Resource Scarcity & the Hmong Response
Patterns of Settlement & Economy in Transition

By R.G. Cooper
Sept. 1985
Singapore University Press
ISBN: 9971-69-071-3
328 p.
$36.50 Cloth

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This book traces the response of one mountain minority group - the Hmong (Meo) - to changing environmental circumstances. The Hmong are shown to be adapting their economic and social structure to meet a situation of increasing resource scarcity. Four Hmong villages are selected for study.

Two of these villages represent alternative economies: one continues swidden cash-crop opium production; the other has switched from an opium economy to an economy of permanent terraced rice cultivation and cash-crop cultivation. The third village is in transition from an opium economy to a permanent economy and the fourth represents an attempt by Thai government agencies to promote change from an opium to a permanent economy.

This book will have practical value to development agencies and is relevant to the academic disciplines of anthropology, economics, and geography.

Asian Studies
Economics

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