Before the 1970s, the nearest main road to Chiang Mai town was Chiang Mai - Hot Road, via a road that connects Samoeng district to Nong Khwai. At the time, the closest market to Nam Jam was in San Pasak, approximately three kilometres away along the Chiang Mai – Hot Road. It took the villagers almost an hour to walk there.
The main vehicles used by the villagers were bicycles. There was only one old pickup truck belonging to a teacher from Chiang Mai town who taught at Tong Kai School and married a woman from Nam Jam. When people wanted to go to Chiang Mai town, which was not often, they had to walk approximately two kilometres to the main road and then take a bus that did not come often. Some either used a dirt track along the canal by walking or cycling to town. The transport routes in the village were dirt tracks and very narrow. Understandably, at that time, people rarely went to the city.
During this time, the rice fields could be cultivated almost all year round. In the rainy season, the villagers use Mae Taa Chang River as the source of water for a traditional irrigation scheme; and, because they grew tobacco alternately with soy bean in the dry season, they did not need so much water. There used to be a tobacco kiln near the airport. The owner, who also owned several plots of fields in the area feeding it, or in the southern area of the current peri-urban zone including some areas in Nong Khwai, rented out the land to villagers. In the rainy season, his tenants invested everything they had and the land owner collected rice as a form of rent. In the dry season, however, growing tobacco required more investment. The kiln owners provided everything such as fertiliser and pesticides for farmers. Then, the kiln owners were entitled to the products at the end of the harvest, and all expenses were deducted from the total sale. The remainder of the expenses then became income for the farmers or the cost of their labour.
Approximately half of families in Nam Jam who were original local residents had occupied all the rice fields in the area and each family had three to six rai. The newcomers from Mae Kanin were landless families. Rice fields were limited and
precious and no one sold the land, thus the newcomers had no chance to own rice fields unless they married the original residents and later got rice fields for inheritance.
The landless families, especially the women, either worked as labourers or rented rice fields from families who had land. A female villager in her early 50 years told me that when she was a teenager (1970s – 1980s), landless women would group three to five people together and seek work in the rice fields such as transplanting and harvesting. These types of activity were similar to those of their parents’ generation.
They would start before the sun rose so they could work longer before the weather got too hot. If they could finish the work early, they would be paid quickly. Then they could seek work in other rice fields. The furthest they travelled for work in the rice fields was to areas near the airport and near Chiang Mai University. Work in the rice fields was mostly done by women. My informant explained that the land owners preferred women as they started work earlier and worked longer so the tasks were finished quickly. In the dry season, these women rented the rice fields for growing tobacco and soy beans. The women worked in the field almost all year round.
In the past, rice farming was labour intensive and wages and rent were paid mostly in rice. Rent used to be as high as half of the harvest, and in the bad years they may not have enough rice for household consumption. Some land owners said that in cases where they did not have cows, buffaloes or labour, it was easier to rent the land out and collect the rent at the end of the harvest. In 1980, buffaloes were completely replaced by hand tractors that allowed the land owners to manage their fields more easily. The rent was later, and remains until now, reduced to one third of the harvest subsequent to legislation pressed by the student uprising and mobilisation of the leftist movement in Thailand in the mid 1970s. The student leaders in this area mobilised the farmers to negotiate with the land owners for lower rent.
Before the 1970s, the people of Nam Jam were steeped in poverty in terms of food security, especially the landless people. Not every family had enough rice for annual consumption. Most of the farmers who had rice fields could only produce rice
for household consumption; so, life was difficult for landless families as food supplies were quite limited. People had to collect food from the rice fields and forest such as frogs, fish, crabs, mushrooms, bamboo shoots and insects. Although they may have been plentiful, they were only seasonal. When they could collect a lot of food, they could not trade it locally as their fellow villagers collected similar food. At that time, houses were made mainly with temporary materials that could be found in the area such as wood and bamboo. Thatched roofs were for the poor or the new families while better off families used handmade clay tiles. Notwithstanding of their harsh lives, people had some good memories of collecting food from forest and rice fields, their play areas in the village, and fun local festivals that the whole village would join.
The main obstacle was that at that time, the area was still remote. Market access was difficult due to difficulties of transportation; thus, people could not trade with outsiders. Using money was not so common. One of the bigger expenses for people at the time was debt incurred that occurred when family members became ill.
Some had to sell cattle, land or borrow money from the rich with a high interest rate in order to meet the medical expenses.
Even as far back as 50 years ago when the area was still in a very rural context and forests nearby were abundant with teak, people in Nam Jam could hardly base their living on agriculture alone. Most villagers had to undertake extra work outside of the village. Many men from the villages around here worked as wood turners in the forests around the area for a long time. Mae Kanin was one of a few forest areas where Nam Jam people went to work. A 70 year old man said that when he was born (1940s), he already saw his father doing the wood turning. Workers usually stayed in the forests for a few months at a time, especially in the dry season. Men who had rice fields came to help their families during the farming and harvesting seasons.
Their wives sent them food and sometimes carried handicraft wood to traders, who came to collect it in the village. People in their 50s still remember seeing people using elephants to work in the forest in their childhoods. It was from being wood turners in Mae Kanin that Nam Jam people invited their friends from Mae Kanin who
were wood turners to move to Nam Jam and live with them so that the community would not be too isolated.
Around the late-1970s when the quantities of teak were significantly decreasing, restrictions were introduced on the cutting of teak in the forests.
Therefore, these men had to leave the forests and look for other work. Some continued to work as wood turners at home using other types of wood. Several men started to work in Chiang Mai city as construction workers and in other labouring jobs. In a longitudinal study undertaken during 1966-1996 in Mae Sa, 13 kilometres to the north of Chiang Mai city, Anchalee Singhanetra-Renard (1999) found that the villagers were no longer self sufficient. People commonly migrated to work outside of their farming activities in the village. They had to make a living and the local economy was limited. These realities of the local people’s livelihoods rarely appear in popular media, nor are they the concern of the country’s middle class urbanites.
The forests were closed in the same decade of completion of the irrigation canal (1967 in Nong Khwai section) with a narrow two-lane road on the east of the canal and the arrival of electricity respectively. This irrigation scheme enabled water for rice farming to be sent from Mae Taeng in the north to Mae Rim, Mueang, Hang Dong and San Patong districts in the south, a distance of 75 kilometres. However, this irrigation scheme does not benefit Mu 5 as it is in a higher area than the canal.
The road attached to the irrigation canal was more important for changes in the village as it connected the village and the city more closely than taking the Chiang Mai-Hot Road. However, the canal road was narrow and not in good condition for decades so the connection to the city was still difficult until the expansion to a four-lane road on both sides of the canal, which was only constructed and completed in 2004 to serve two mega projects.
The village was electrified in 1976, courtesy of “the revolving fund program”
introduced when Kuekrij Pramoj was prime minister. This was during the cold war and communist uprising in Thailand. The Thai government, supported by the United States, introduced a number of development projects. Substantial budgets went to the
rural regions to weaken the communist movement. Electricity not only brought big changes to the village, but also inspired the villagers. After the village was electrified, a teacher who had a car bought the first TV set. Every evening, all of the villagers went to his house to watch the programs on television. Several people said that now they could see what the city looked like and how city people lived so comfortably. This was the local villagers’ first significant visual connection to the civilised urbanity and the capital city of Bangkok. Subsequently, the people reported that they aimed to work harder and to improve their material standard of living. This was also the same period (1977) when land in Nam Jam started being legalised and title deeds were issued to individual land owners.