ABSTRACT
On the face of it, and despite the industrial growth of the past decades, Southeast Asia remains a region of farmers. Excluding the city state of Singapore and the oil-rich sultanate of Brunei, between 19 per cent (Malaysia) and 78 per cent (Laos) of each country’s population are classified as working in the agricultural sector, and between 42 per cent (Philippines) and 84 per cent (Cambodia) as living in rural areas (Table 5.1). Weighted according to population, the combined figures for the region as a whole are 50 per cent and 63 per cent respectively. Such statistics lend credence to the belief that the countries of Southeast Asia, like those of most developing regions, are dominated by agriculture. This view has it that the Southeast Asian world is still primarily a
Table 5.1 Population working in agriculture and living in rural areas
Rural population Percentage of labour Total population, as percentage force in agriculture, 1999 of total, 1999 1998 (millions)
Brunei 40 2 0.3 Cambodia 84 74 12.8 Indonesia 60 45 209.3 Laos 77 78 5.2 Malaysia 43 19 21.8 Myanmar 73 63 47.1 Philippines 42 40 74.2 Singapore 0 0 3.9 Thailand 79 51 62.0 Vietnam 80 71 77.1
Total 513.7 million
Weighted total 63 50
rural world; that this rural world is essentially an agricultural world; and, for the truly unreconstructed, that this agricultural world is, or should be, a peasant world. As McVey explains: ‘save for the city-state of Singapore, [Southeast Asia] has long been imagined as quintessentially agrarian, its symbol the peasant toiling in his paddy-field, and plantations the only real representatives of the modern economic sector’ (1992: 7). But ‘rural’, like ‘urban’, has become a metaphor for much more than open spaces and green trees: it also implies a way of life, a set of values, and a shared commitment to a certain livelihood. Loaded words like ‘community’, ‘self-reliance’, ‘indigenous technologies’, and ‘selfsufficiency’ are irrevocably associated, in the eyes and minds of many scholars and rural development workers, with the lives and livelihoods of rural people.
