Colonisation and Commodification

This thesis is premised on the urgency of addressing the problems confronting small-scale producers in the vicinity of the city, and small-business traders within the city, in Bangkok’s contemporary urban food metabolism. These problems were significantly exacerbated by the decision of the Thai government in 2012 to turn its agricultural industry into its main export business, as part of the development project ‘Thailand: Kitchen of the World’. The development of agricultural business as a principle economic driver has increased the amount of production in the country; however, it is large-scale agricultural business that heavily dominates the food supply chain, and which has taken advantage of the scale of production available to them to reduce product prices. Smallscale businesses involved in the production of raw ingredients and cooked food have struggled to compete within the price-oriented economy. In order to understand the cause of this contemporary market system, it is necessary to trace the emergence of the colonial market system in the history of South East Asia. Food production in Southeast Asia since the Colonial period has been governed, manipulated and managed through the paradigm of commodity. A commodity, as Marx suggests in Das Kapital, is an object that has an ability to satisfy humans’ needs and which consists of two properties: its use value and its exchange value. The colonial trading system transformed the use value of crops from products for eating into an object to be commodified. As the free market system consolidates the exchange value of food as commodity, food trading has been dominated by the industrialised large-scale food company, controlling the entire supply chain from seeds to the distribution channels of modern trade supermarkets. Consequently, independent, small-scale farmers are usually deprived of resources - land, water, labour, production equipment and capital - due to their lack of competitive power in the commodified food system. One attempt to counter this system was the establishment by Siam’s autocratic government of agricultural cooperatives in the rural area in the beginning of twentieth century. It identified the problem of rural farmers who were devoid of capital, necessarily relying on money lending or advances, and inevitably charged high interest rates for the privilege. The aim of the government, on the one hand, was to offer a lower interest credit which could reduce the cost invested in production and, on the other hand, to use the cooperative as a politico-economic tool to organise the money lending and debt repayment of farmers1. The first cooperative was established in Phitsanulok, an under-utilised part of the country, to support the newly settled community and encourage internal migration to the area, which could in turn increase the productivity of the land2. Nowadays, the agricultural cooperative movement is well recognised, organised and supported by the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives. As such, the cooperative movement in Thailand is widely practiced. An agricultural cooperative consists of a group of farmers who grow similar crops and pool their resources in order to access means of production such as fertiliser, farming tools,

1 Masahiro, Yamao, Cooperative Movement in Thailand: Towards the Establishment of Cooperatives Society Act in 1968 [南太平洋研究=South Pacific Study, Vol.13, No.2] p. 187 2 The History of Cooperative Movement in Thailand (ประวัติการสหกรณ์ ในประเทศไทย) <http:// www.sahakornthai. com/prasat/index.php/

3 Rawes, Peg, Housing Biopolitics and Care, Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy, (dinburgh University Press, 2017) p.81 money loans and distribution channels through the cooperative shop. Each cooperative manages to collectively assemble the means of production to reduce costs, such as a rice mill for rice farmer cooperatives and a slaughterhouse for livestock cooperatives. The cooperative also acts as a middleman trader, buying products from members to secure a certain price standard. However, it still lacks a direct distribution channel to consumers. While the infrastructural support from contemporary cooperatives is widely practiced in the rural areas of food production, the distribution channels remain highly controlled by the municipality and private company. The Department of Agricultural Extension, responsible for supporting agricultural cooperatives, has attempted to establish programs to promote a better distribution model by increasing the quantity of sales by cooperatives, farmers’ market events, and skill and knowledge trainings for farmers; however, there is still a lack of support for traders in the city. Rather, urban traders often encounter the harsh response of eviction from their operable selling locations, and are relocated to the constructed market buildings. This thesis recognises the market architecture as an infrastructure for food distribution in the city. The space of the market that accommodates an agglomeration of small-business traders and buyers as public activities can be reconceptualised through the operation of cooperative organisations with alternative forms of ownership, management and type. It offers an alternative market typology that facilitates and promotes the social value of the community, and connects local neighbourhoods to communities in a wider periphery. By re-examining the architectural typology of the market hall in Bangkok, the research undertaken in this thesis reveals how it became instrumentalised by the authorities for the organisation and control of trading activities performed by sellers and buyers. The Bangkok Metropolitan Authority, a municipal body responsible for the erection of market halls, used them as a tool to control vendors, forcing them to sell in a way deemed, from authoritative eyes, appropriate. The standardisation in Ministerial Regulation on the Sanitation of Marketplace 2008 is highly focused on regulating both the architecture of, and the bodily control in the market hall. The current standard can be recognised as a generic distribution of the minimum provision of infrastructure: stall, circulation, water supply, electricity, drainage system, roof, lighting and ventilation, which is not humane3. The model does not address how traders actually use the space both physically and temporally, which raises the question: how can one redesign the current market typology in a way that orients it towards the main user of such a space? How could the standardisation, rather than acting as a controlling apparatus, allow instead for the possibility of variation and appropriation by the users?

As the thesis reconceptualises the market as an interface between urban and rural communities, the cooperative organisation could be an agent to challenge the current idea of market architecture. This thesis’ redefinition of market architecture, explored here as a