Baan Rongwhai is empty -- and it has been for years. Out of the 280 families in this village in Chiang Rai's Wiangchai district, 200 men are abroad, working as hired labour in Taiwan and South Korea. After working for two years in Taiwan, Wichai Sripho, 33, returned to Baan Rongwhai with enough money to buy a piece of land and a house for his family. Eager to earn more money, he then went to South Korea to work, this time illegally.

Although the number of Baan Rongwhai men overseas is unusually high -- it works out to a bit less than one man per family -- the trend is the same throughout the country, whether the village is situated up in the north or nestled along the coastline of southern Thailand. The men have left their villages, gone to cities, to foreign countries, aiming to fulfil their dreams of buying land, houses, cars, motorcycles; hoping to live an assured future.

These dreams, however, may not come true -- and it won't be the first time.

Just how good have the past 10 years been to rural communities? Chatichai Choonhavan took up the reins of government in 1989 and immediately began concentrating on turning Thailand into a newly-industrialised country. "Thailand can no longer be considered a poor country when even a hilltribesman can own a pick-up truck,'' he said blandly and began encouraging development along the lines of the trickle-down theory, that as the rich got richer, the poor would become a little less poor.

Even as the income gap between the rich and poor widened, Chatichai continued to promote industrial growth in every corner of rural Thailand. From 1990, the country's rice growing provinces, including Ayutthaya, Saraburi and Lopburi, were turned into concentrated industrial zones, which then gushed into other major provinces in the North, Northeast and South.

Chuan Leekpai, Chatichai's successor, followed the same path by declaring promotional industrial zones in 59 other provinces. Chatichai's ideology was no different, however, from development policies of the governments of the previous three decades. Thailand was among the countries that adopted the quick-growth free-market economic policy spearheaded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Nevertheless, sky-rocketing land prices, mushrooming factories, brand-new houses and motor vehicles became the symbols of development in the early 1980s.

Like Chatichai, villager Preecha Laosrikij, 40, appreciates the free-market policy. He said he feels grateful to the Chatichai government because it boosted land prices. Preecha gained Bt1.6 million from selling a part of his land in Nakhon Ratchasima Pak Chong district in 1990. The Bt1.6 million kept Preecha out of debt when his farm failed. And he also kept part of his land for his future.

Although the government achieved the target of economic development during the seventh national plan (1992-1996) with an average economic growth rate of 7.8 per cent a year over the past three decades, economic activities and prosperity were still concentrated in metropolitan areas and suburbs. The Northeast in particular recorded the lowest household income.

The World Bank report in 1997 stated that poverty is increasingly concentrated in rural areas with 94 per cent of the country's poorest group living in remote villages.

Pleung Kongkaew, a teacher at Wichien Matu School in Trang, sees Preecha as a member of a group of few ''lucky ones'' who know how to benefit from opportunity. The majority in rural communities nationwide are losers from the free-market economic policy.

Pleung reflected that during the past decade of rural development, people in the southern provinces have suffered three major losses. Natural resources -- the fish in the sea and the products of the forests -- have rapidly disappeared because of the government-promoted rapid economic growth policy. Worse, the rewards have not been fairly distributed but concentrated in the hands of the privileged and the powerful. Villagers have also lost their capital, such as land. Pleung cited intensive shrimp farming, which was heavily promoted by the Fisheries Department in the early 1990s, as a major cause of land loss and a force pushing villagers into a debt cycle when the harvest was not successful.

The greatest loss was the family, Pleung said. When people are in debt and can no longer depend on natural resources, they leave their families and communities to find new means of survival. Working in urban areas or overseas became a viable alternative to farm work and seasonable labour at home 10 years ago. People left, said Sawai Nukaew, 45, a farmer in Ubon Ratchathani's Trakan District, because the Agriculture Ministry's policies have been inconsistent, forcing people out of their communities.

District agricultural officers, he said, swing back and forth in their directives, telling farmers one day to plant jasmine rice, then on other days encouraging fruit orchards, bamboo plantations and pig and cattle farms. ''They said they wanted us to do integrated farming,'' Sawai said. The farmers took out loans -- Sawai's was Bt60,000 -- but in many cases the farms failed.

''We were left alone with all the debt,'' he said.

The farmers accepted this top-down approach. After all, someone has always told rural communities what to do; all government mechanisms in rural provinces from village headmen to provincial governors, from school teachers to tambon agriculture officers left the farmer little to decide on his own. At times, without experience in planning or decision-making, villagers have tended to make the shortest-term decision.

When the Chiew Larn Dam was constructed by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand in the early 1990s, villagers in Tambon Reeled in Surat Thani's Punpin district found they could not grow rice any longer because the dam allowed salt water to intrude into the farms. Most of the villagers then turned to intensive shrimp farming and trawling promoted by the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives. Each villager received a loan -- ''several hundred thousands of baht'', said headman Manas Pholcharoen. Instead of using the money to develop the fishing or the shrimp farming, the villagers used most of the money to buy anything they wanted, mainly luxuries.

''The money came and went quickly,'' Manas said, ''and now, the debt is larger than our income.''

In Lamphun's Tambon Makhua Jae, only two out of the cluster of 16 villages still own farmland. The other villages sold the land that was with their families for years after an industrial estate was established nearby in the early 1990s.

''We had no other choice,'' said Bamrung Wongwarn. He and his neighbours had to pay off debts when their farm produce was unprofitable. ''But the money has gone too quickly. Some of us built new houses and bought motorbikes, and then we realised that we had no more money,'' he said.

The rural sector, however, may no longer have agriculture as its major focus. Dr Ammar Siamwalla, former president of Thailand Development Research Institute, pointed out that 80 per cent of the income of rural villagers is from non-agricultural activity.

''Industry and services have become people's major source of quick and easy money. A lot of people have given up the independent way of life and become cheap labour,'' he said. Yet industry and services depend on a strong economy, and these sources of income may be drying up in the wake of the crash of regional economies.

Back in Baan Rongwhai in Chiang Rai, Wichai has just returned home for the second time. His job in South Korea is gone -- the result of the crash of the South Korean economy.

''The factory where I worked closed, and I didn't even receive last month's salary,'' said Wichai. He's dazed, saddened, grim. His dream is gone, his alternatives as well.

Part 2 looks at people struggling to find alternatives to mainstream development, where bargaining power and local wisdom contribute to quality of life -- and an individual's pride.