KKU-CSEAS Conference on Rural Northeast Thailand in Transition: Land Use, Farming Systems and Households

Date: 16 September, 2014
Venue: Faculty of Agriculture, Khon Kaen University

Program »

Record of Activity: Rural Northeast Thailand in Transition: Land Use, Farming Systems and Households

Northeast Thailand is one of places where CSEAS is most familiar with, a lot of the staffs have been involved, and knowledge, experience and networks have been accumulated in CSEAS through many research projects ever done. A new collaborative research project with Faculty of Agriculture, Khon Kaen University (KKU) is in progress, and this conference is a report meeting and to find research agenda in the future as well. The project aims at catching rapid changes in agriculture and life and integrated understanding of the changes through examining all of factors associated. Prof. Terry Rambo from KKU, who is a former staff in CSEAS, leads the project and Prof. Yasuyuki Kono is a leading member of the project.

Thirty-one researchers and graduated students (10 Japanese, 3 Americans and 18 Thais) joined the conference and 9 researchers gave a talk. It made up of 4 main sessions as “Changes in land use and agriculture”, “Rural households and communities”, “Population aging and health” and “Panel discussion”. From CSEAS, Prof. Yasuyuki Kono and Prof. Kozo Matsubayashi were speakers. Prof. Kono presented “Dynamism of Northeast Thailand: Focusing on life and environment” and proposed that shift of framework from production-oriented to life-oriented view could be helpful to understand changing northeast Thailand and also agenda for further research. Prof. Matsubayashi claimed that human aging is a very new and big challenge for human being and needs us to create new philosophy to build society incorporating the aging in his talk “”Aging in Place” in Asia -Reconsidering from the viewpoints of field medicine and human evolution”.

In panel discussion, Assoc. Prof. Suchint Simaraks (KKU), Adjunct prof. Chai Podhisita (Mahidol University), Dr. Jefferson M. Fox (East-West Center, Hawaii University), Prof. Hayao Fukui (KKU, a former staff of CSEAS), and Prof. Aran Patanothai (KKU) highlighted a couple of important points over all of the talks done in the conference. Especially, the panelists, including Assoc.Prof. Attachai Jintrawet (Chiang Mai University) from the floor, had a common sense that rapid transformation in land use, farming system and household are intricately involved with a range of factors like development of communication tools, globally mounting concerns about environment, changes in eating habits etc. and an analytic framework be able to integrate the factors have to be developed. Prof. Rambo and Prof. Kono recapitulated the conference and underlined significance of integration of more than a hundred of research papers ever done in northeast Thailand and a range of statistics been accumulated in Thailand.