ABSTRACT
Once the rice-bowl of Asia, Myanmar’s rural economy underwent significant decline in the post-independence years. After decades of isolation, Myanmar has begun to embrace economic reforms, including rural transformation and greater industrialization. How do rural households respond to the uncertainties engendered by rural transformation and the move towards a more post-agrarian economy? What are the local conditions which form the backdrop to specific, localized responses to precarity? One of the key analytical moves in this book is to seek comparison with the earlier conditions and patterns of resistance described by James C. Scott. Hence, this chapter uses both original and published data to describe both the setting of contemporary rural Myanmar, and the challenges and constraints being faced by farmers. This forms the basis for the discussion in later chapters of why this particular response (welfare organizations) has emerged, as opposed to other potential forms of response to precarity. This chapter lays the foundations for the argument in chapter 4, which is that the current rural conditions are best described by the term precarity, and by characterizing the conditions as such, we may then speculate on the type of moral economy which emerges as a response to those conditions.
