It is a divide, say analysts, that mirrors the new political equations introduced to Thailand following the TRT’s thumping electoral victories in 2001 and 2005 polls. Most noticeable among them being an aggressive set of policies to help the poor that has succeeded, after five years, in exposing how inadequate the previous means by which the elites and leaders of political parties dealt with the underclass.

”There is no comparison on pro-poor policies between the Thai Rak Thai and the parties in government before 2001,” Giles Ungpakorn, political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, told IPS. ”The opposition Democrat Party has been in government many times before but their policies lacked sympathy for the poor.”

”Thaksin has redrawn the political map by offering policies to help the poor improve financially than the traditional vote buying technique of the other political parties before – just handing out only cash,” he added. ”Most of the anti-government demonstrators and the opposition parties treat the poor with contempt.”

Cheanchom Thongjen, an economist at the World Bank, offers a similar comparison. ”The Thaksin government’s policies to help the rural and urban poor were demand driven. They were in response to what the poor had identified as their priorities,” she said in an interview. ”The governments before had a top-down approach, supplying the poor with assistance that they thought the poor needed.”

And now, as Thaksin, a billionaire tycoon before becoming premier, faces calls by Bangkok’s anti-government demonstrators to resign on charges of alleged corruption, his family profiting from a 1.8 billion dollar deal and stamping down on the media and his critics, his political investments appear to be paying off.

The key planks of his agenda to lift the quality of life of the country’s underclass have been: declaring a three-year freeze on their debts, offering one million bahts (25,000 dollars) to each of Thailand’s 70,000 villages to create small businesses, the 30 baht health care programme and a housing project for the poor.

An initiative to boost rural economies has also come in the form of a one-village-one product programme (popularly known as OTOP), where by the government has offered to help cottage industries with research and development and marketing the products.

The 36,000 OTOP groups across the country, with each having between 30 to 3,000 people per group, have seen incomes rise over the past four years, says Sakda Siridechakul, president of Chiang Mai’s OTOP association. ”OTOP has helped incomes to be spread to many people in the villages. It has given people producing handicrafts to feel they can be part of the global economy.”

All this week, in fact, Sakda has been leading other supporters of OTOP and, by extension, Thaksin, to gather outside one of the gates of Chiang Mai’s old fort walls to paint cloth banners in support of the government. ”The Prime Minister is a smart person and stupid people want to attack him,” said one of the 125 banners painted on Thursday evening.

Research by the World Bank reflects this sense of achievement at the grassroots. Four years after the TRT was first voted to power, Thais living in poverty had dropped to 7.08 million people from the 13 million in 2000.

Agriculture incomes in the poorest section of the country, the northeast, had risen by 40 percent during the same four-year period, added the Bank’s 2005 ‘Thailand Economic Monitor.’

”It is a record that the anti-Thaksin demonstrators and the opposition parties have no answer to,” says Giles. ”This is one reason why they are campaigning to boycott the April elections.”

Such anti-government sentiments have little appeal for women like Chinda, who says, ”People in my village will be voting for the Thai Rak Thai. We must keep Thaksin as the prime minister.”