Palaung FAQ

I’ve been asked to explain the nature of our work with the upland Palaung villagers with whom we are partnering in the CSA project. Here are a few questions and answers for a start.

1. Who are the Palaung?

As I understand it, they’re not actually “Palaung” at all. They call themselves Dara-Ang. The Shan, and following them, the Burmese, call them “Palaung,” as they’re also known by Westerns. But we’ll start calling them Dara-Ang.

They come from the Shan State of Burma. I’ve read that the Dara-Ang, like their Mon-Khmer speaking relatives the Wa, Khamu and Lawa (living mainly in Burma, Laos and Thailand, respectively) are some of the “original” people of the region. The major Dara-Ang population lives along the border between Burma and China, north of Lashio. Some say they’re the world’s original tea growers. Certainly, in northern Shan State, they’re known for their excellent tea, which they grow on terraces high in the mountains.

Loong Nam Saeng said that the several thousand Dara-Ang in Thailand actually hail from an area in south-central Shan State west of the Salween River. His village was a day’s walk from Mong Pan valley. The people we are beginning to work with live in Pang Daeng Nai village in Chiang Dao District, Chiang Mai Province. It’s about 70 km north of Chiang Mai city.

2. What are they doing in Thailand?

The Dara-Ang left Burma in the late 1970s and early 1980s, fleeing warfare between the Burma Army and several different rebel armies and narco-traffickers. This was the time of notorious Khun Sa’s consolidation of control over the heroin trade of the Golden Triangle. The Dara-Ang were caught between the rock of Burmese oppression and the hard place of ethnic upheaval. They never knew which marauding army was going to arrive to grab their sons as porters and their rice, chickens and pigs as food. They say that the landscape was better for growing and finding food than their current home in Thailand, but the politics was a real mess and they had to leave.

Pang Daeng Nai video

3. What’s their status in Thailand?

Some of the younger ones have Thai citizenship, but most have some sort of alien-residence card, allowing them either permanent or temporary residence in Thailand, depending on the type of card. They technically live in a state forest reserve and have no legal title to the homes they live in or the land they farm. That does not mean that they’re in imminent danger of being evicted, but the situation is not a great incentive for good land stewardship.

Because of their vulnerability, the Dara-Ang in the past were preyed upon by unscrupulous Thai villagers and authoritarian state officials. A particularly harsh example occurred in the early 80s. As the elders tell it, one early morning a group of forestry and other officials showed up telling the men they were to be given citizenship cards and blankets. They needed only get in the trucks and come to town to register. Upon arrival in town, they were thrown into jail with no due process and locked up for three years. During their detention, the women were hired by the forest department for slave wages to plant teak trees in their own rice fields. Today the village is surrounded by a sterile and unproductive monoculture of teak, while the villagers farm more difficult sloping land farther afield.

4. How do they make a living?

That’s a good question, and we don’t really know yet. One of the objectives of this project is to partner with some people and organizations who are helping farmers with bookkeeping. By teaching accounting skills, the farmers can better understand the economics of their work, as well as more efficient alternatives.

The simple answer is to say that they are farmers. But we know that such a simple answer really blurs the reality of the Thai countryside. People farm one day, do wage labor the next day, then earn some money working with an NGO the next. They sell stuff to tourists or buyers or each other. A lot of the young people are working in the towns.

The men we know the best in the village, two brothers named Loong (uncle) Yord and Nam Saeng, do various things to get by. Nam Saeng told us during our last visit that he grows enough rice for six months out of the year. That means he needs to make enough money for half a year of rice for the family, in addition to all the other things they need: school expenses for the kids, medicine, petrol for motorbikes, ceremonies, etc.

One way they earn cash is to plant field crops like feed maize and peanuts. They’re generally dependent upon buyers who drive up to the village and buy their crop for a ridiculously low price. They also work in the fields of neighboring villages, or sometimes for construction projects. Nam Saeng spent eight years as a novice monk in Burma, and he now acts as a Buddhist layman leader in ceremonies, which earns him a little money. The women weave scarves and things or buy knick knacks to sell to tourists who infrequently visit the village. They really don’t have many good options to earn a living.

5. What’s the environment like?

It’s a beautiful place in a lot of ways, full of limestone crags thick with greenery and gallery forests along the streams with trees like forest mango and bamboo thickets. The villagers work hard to keep the village neat and green. But the villagers complain about decreasing yields from a hard-tasked soil. Some of the steep exposed hills don’t require a soil science Ph.D to inspire worry.

6. Is anyone trying to help?

We’ve come to know the place through the good work of the Upland Holistic Development Project (UHDP). They’ve been working in the village for most of ten years on things like agroforestry, integrated upland farming, backyard agriculture, citizenship and other useful things. Through a process of mutual learning, they worked together with the villagers to research and develop low-input and biodiverse approaches to dealing with local problems of land scarcity, soil degradation, food security and other big issues. Today you can see the difference. Some fields are rocky and unproductive, burning in the unforgiving sun of the Hot Dry and racing with runoff from the Rains. Others are lush with indigenous and edible palms, peppers, bamboo, bananas and fruit trees, and peanut fields cut with contour strips of pineapple and coffee. These good things are the legacy of partnership between the Dara-Ang and UHDP.

One thing we hope to do is help complement UHDP’s R&D work with market research and extension, showing the Dara-Ang that their hard work in good land stewardship is appreciated by consumers.

7. What’s next?

A lot. We have a workshop to organize in the village and another one on the farm to which some of the villagers will be invited. Tu and Non will visit soon to learn more about the productive potential of the place to meet future CSA demand. We need to develop recipes and cooking parties and propaganda to convince our customers to experiment with the Dara-Ang’s agroforest products. And all of this will involve a lot more time in the beautiful hills of Chiang Dao. No hardship!