Village Vignettes 5: The economy

Today, a very quick look at what the village economy is like (from someone who knows very little about economics in general). The economy traditionally has not been based on cash; just about anything you really need can be found in the jungle or grown on the land. Food is grown in gardens (and in the wild); meat can be found in the jungle (e.g. bandicoots and crayfish) or raised around the house (chickens and pigs). There are plenty of building materials in the jungle. Many plants have very useful medical properties to keep you healthy. Land itself is passed on from father to son. Even today, if you live in a village and have no money at all, you’ll survive.

Cities and towns are different. If you don’t have access to the jungle or a garden, you have to buy all your food, rent a house to stay in, pay utility bills, and so on. If you live in town, you might have a job with a decent paycheque, but the cost of living is much higher too. I’ve met a few people already who were educated and had a decent job in town, but went back to village life because they were better off there, even with a significantly lower cash income.

In villages, there is more and more of a cash economy, because there is an increasing number of things that need money to get. People need money to buy certain products, e.g. machetes and mobile phone top-ups. Parents often have a hard time scraping together enough money to pay for their children’s education (there are school fees all the way through elementary school and high school, and although the government is promising free education next year, we’ll have to wait and see what actually happens). At those times of the year when there is less garden produce available, it is nice to have some store-bought food (e.g. rice). Then there are always extras that can be either just a nice treat, or something that can bring in money (e.g. someone might buy a generator and charge people a small fee to charge their cell phones on it).

Sources of income

There are many ways to earn money in the village. I’ve mentioned selling use of a generator. Most villages have at least one family that runs a store, selling basic things like rice, noodles, sugar, and tin meat. Many women bring garden produce to market. Others sell baked goods there (we taught our family how to make cinnamon rolls, and they figure they can make a lot of money selling those because no one else knows how).

The land also produces a lot that can be sold. Our host family was quite busy harvesting cacao. This grows in pods on trees:

The pods are harvested and opened up. Inside are cacao beans, which are then dried:

At this point, the bean itself is quite edible (after peeling off the skin); it tastes like very dark and very bitter chocolate. The dried beans are sold, then ground into cocoa powder, and eventually they’ll find their way into chocolate.

Besides cacao, other sources of income include coffee, copra (coconut oil), and forestry. For many of these things, the people in the village are at the mercy of world market prices. The price of cacao, for example, is about half of what it used to be, and the price of coffee is so low that our host family doesn’t even bother picking theirs, but lets it rot on the trees. Because prices do fluctuate (and there is no insurance and no government bailouts for this sort of thing), people with a bit of foresight will grow several different kinds of crops, so that there is always something with which they can earn a bit of an income.