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.

Bill Pritchard provides an important update on how current trade methodologies are implemented as China becomes one of the world’s largest fresh fruit importers from countries such as Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.

This book examines the relationship between land tenure, conservation and rural development in the context of the Southeast Asian archipelago. In particular, it is concerned with people living in and around national parks and other protected areas. It discusses the value of reinforcing indigenous tenure and sustainable resource use practices and of including them in policies and projects that attempt to integrate conservation and development.

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

In Revisiting Rural Places, scholars return to sites of their earlier research in Southeast Asia to examine how the rapid pace of change in the countryside affected places, spaces and people that they originally studied decades ago. Each of the 14 core chapters is organized around a change that, based on broader trends, the authors did not anticipate: a new longhouse in Sarawak, the urban forests of Java, the assertion of an ethnic minority identity in Northern Thailand, the re-shaping of class relations and identities in the Philippines, and the uncontested sell-off of farmland to cacao entrepreneurs in Sulawesi. These outcomes pose a challenge to conventional understandings of how the countryside is being re-shaped, and to what effect. The accounts in this volume map out diverse pathways to poverty or prosperity. Families who seemed trapped in poverty decades ago have prospered owing to non-farm and educational opportunities. Others have unexpectedly been thrust into relative deprivation by industrial agriculture, rural industrialization, or destructive natural resource extraction. The breadth of the material makes this unique and exceptionally rich account of rural change a valuable classroom tool as well as an important source of information for a broad spectrum of institutions and other stakeholders, from the World Bank to NGOs and rural activists.

When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.

Over the past three decades the rural Asian economy has experienced a dramatic transformation. In most countries the speed and level of development have far exceeded expectations. This book describes this "quiet revolution" with an emphasis on policies and strategies and their impact on agricultural and economic growth, poverty, and the environment.