What is the difference between highlands and lowlands

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Last year the fault was actually seen by the Class on the other side of the island in the cliffs of Stonehaven, Accordingly, the task proposed to be accomplished this year was to trace this dislocation across the country, if possible, from sea to sea. Such a traverse would at least bring the pedestrians face to face with some of the finest and least visited river scenery in Scotland, while it would probably also impress some geological lessons on their memory in a way not likely ever to be forgotten.

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Nature 12, 93—94 Download citation. Conservation and Development in Northern Thailand. Implications of socio-economic, demographic. Most human groups capitalize on resources from several different zones rather than confining their activities to a single zone, and humans characteristically make major modifications of the microenvironments in which they live. For these reasons it is appropriate for us to consider human activities and resource use within the region of Northern Thailand in terms of interaction between the two major ecological zones or types-the highland and the lowland.

Emphasizing the interactions between zones is a break with the tradition of planning for development within a single zone which assumes correspondence with the boundaries of a self-contained system. This has proved to be an unrealistic and ineffective approach, particularly in the highlands.

This paper deals with some of the human aspects of highland-lowland interactions in Northern Thailand, including the distribution of ethnic groups and local economic systems. We are thus interested in the combination of agriculture and foresty in the region as a whole, as well as in local economic systems in which agriculture and forestry are combined. Forests remain mostly in the relatively sparsely populated highlands; they have been cleared from most of the intensively cultivated, densely populated lowlands.

Nonetheless, we proceed from the belief that economic-environmental problems of Northern Thailand, including questions of the interaction of forestry and agriculture. For reasons which will become evident, we believe human and natural resources will be better conserved in the course of development if highlands and lowlands are viewed as interacting parts of a regional system.

The nature of highland-lowland interaction is changing rapidly in association with demographic, socio economic, and cultural changes. This implies the usefulness of the regional view in planning and evaluating development projects designed to solve problems both on the natural resource side deforestation, erosion.

The major concerns of lowlanders with the highlands have been suppression of opium cultivation and protection and exploitation of forest and watershed resources for the benefit of the lowlanders. The basic concern of most of the highlanders is in getting enough to eat. Development projects in the highlands have emphasized the technology of production, and have demonstrated the possibility of growing a variety of crops including native and exotic forest species of benefit primarily to lowland economic interests.

Little attention has been paid to the improvement of highlander subsistence production. The development projects have failed to raise the standard of living of all but a minuscule fraction of the highlanders, and have slowed neither the pace of environmental degradation nor the rate of highland population growth.

In several instances they have in fact contributed to increased pressure on the land because of their failure to attend to problems of subsistence of villagers displaced from their customary swidden areas. In order to solve development problems, it is necessary to tackle such problems as land tenure and marketing as well as reforestation and crop substitution.

Because extreme poverty is an outstanding characteristic of highlanders. At that time there was some differentiation of land-use types based on environmental zones. In the past three decades an increasing number of types of land use or local economic systems can be distinguished in various Northern Thailand environments.

At the same time, the nature of the interactions between highland and lowland has been changing rapidly. Traditionally the level of living standard of highlanders and lowlanders was rather similar, with highlanders enjoying some economic advantages and lowlanders enjoying others.

The urban centres in the lowlands and the national and international markets in which they participate have increased demands for highland resources. As lowland administrative control has expanded. Iowlanders are better able to control directly the production of these resources. We believe that the physical and social separation of the production of these resources. Credner ; Uhlig ; Van Roy , chaps. This has led to a typology in which the distribution of ecological zones, ethnic groups, and local economies is neatly arranged in the form of a layer cake.

According to this typology, which, as we shall see, is no longer adequate, the soggy bottom layer is populated by wet-rice growing ethnic Northern Thais, living in the lowland valleys: the drier middle layers are occupied by Karen and Lua' rice swiddeners. Yao, Akha. Lisu, and Lahu. In fact, today there are so many exceptions to these stereotypes that they are misleading for development planning. In some highland areas ethnic Northern Thais outnumber the other groups; in other highland zones the upland minority people depend at least as much on irrigated rice as on swidden rice; a major portion of the highland minority groups are actually wetrice growers in the lowlands; highlanders are flocking in increasing numbers to join the lowland labour force; and the boundaries between supposedly distinct ethnic groups are notoriously permeable and subject to redefinition.

