環境情報学部兼政策・メディア研究科教授 ティースマイヤ・リン
学術交流支援資金 22年度（2010年）最終報告書
研究題名：
“Economic Causes and Outcomes of Disastrous Climate Change in the Upper GMS”
1) Research contents
This research consisted of primary on-site and secondary (data and material-based) research with a team of researchers from Japan and Asia. The topic was the effect of disastrous climate change on the local and informal economies, as well as the environmental resources, in the northern tier of ASEAN countries. This is an ongoing and vast problem, and this year’s research was the attempt to capture the current changes in specific local areas of southern China, Northern Myanmar and Northern Thailand. For the purposes of comparison a baseline observation was first made in June at a farm in Tochigi-ken where the heat and dryness had not yet had a measurable effect.
The research focus was on current or former food-producing and food-selling areas that have, due to disastrous climate change, become less able or unable to produce enough food for subsistence or income. The disastrous climate changes surveyed in the past year were the severe drought until August 2010 and the severe flooding that followed from August until the late autumn in the areas mentioned.
The areas surveyed included remote, entirely agricultural areas without infrastructure, agricultural areas closer to towns having infrastructure and market access, and urban areas that are dependent on procuring agricultural products. Survey methods were interdisciplinary, including scientific sampling and chemical analysis of soil and water as well as qualitative interviews and analysis of information provided by local residents affected by climate change. The effect of climate change on the subsistence environment was presumed to be the worsening infertility of the soil, extreme heat causing damage to health, and the drying up of water resources. The samples and interviews attempted to find if these were true or not according to the local producers, traders, and consumers; and, where true, to ascertain how the local livelihoods were affected and what coping strategies were used.
Hypotheses and survey targets were as follows.
l The secondary data, including satellite images and consumer cost measurements, showed the rapid expansion of dry and severely dry areas in southern China, throughout Myanmar, and in northern Laos. This included the extreme shortage of rainfall in these areas. It was hypothesized that there were several factors contributing simultaneously and cumulatively to the drought, including large-scale dam construction upstream on the Mekong; deforestation for agricultural and industrial development plans; and overuse of agricultural chemicals.
l Livelihood effects caused by the drought mentioned above included:
① Greatly reduced production of rice and wheat. In the case of subsistence farming, the result was to conserve the crop for self-consumption, resulting in little or no income from market activity.
② In the case of market-oriented production, the result was a rapid increase in food price at the market itself which was not proportionally reflected in the prices that the producers were able to obtain.
③ Here another effect was that of making food as well as market-based economic activity less available or more costly due to increased rent-seeking activities by middlemen in the trade.
l Primary data included samples of rural environmental resources (soil, water, air) and interview sampling with local residents, traders, farm workers, and consumers. These led to the following hypotheses:
① Resources: dryness leading to possible desertification, and lack of nutrients in the soil, resulting in low productivity. Stagnation and reduction of water resources, leading to eutrophication and pollution. Possibility of greater use of chemical inputs to counteract the effect of dryness, with the added effect of a cycle of soil degradation.
② Regional environmental impact on economy: Drought caused temporary closing of the Mekong River to navigation and trade for a period of nearly 3 months. For the countries and regions directly dependent on the large volume of the river trade—southern China, northern and eastern Thailand, and northern and central Laos—the economies of both buyers and sellers, and well as of the transport companies and workers themselves, would have been severely affected, as would consumer prices.
③ Reduction in subsistence related to dryness and subsequent flooding would lead to insecurity in rural, food-producing areas of southern China and Myanmar. There should be market insecurity based on lack of food and other rural products heavily affected by disastrous climate change.
④ Increase in malnutrition and morbidity due to food shortages, lack of agricultural subsistence, and extreme heat and water shortages.
⑤ Increases in the number and volume of migrant laborers seeking not only alternative sources of income after the reduction in market trade from climate change; but also seeking food, other basic needs, and services that had become less accessible due to the drought and subsequent flooding.
⑥ Increase in cross-border and illegal migration, for the reasons mentioned above.
2) Research activities / participants’ duties / travel
The preliminary, baseline observation took place in late June on a large cooperative teaching farm in Tochigi (那須塩原) whose volunteers and staff are Japanese and from rural areas of developing countries.
