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Kill neither the Indian nor the Snake

Thais have an old saying stating that if one concurrently encounters an Indian and a snake, one should get rid of the Indian first. The statement may be said in jest but it does reflect an old prejudice against immigrants from the Indian sub-continent who in the old days not only looked quite different but also conducted themselves so differently from the local population: they were tremendously hard-working as well as extremely frugal; they were often money lenders who would make small loans at exorbitant interest rates to people who needed the money urgently.

Instead of holding on to the old prejudice, we Thais should thank immigrants from the Indian sub-continent who gave us a substantive part of our cultural identity. Most of us are Buddhists and know that Buddhism came from there. So did our language as well as much of our style of cooking. Recently, however, we tend to look more towards China, another main source of our cultural identity. This is due perhaps to two main reasons: China has achieved spectacularly rapid development with consistently high rates of economic growth and most successful Thais are of Chinese origin.

But now that the world is facing ever tighter resource constraints, instead of trying to copy everything Chinese, I suggest that we again look west and see what more we can learn from our Indian brothers, especially their patterns of consumption. Although some Indians may show off their wealth in the form of conspicuous consumption, as India has also achieved consistently high rates of economic growth over the past couple of decades, the majority of Indians remain frugal as well as vegetarian. Besides, those who are not strictly vegetarian do not eat beef for they are of the Hindu faith. Most Indians, therefore, have very small ecological footprints on our planet compared to our Chinese brothers who seem to widely show off their wealth in a spectacularly boastful fashion and consume just about everything in sight, or even out of sight, including cobras which play an important ecological role and are highly revered by Indians.

As the spectacular economic growth raises their incomes to an ever higher level, the Chinese seek out more exotic food — shark fin, pangolin meat, rare animal parts, etc. The tremendous adverse impact that such consumption has on the animal population and ecological balances has been often reported. Despite this, the collective ecological footprints of the 1.3 billion Chinese are not known, especially when compared to those of the 1.1 billion Indians. The numbers provided by Fred Pearce in his book, When the Rivers Run Dry: Water – the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century, however, are indicative of the relative impacts of the two peoples.

According to Pearce, it takes 3,000 gallons of water to grow enough feed for a cow to make a quarter-pound hamburger but only 65 gallons to grow a pound of potatoes. Rice consumes the most water compared to other major food crops: it takes between 250 to 650 gallons to grow a pound of rice while the same amount of wheat takes just 130 gallons. Chinese eat more of rice while Indians eat more of wheat. Although he provides no information on growing plants that produce high protein content such as beans and peas, it can be inferred that their water requirements fall somewhere between rice and potatoes.

Despite having a lot of rain during the monsoon season, Thais should be reminded of the precariousness of the world water situation by the unusually low level of water in the Mekong River during the current dry season. And if we continue to follow the world trends in preferring hamburger over beans and peas that the Indians eat more of, our ecological footprint will continue to rise at a time of ever rising pressures on our planet’s ecological system. For this reason, I recommend that we Thais, as well as people all over the world for that matter, look to emulate the consumption patterns of our Indian brothers rather than that of the Chinese for it will help save us from creating ecological disasters in the near future.

Sawai Boonma

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