For these reasons it is appropriate to move beyond geographic typologies to consider the implications of socioeconomic and demographic processes as they relate to regional development. Urban nodes, neglected in the layer-cake stereotype. They also are taking on growing importance as centres of change in agricultural technology and in the commercialization of land ownership and land use, and as centres for the diffusion of other aspects of modern urbanism to rural areas.

Between the and censuses Thailand , while population in the Northern Region grew at a rate of 2. This represented an increase from about 5 to about 6 per cent of the total population of the North.

These figures, which on a world scale or in comparison with Central Thailand represent a low rate and low amount of urbanization, understate the penetration of urbanism into rural areas. Smaller urban clusters, such as district towns, have probably been growing more rapidly in size than have municipal areas, and clearly they have been acquiring urban services at a rapid rate. At the same time. Still, the rural areas.

Education is a prerequisite for upward mobility in the non-agricultural occupations. Because their access to education is so much more limited, residents of rural areas. The civil service. Although quantitative data are not available.

At the same time these urban centres are the destination of increasing numbers of unskilled, underemployed and landless northerners, both from the lowlands and from the hills. This pattern of increasing differentiation in the urban places of the North between the better educated, nationally oriented elite and the local unskilled underemployed workers suggests that it is probably fortunate that these urban centres are not growing in size any faster than they are.

It should be noted that this pattern of social differentiation is not restricted to the large urban centres such as Chiang Mai, but is also to be found in the smaller provincial towns and even in district towns in the North Kunstadler ; h Some of the elite residents of the urban centres are approaching. The urban poor, most rural dwellers, and even the highlanders are aware of these changes, but have received only a small share of the benefits of modernization.

Their life chances remain limited. Among these groups the highlanders, in general. Highland-lowland interaction is seen in the large towns in terms of sales of highlander products e 9, crafts. Iumber for which the highlands are important sources. As lowland markets and trading networks broaden. Highlanders are no longer employed as caravaneers, having been replaced by trucks over the rapidly improving road network Kunstadter : ''hill-tribe style" clothing, sewn in Chiang Mai or Bangkok, is sold on national and world markets at lower prices than the authentic pieces would bring; highland-grown early-ripening rice, which once found a market in isolated lowland towns prior to the lowland harvest, is being replaced by lower cost rice trucked in from other areas Kunstadter b.

Lowland demand for highland resources, such as lumber. The land taken for mining or forestry projects is removed from use for subsistence agriculture.

Land-use patterns or local economic systems in the rural low valley lands have been differentiated by the development of large-scale irrigation works in the North. To the longestablished rain-fed paddies and small scale irrigation systems, which allowed wet rice farming only in the monsoon rainy season, have been added larger-scale dams and ditch networks, some of which provide year-round water and allow multiple cropping in favourably located fields Even prior to the development of irrigation systems allowing multiple cropping.

Also, with the development of rapid transportation and wider markets, some irrigated fields were being converted to tree crops. In these rural lowland valleys, interaction between highland and lowland has been largely in the form of some seasonal employment of highlanders whose rice harvests are completed several months earlier than those in the valley.

The effects of the increasing intensity of agricultural land use on the lowlands on highland-lowland interaction has not yet been studied David Pfanner, personal communication, Because of the increasing substantial growth of landless or "underlanded'' agricultural populations in the lowlands see.

On the contrary. It should be noted that both ethnic Thais and minority groups living in the rural lowland valleys have participated in the intensification of lowland agriculture. The two largest minority groups with both highland and lowland representatives are Karen and Lua' Most Lua' who lived in long-established lowland villages have become assimilated to such an extent that they have become Northern Thais in terms of their self-ascribed identity. Some Karen villages in the Ping valley.

