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Working Hypotheses:

Globalisation: technology-enabled (?), continuing outward impulse of capital, driven by saturated mature markets (overcapacity, declining rates of profit) and the search for competitive advantage (in production and in control of natural and human resources), and for emerging markets

Privatisation: the inward impulse, cannibalizing the welfarist state, market creation & market deepening, extending the circuit of capital into a hitherto non-commercial public sector domain.

In this seminar we will describe the health care system (broadly defined) as an articulated system of functional components (hospitals, health care professionals, pharmaceuticals and medical disposables, medical, surgical and diagnostic accessories, medical insurance, hospital support services, construction and equipping of healthcare facilities, medical information systems, telemedicine, etc).

We will explore the privatization (commodification) of health care services and inputs in selected health sub-systems (drawing upon examples from Malaysia and other Asian countries), with attention to its interactions, its political economy and institutional dynamics, and its implications for equity and access to health care.

Tanks, as a traditional source of irrigation, are found in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. In India, tanks are concentrated in the Southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu where they provided the largest source of irrigation until the mid-sixties. There are more than 39,000 tanks in Tamil Nadu state alone, with varying sizes and types. Currently, area irrigated by tanks has been continuously declining and the share of the tanks in total cropped area in the state has declined from 37 per cent during 1960s to 22 percent during 1990s. Several factors such as variation in rainfall, level of tank filling, tank siltation, encroachment, and weakening of the local institutions have contributed for the rapid decline in tank performance. Now there is a growing demand for reviving the tank irrigation potential due to increased cost of major reservoir projects as well as declining groundwater potential in several regions of the country. Also most of the small and marginal farmers are concentrated in the tank systems and hence poverty alleviation can be directly addressed if tank irrigation is improved. International agencies such as World Bank, Asian Development Bank and JICA are now showing interest in tank modernization programs in India. This seminar will focus on how tank irrigation potential could be revived.

Md.Hedayetul Islam Chowdhury was invited to Japan through JICA Training. He visits Government and Agricultural Cooperative in Tokyo and Kameoka, Kyoto, Japan. ON the basis of his presentation and short visiting experience in visiting rural area and local governments in Japan, he will discuss about the possible way of the approach of Rural Development of Bangladesh Rural Development Board.

Northeast Thailand is a large region, nearly half the size of Japan, in the center of mainland Southeast Asia. Over twenty million people live in this region, most still living in rural areas.

This presentation is an interim report on a current　research project to overview change in human adaptive strategies in rural Northeast Thailand over the past twenty years. Many of the changes that took place were not anticipated, and indeed stunned many academic observers. Reconceptualizing our understanding of these changes may help us to better understand the situation.

In the mid-1980s, human adaptive strategies in rural Northeast Thailand exhibited a high degree of economic diversity at the micro level (within the household), despite rising incomes. This was seen as an ongoing response to the opportunities and constraints of micro environmental variation (within the rainfed "mini-watershed"), and a risk minimizing strategy against uncertain pay-off in any one particular activity, primarily in response to highly variable rainfall. The typical household "portfolio" included raising more than one type of rice on more than one type of paddy land, livestock, cassava, vegetables or tobacco in the off season, fishing, hunting and gathering, handicrafts and seasonal off-farm employment.

The portfolio was dominated and controlled by the rainfed rice cultivation strategy. The rice strategy was a highly elaborated one, with different photoperiod sensitive varieties selected for and adapted to differential niches within the holding: later-maturing species on lower paddies, quicker-maturing species on higher paddies, etc. By the mid-1980s, the rice strategy seems to have been increasingly elaborated and fine-tuned in response to increasing population pressure on the subsistence rice base. All other economic activities in the portfolio had to be "fitted" to this rice strategy, in their timing, their labor requirements, land use, etc.

Today rice is still widely grown in rainfed paddies throughout the Northeast, and there are other similarities as well, but this does not mean that human adaptive strategies have not changed much over the past twenty years. They have undergone very major change, arguably: structural change. This was in large part a result of Thailand's economic boom in the late 1980s up until the economic crisis of 1997, even though that boom mostly took place in the greater Bangkok area and along the Eastern seaboard. The economic crisis of 1997 complicated but did not reverse this change.

Using government data, including some year-by-year graphs, some photographs, and various published materials, this presentation will overview the changes that took place, and attempt to reconceptualize and better understand them (including the role of rice). If we can better understand how and why things have changed over time in the past, we may be in a better position to anticipate the future.