Rice for Fish Project: Transregional Food Reciprocity Network during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Thailand

Paper Abstract: After Thailand's implementation of full-scale national lockdown and curfew measures, many communities, mainly the rural areas, experienced the severest food security problem in history. Those government measures restrained the pandemic but also caused the problems of income reduction and joblessness. Furthermore, Thai people also criticised the failure of Thai government to cope with the pandemic, particularly the difficulties in food access due to the lockdowns and curfews, and many of them later initiated food-sharing projects in diverse ways. This study explores the food reciprocity project among indigenous people of Thailand called 'Rice for Fish', which connected the Karen in the Northern provinces, the sea people in the South, and the Northeastern peasants. It interrogates the transregional interconnections and the practices of these marginal people to cope with food scarcity problems by questioning how or under what conditions this transregional network had been formed and the processes of these food reciprocity practices. Methodologically, it combines fieldwork research in Tub Tawan village, Takua Pa subdistrict, Phang Nga province, a center of sea people in this network, and documentary research through deeply investigating newspapers, articles, and official reports. It found that the emergence of Rice for Fish networks linked to 1) the sharing sense of subalternity within Thai polities and 2) the self-representation as a cultural and environmental preserver. Rice for Fish project, on the other hand, was a nonlinear network that assembled different actors from various sectors. Moreover, those actors interacted with each others in the 'mutualism' way.