They are predominantly lowland wet-rice farmers as are many Karen in Burma. They maintain kinship and other connections with highland villagers of the same group. Recent Karen and Lua' migrants from the highlands to the lowlands usually enter lowland society at the bottom stratum.

Unless they have money or relatives who can give them a start. Those who are a little better established may have regular jobs working as servants or doing unskilled jobs, or may have accumulated enough capital to go to the hills to purchase vegetables for sale in the lowland markets.

In the past some have been able to acquire irrigated land of their own, but it seems unlikely that many of the recent migrants will be able to do so because of the scarcity of unclaimed potentially irrigable land, the rapid increase in land prices relative to the price of unskilled labour.

Between the irrigated or rain-fed rice fields in the lowland valleys and the highland areas occupied by people who are originally or primarily swiddeners. Lies a foothill zone which is generally not continuously used or occupied. Occasionally such marginal areas.

In recent years they have become the destination of landless or underlanded lowlanders. They go seasonally to the unirrigable gentle upper slopes "upper terraces" in geological terms of the lowland valleys, or into the steeper slopes of the foothills for short cultivation-short or long fallow supplemental swiddening of subsistence or cash crops.

In some areas such as those described by Chapman ; a. Land at higher elevations with greater rainfall and with soils having better water retention was once the exclusive domain of older established minority groups Karen, Htin, Lua' , living in permanent villages. They practice short cultivation-long fallow swiddening for subsistence crops, supplemented with increasing areas of small-scale irrigated fields where terrain and water supplies permit.

In some areas wet rice now supplies as much, or more. Many of these people supplement their subsistence agriculture by seasonal wage work in other locations harvesting in lowland fields, mining, lumbering, clearing and weeding opium fields, temporary unskilled labour in towns, etc. Kunstadler ; Marlowe Traditionally they have deliberately maintained the forest vegetation on ridgetops.

They have also actively fought forest fires to protect the swidden regrowth. Groups which have arrived in Thailand more recently Hmong, Yao. They may also farm at slightly higher elevations, which may be less desirable for subsistence crops because of slope, soil qualities, or forest cover.

They often practice long cultivation-long fallow swiddening with a mixture of subsistence rice, maize and cash crops opium, maize, pigs, etc. They may select their cultivation sites because of special soil qualities basic soils in limestone areas , because of the availability of seasonal labour supplies and subsistence commodities from nearby Karen and Lua'villages. They do not control fires as effectively as Lua' and Karen villagers, they practice clear cutting and clean deep weeding regardless of problems of soil erosion and reforestation, with the result that where they cultivate the forest vegetation is replaced with a persistent grassland when the area is abandoned after a long period of cultivation Keen a.

Some members of groups such as the Hmong, who in Thailand have in general moved their highland villages from place to place as the soil became exhausted, are now being forced by land shortages to seek alternative solutions. In some cases they have begun to cultivate grasslands Keen a, pp - , and in increasing numbers they are coming to the lowlands either to seek work, sell their handicrafts, or to seek land for permanent field farming.

Given their reputation as inveterate highlanders who are willing to search for hundreds of miles for suitable swidden sites, and who will work only for themselves, this suggests the extent of land shortage in the highlands.

At the higher elevations, depending on the natural occurrence of the wild tea plant Camellia sinensis. In addition to the land occupied and used for crops, or from which tea is harvested, their local economic system makes extensive use of wood from still higher elevations, as fuel for tea processing.

For many of the people with lowland origins, working in the tea gardens is often seen as a means of accumulating cash with which to buy irrigated fields in the lowlands Van Roy Keen b. Thus their movement to the highlands is part of a migration cycle related to land shortages and land prices in the lowlands.

In the past, tree planting has not been vigorously pursued to replace the lumber which was extracted. Most tree planting was done at the lower elevations in areas not particularly well suited for swiddening, and most of the plantations were of teak.

