The hill-tribes and the Lisu Farming in the mountains
The Lisu and the other hill-tribes when first arrived in Northern Thailand were allocated bits of lands in the mountains under certain conditions. The land size was calculated by the number of family members at the condition to farming and working on this land enabling a better living and autonomy.
More recently, some restrictions are being made by the Thai government and the tendency is to reduce the amounts of land per capita.
These new land restrictions are of course quite alarming for the Lisus and other hill-tribes farmers in the mountains whom even though their hard and tedious work and their resilience is once more their work is challenged..
Added to the ‘usual’ issues, the weather unreliability, not enough rain or too late, villages water shortages and so on.. and of course jalousies and all kind of bad energies..
The new land restrictions and shrinking of land is not going to help!
It seems that some 15 years ago, some farmers were only planting mountain rice (delicious, but totally different rice which is sown in the earth not in rice-fields, and grows with rain water only), and a couple of other crops.. They had a few pigs and some chickens, some may have done farming that way for generations.
For some farmers like in most countries I guess, changing and/or shifting to different crops and even more diversify the crops can be really challenging..
Meanwhile, there were other crops projects like coffee that were started decades ago by the Lisu in some villages, which seemed not to be as fruitful as expected.. In such villages and in Thailand generally some more or less quickly shifted to other different crops.
When a few chose to shift their crops to less usual crops and could sell at a better price, make more profits, they were quickly followed by other farmers.
Gradually, sales became tougher, and market prices cheaper.
This happened with ginger for example, a few started, could make a better income, they were followed by a few, later by many, market prices went down..
The same thing happened with oranges which are a really common product in Thailand even if quite different from the ones we find in our Western shops imported from Spain and North Africa.. These are much bigger..
Here in Northern Thailand, the oranges we commonly find are small and look more like mandarins.. We see orange farming almost everywhere these days.. It would seem that prices stay high though!
Some other farmers have recently switched to other fruit-trees and orchards and planted different fruits like mangoes (mamuang) and longans (lamyai) which are also really common here..
There might be some quality enhancement due to the higher altitudes for the selected species..
Not once in the past 15 years have we seen a machine like a tractor to help.
The new government land restrictions and shrinking are not going to help them neither..