Research travel for the main on-site surveys took place in August and September of 2010. Research team members included 2 from Japan (慶応義塾大学のティースマイヤ・リン＝団長とヒューマンエコロジー調査の役割、東海大学化学研究科の関根嘉香＝化学物質のサンプリングや分析役割、1 from Taiwan(台湾国立中正大学政策研究科助教授李水萍＝社会調査の役割) and 1 from Myanmar（アジア開発研究所のセット・アウン氏、経済調査の役割）。
Participants traveled to rural northern Thailand and then to Kunming in southern China and finally to Mandalay and Shan State in Upper Burma, then back to rural Thailand. Samples were made at each location of soil, air and water. Local specialists were consulted in Thailand and China to ascertain the current severity of climate change on food and rural jobs; and the predicted effects in terms of food shortages, water shortages, increased commodity prices, rent-seeking, and alternative job-seeking.
3) Findings
① Environmental and climate-related: there had been a severe shortage of rainfall in the surveyed areas since the autumn of the previous year (2009). This, combined with global warming and local environmental management issues (overuse of chemicals and deforestation), resulted in a seemingly sudden and disastrous change in the agricultural environment, and therefore food production, agricultural income, and consumption.
Stagnation of agricultural-use water resources and pollution from the run-off of chemical inputs.
Continued, or increased, use of chemical inputs among the most heavily impacted farmers to compensate for the lack of irrigation water and rainfall.
Changes in soil composition, which can affect cultivation and productivity in the near future.
② For southern China, Laos, and Myanmar, dependent to a greater or lesser extent on river trade, the temporary closing of the Mekong to navigation had an adverse effect on small-scale trade, trade transporters, producers and consumers. For Thailand, whose trade has included other kinds of transport, the effect was not measurable.
③ Increase in the number of malnutrition cases, especially among children due to food shortages and lack of agricultural productivity. Increase in mortality due to extreme heat and dehydration, especially among the elderly. This research estimates that in Myanmar alone, approximately 1,000 people per day died at the peak of the drought and heat (May through July), based on the figure of 100 persons’ mortality per day in Mandalay (north central) and Pathein (delta).
④ Increase in cross-border and illegal migration, including to or from very distant locations and through hazardous and physically exacting means. Rural informants mentioned itinerant workers having walked from India and Bangladesh, where drought started earlier, into Myanmar or even Thailand looking for plantation work. This would have entailed illegal migration through hazardous physical terrain and possibly hostile officials or border dwellers. From China, a surprisingly large number of low-skill, low-education rural workers were interviewed on or near Myanmar plantations where they had come to look for work and food. These workers had been transported by trucks owned by middlemen recruiting for local employers. For them, as well as their employers, in the situation of the continuing global economic recession as well as the immediate situation of falling productivity and rising costs, it made sense for the workers to re-locate to an area where, though poor, there were more basic resources than in their home villages, and for the employers to hire non-local, even illegal workers at lower wages in order to keep their production costs down.
One preliminary conclusion to be drawn from these findings is that the current regional agriculture-based economy is adapting to the global recession and to climate change through temporary and cost-cutting strategies for small-scale producers, workers, traders and consumers, by producing substandard and cheaper goods and encouraging informal and illegal cross-border livelihood migration. These strategies, however, are unlikely to form the basis of a sound economy in the 21st century and will more likely lead to wider gaps between so-called rich in the urban areas and the poor in the remote agricultural areas.
Further, such cost-reduction strategies also result in further environmental degradation. The rapidly desertification and salinization of soil, evaporation of water resources, and rising temperature are proceeding much more quickly than in developed countries. They are also being pushed by the strategies mentioned above, particularly those of overuse of cheaper, and more toxic, chemical inputs in agriculture and the deforestation that accompanies urgent searches for economically productive space and resources. Past initiatives undertaken by national governments, such as dam-building, plantation agriculture and the building of roads and industrial parks also provided temporary solutions to the lack of income and jobs as well as boosting the export economy of the region, but they have also led to the deforestation and spread of chemical inputs that now threaten the water and food of the whole ASEAN region. Current initiatives are taking place at the local, small-scale level, where national-government welfare assistance under the current recession would be too slow to reach. They also rely heavily on deforestation, in this case for the illegal sale of timber, and on chemical inputs that dry and degrade the soil and air, making them rapidly less useful than before.
To avoid continued dependence on developed-country export markets, themselves still impacted by recession, and to evolve national and regional economies that are resistant to large-scale shocks such as disastrous climate change, will require a closer and more serious look at the participation of the most severely-impacted local economies and their workers within the region’s activity.