Small but increasing areas in the highlands are now devoted to tree plantations sponsored by the Forest Industries Organization. These are occupied mostly by landless lowlanders, and to a lesser extent by highlanders.

Residents in the forest villages are given access to land for swiddening in return for labour in clearing and planting, and for cultivating lumber trees. In some of these projects villagers have supplemented their earnings by wage work elsewhere, or by raising and selling cash crops. Because of the relatively long cycle on which teak is grown 60 years minimum this form of land use cannot support as many people per unit area as traditional subsistence swiddening on a short cultivation-long fallow cycle Kunstadter d, pp.

Other plantation schemes, such as the pine plantation at Baw Luang ibid. The conflict between forestry and subsistence farming has become increasingly acute in the past few years. Land at the middle altitudes is being alienated from its long-established customary use in regular rotation swidden systems. Large areas are being reforested on contract by concessionaires irrespective of their productive use in regular rotation subsistence swiddening.

This has already led to armed confrontations between the lowland concessionaires seeking to complete their contracts and highland villagers who receive no benefit from the land which will henceforth be protected forest. This process, aside from its social and political implications, can be expected to increase the pressure on the land remaining for agriculture.

Swidden agriculture, although it provides subsistence to the vast majority of highlanders, is not recognized as a legitimate type of agro -forestry. There is a small but increasing amount of cash cropping in the hills, sponsored by lowland officials or entrepreneurs, employing highland workers. Examples include the King's Projects, and the various heavily subsidized schemes for crop substitution among opium growers. In the private sector this can be seen.

Although several of these appear to be technologically successful. Lowland personnel and economic interests dominate highland-lowland interactions regardless of local economic type or the ethnic groups involved. Thailand as a whole is modernizing rapidly, at least materially, but the highland-lowland relationships in many ways resemble the socio-economic conditions of an earlier period in many developing countries. Highland resources are drained off to benefit a small number of modernized urbanites far removed physically and socially from the highlands.

Highland economies continue to stress agriculture and extractive industries while the emphasis in the lowlands, especially in urban centres, shifts to manufacturing, commerce.

Socio-economic gaps, measured by income. Traditional authority of highland village officials is weakened as the power of the central government expands. Traditional landholdings of the highlanders are taken by decree or force, and the indigenous highland population cannot protect its resources. Modern urbanites assume cultural superiority over the highlanders, who lack opportunities for upward social mobility even through education.

Also, as we shall see, conditions are apparently being created which favour rapid population growth while natural increase in the urban centres has sharply declined. The Demographic Situation in the Hills and Valleys of Northern Thailand The total population of the 16 provinces of the Northern Region of Thailand was 7,, in , having grown at an annual rate of 2. Most of the people live in relatively narrow, intensively cultivated valleys. Tribal Research Centre surveys in 77 indicated there were Allowing for some unsurveyed highlander communities, this suggests that minority group highlanders represented about 4 per cent of the regional total, not including the tens of thousands of highlander refugees who have arrived in Thailand from Laos and Burma since The number of ethnic Northern Thais engaged in swiddening or other occupations at elevations above the lowland valleys, while known to be high, has not been systematically counted or estimated.

This number may reach or surpass the number of minority group highlanders Chapman ; Judd Nationally there are very strong rural-urban and socioeconomic differentials in vital rates e. Chamratrithirong and Boonpratuang ; Knodel and Chamratrithirong Kunstadter h. Within the Northern Region recent demographic research has suggested a dramatic decline in birth and natural increase rates.

Crude birth rates fell from about The birth rate did not fall evenly in the region. There were strong ruralurban, educational and occupational differentials. Urban residence, nonagricultural jobs and higher education are associated with lower fertility Chamratrithirong and Boonpratuang , p.

Although fertility has been declining in the rural North it remained high in the more remote districts with sizeable highland populations, at least in Chiang Mai Province, which otherwise has been a leader in the decline of fertility in the North Pardthaisong Evidence from age distributions of highland minority peoples also supports the conclusion that highlanders have maintained high, and in some cases extremely high, fertility levels Kunstadter b.

Table 4. Strong rural-urban differences in mortality rates exist in the North, with rural children having more than twice the probability of dying than do urban children Chamratrithirong and Boonpratuang Table B.

Mortality rates have been falling throughout the region, from In the lowlands the mortality decline has apparently been more than matched by fertility decline, thereby reducing the rate of natural increase. In the highlands, where mortality rates have probably not fallen so far or so fast, the higher level of fertility is apparently sufficient to maintain higher growth rates than in the valley.

The rates of natural increase among some highland groups e. Table 3 This suggests either that the burden of economic support is even heavier on adults in the highlands than in the lowlands, or more probably, that the young children must contribute more heavily to the family income in the highlands.

In either case, the situation implies problems of development in the need for education for very large numbers of highland children see below. Census figures for the North in and show an increase from About half of the interprovincial movements were within the Northern Region, most of the remainder originating from the Northeast and Central regions see Ng for an analysis of interregional moves from the census A total of , 3. Although there is a clear trend towards migration both within the North and between regions in Thailand, internal migration has apparently declined as a source for population growth in the North Net migration into the North declined from about 32, in the five years prior to the census equivalent to about 0.

Interzonal population movement between highlands and lowlands in the region has not been well documented or quantified. Nonetheless, the pace of movement has probably increased. This is suggested in the lowlands by the visible increase in the number and variety of highlanders visiting the markets, selling goods, and seeking employment, and by the growing number and size of settlements of deliberately or spontaneously relocated highlanders.

In the highlands. Motives for such movements varied, though probably predominantly economic. Most of the highlanders moving out of the hills do so because of their chronic inability to make a living. Some move because of personal disaster prolonged illness, fire from which they lack the resources to recover; others may be expelled from the villages for violations of local taboos or inability to get along with their neighbours.

This type of movement to the lowlands is probably becoming increasingly common because former patterns of migration within the highlands are no longer possible or attractive: the splitting of villages and movement to unoccupied land is no longer easy because of land scarcity in the hills.

Lowlanders apparently move to the highlands to look for jobs mostly government projects which have either educational or citizenship requirements, or personal contacts not enjoyed by highlanders, or to seek land, especially in places where access has been improved by roads. The lowlanders' knowledge of land laws, as well as their contacts with officials, makes it much easier for them to establish a legal claim to these lands than it is for the highlanders who may have customaryuse rights to the same land.

Thus, apparently, interethnic competition for land and jobs is increasing in both the lowlands and the highlands. Lowland-highland differences and interactions may be seen with regard to fertility and mortality, as well as migration.

The decline in fertility in Northern Thailand may be viewed as a process of diffusion starting from urban centres including the very small clusters of urbanized people in district towns , perhaps as early as the late s.

By the late s there were already clear and strong differentials in vital rates between urbanized people and those living in the rural and highland areas see. Fertility has declined in association with the spread of modern urban characteristics education, occupation, etc. The spread of the conditions, motivations, and attitudes associated with planning for a small family.

The limited data available regarding fertility among different highland groups seem consistent with the idea that the control of fertility is related to the local economic type.

Cash cropping highlanders expanding into relatively sparsely settled areas, who may be able to use increased family labour supply including the labour of young children to increase cash income have high fertility; Northern Thais in the hills.

The correctness of the hypotheses of causal connections between fertility and local economy implied in these apparent associations needs to be verified with better quantitative research. This is important for development planning because of the possibility that conversion of subsistence farmers to cash cropping may imply both an increase in fertility and an increase in demand for land Kunstadter a; g; Scholz ; Walker , p.

Adequate epidemiological data are not available to describe causes of death with great precision. It seems likely that dietary differences between the different local economies in the different ecological zones are associated with different types and degrees of malnutrition. Because of interaction of malnutrition and disease immunity Awdeh et al.

The mortality differentials between lowlanders and highlanders are one sign of this. Dietary differences and changes associated with various local economic types is a subject for urgent research, particularly as dietary deterioration can be predicted in the course of transformation from the more varied diets based on subsistence farming and gathering economies Kunstadter d to the less varied diets associated with low levels of cash income and in the absence of access to gardens and the gathering of wild forest products.

The epidemic of dental caries. Resurgence of malaria apparently has already become a serious health problem among some highland populations.

On the other hand, because of their ecological isolation, remote rural areas, and especially highland populations, may have enjoyed some protection from widespread vector-borne and communicable diseases Kunstadter Although protection from some of these diseases smallpox, measles can now be gained from vaccines or control programmes in the lowlands, the picture is not so optimistic for those diseases such as Japanese encephalitis, dengue and dengue haemorrhagic fever which have become increasingly prevalent in the lowlands in the past decade.

It can be expected that the ecological separation which once protected highlanders from these diseases will be lost. The highlanders will be exposed increasingly to lowland diseases. These examples suggest the importance of further study and deliberate consideration of the unintended health consequences of ''development'' in the form of increased ease of movement between ecological zones, increased environmental modification in either highland or lowland, and increased transformation of subsistence into cash economies.

Population in the North continues to grow. The rate of growth is declining because of the rapid fall in fertility accompanied by only a slow fall in mortality. Population in the highlands is probably increasing at a more rapid rate than in the lowlands as a result of much higher fertility, in spite of higher mortality.

Net migration to the hills may be at a greater rate than net migration in the lowlands. Interzonal migration is increasing the inter-ethnic competition for land and jobs in both zones Transformation from subsistence to cash economies in the highlands may have the unanticipated and undesired effect of increasing fertility, and development in both zones may be associated with undesired changes in morbidity and mortality conditions.

Continue Agricultural intensification and the role of forestry in northern Thailand E. Chapman Introduction Many of us at this workshop have seen major changes occurring over the past 10 to 20 years in the strength and variety of linkages between the valleys and the hill country of Northern Thailand.

In the s and early s the economies and physical habitat of the lowland Thai were commonly seen as entirely distinct from those of the hill communities, with the two physically separated by a virtual no man's land in the zone of lower slopes between about m and m. Below were the towns and Thai villages focused on wet-rice cultivation. Certainly in the eyes of most observers in the early s. But by the mid s the distinction was becoming blurred: Thai swiddeners in Amphoe Thung Chang, Nan Province, for example.

Population pressure in the Thai lowlands was clearly producing some movement to the inbetween areas of the lower slopes.

In the late s it is a great deal easier to see an overall unity in the land-use systems of Northern Thailand, with the spectacular differences related, in the first instance, to the stage reached in the process of agricultural intensification, which in turn reflects differences in population pressure.

At the ''advanced'' end of the range, even excluding small areas of highly profitable crops, such as lamyai orchards, there are now many lowland villages where irrigated, triple cropping is practiced e. The contrast between these two farming systems is immense. Yet the areas I have in mind, between Amphoe San Patong and Amphoe Chomtong, were only just moving out of a rice monoculture rainy season glutinous rice in early Further north, in the same province Amphoe Fang, Chiang Mai Province some pioneer villages were only then converting swiddens on the low terraces of the valley floor into bunded fields for wet-rice cultivation.

These observations help to emphasize how recent and rapid the process of agricultural intensification has been over the past 10 to 15 years in resource-favoured areas, in the immediate aftermath of malaria eradication and in response to population pressure. Over the period - 70 the region's population seven provinces grew by 88 per cent, to 3. It is not necessary to brief this audience on the many microscale studies which have added so greatly in the past 10 years to our knowledge of swidden agriculture in Northern Thailand Kunstadter, Chapman, and Sabhasri , Geddes ; Hinton Walker Many studies have provided supporting evidence for the applicability of the Boserup historic-demographic model of agricultural change.

High labour costs are always a deterrent. This investment looks high to a villager uncertain over land ownership and often more uncertain about his returns on the labour employed.

In much of the tropical world it has been argued, ''because of the lower labour demands of shifting cultivation, economically rational farmers will not change to permanent-field cultivation without a stimulating force, often the combination of population pressure and degradation of forest fallow'' Clarke , p. Dry season cultivation has expanded symbiotically with the progressive commercialization of lowland farming, and with a rapid expansion of market contacts between villagers, merchants, and towns It has also stimulated a closer appraisal of natural resources, particularly water supplies, and through its generation of cash income, has played a powerful role in increasing the movement of lowland villagers, both within the Northern Region and beyond.

Hill communities, of course, have been only marginally affected by these developments so far. Resources and Agricultural Intensification Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, ''When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. When the Agricultural Census was taken in The sudden surge in second cropping was undoubtedly encouraged by population pressure, but it was helped also by the expansion of Government irrigation schemes under the Royal Irrigation Department.

A fortunate accumulation of irrigation capacity in the Pinq valley near Chianq Mai for the production of profitable dry-season crops was available by the time the need for increased agricultural productivity occurred.

Unhappily, need often occurs before the means of meeting it are available, as in the problems of opium replacement in the higher hill country above 1, m. In the s and s not all lowland villages experienced either the need or the opportunity for agricultural intensification. In Chiang Rai Province the existence of larger holdings and markedly higher rice production per capita in the early s reflected lower population pressure Chapman and so less need for agricultural intensification.

On the other hand, in the lowlands of Nan, and many similar areas of the northern provinces where population pressure was high. Undoubtedly the most advantaged area for agricultural intensification in the s and s has been the central Ping valley south of the city of Chiang Mail Along its western margin.

Even closer to the Nan River, the existence of a narrow, incised flood plain means that gravity flow irrigation is not easily practicable, as it is on the Ping, and so pump irrigation at higher cost and with a greater maintenance problem is required. Thus, opportunities for agricultural intensification have been very unequally distributed and remain heavily concentrated in the Ping, Wang, and Yom valleys.

The lack of irrigation opportunities in many areas has stimulated interest over the past 10 to 15 years in alternative ways for increasing agricultural production from neglected resources in the ''have-not'' areas. An early and most obvious response in the mids. Its success was very limited. More recently-and much more successfully- farmers in Amphoe Pa Sang.

Lamphun Province, have established a mung beans-rice cropping system. To these two instances might be added many other agricultural endeavours, such as the expansion of orcharding. Commercialization of farming has proceeded rapidly over the past two decades in the lowlands.

Just how far the transformation of a subsistence-oriented economy has changed, and is changing, was illustrated last year when farmers in a village near Chiang Mai replaced their traditional rainy season crop of glutinous rice grown for domestic rice supplies with non-glutinous rice for sale, in response to a 25 per cent price differential at harvest.

These efforts at agricultural intensification have depended mainly on villagers' initiatives, in response to resource and market opportunities. In at least three broad instances, however, official agencies have made significant contributions, beyond the scope of village endeavours. First, the Thai-Australian Land Development Project in Nan, Phrae, and Lampang has tackled the problems of establishing permanentficid cultivation on sandy podsolic soils: although limited to gentle slopes preferably less than 3 to 4 degrees , in order to reduce the costs of erosion control, it has successfully established permanent-field cultivation of upland rice, mung beans.

Secondly, the Multiple Cropping Project of Chiang Mai University in association with the Ford Foundation, has tested alternative three-crop systems suitable for the irrigated lowland environment.

Thirdly, and so far the most significant of the three, the important contributions made by the Ministry of Agriculture in the introduction of faster-maturing. The remarkable timeliness of these developments, providing opportunities for increased production when they were suddenly needed in response to population growth, should not allow us to forget the lead-up time and effort involved, for example in the 10 to 15 years before RD 1 was introduced or irrigation water flowed through the Taeng River canal.

Furthermore, bearing in mind the concern of this workshop with efficient use of resources and with highland-lowland relationships in resource use, we may ask what major problems have emerged so far in the process of agricultural intensification in the lowlands.