Beware!  The ASEAN Economic Community, or AEC, will be upon us in 2015.  And if Thailand doesn’t hurry up and get ready, it will lose out, and will be overwhelmed by those economic powerhouses who do these things so much better and more efficiently than Thailand, like, er, Lao.  Or Myanmar.

So what do we have to do to get ready?  Well there seems to be a range of opinion on this but proficiency in English seems to figure prominently in many minds.  I have been told in the most magisterial tones that when AEC 2015 comes into force, every police station in the land will have to be able to handle cases in English.  So all those Cambodian migrants sneaking illegally over the border at Aranyaprathet will, under AEC 2015, have to be booked in a language that neither they nor the arresting officers understand.  And ASEAN will be the stronger for it.

Oodles of government dosh has been spent on English classes for civil servants so that they will be able to compete with the fluent citizens of other ASEAN nations who are threatening to snatch their jobs.  Jobs that don’t actually require English, which do require Thai, and which are only open to Thai nationals anyway.  But this is a race that must be run.  And won.

But hang on a minute.  Let’s just read what it says on the tin.  The AEC aims at a free flow of goods, services and capital, but not labour.  Workers will be able to cross borders freely only if they are ‘skilled’ – a dozen professions where inter-ASEAN competition either already exists or can easily be stifled through local language requirements and the like.  The spectre of hordes of Indochinese and Burmese pouring across the border and into factory and construction jobs, undercutting Thai workers by taking starvation wages, is just a xenophobic fantasy.

But one true believer in the need to gird up the national loins is Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture Yukol Limlamthon.  As Min of Ag with a delight in the word ‘hub’, he sees Thailand becoming the agricultural leader in ASEAN. 

‘With the AEC, we see Thailand becoming a centre that brings in material from other ASEAN economies to export to the world.  Not only will we act as distributor of ASEAN agricultural products, but also we can import food from the rest of the world to feed ASEAN.’ 

So when the Philippines wants to export sugar to the US, or Indonesia imports live cattle from Australia, they will have to send the stuff on a detour to Thailand first, presumably so that Thailand can take a cut.  And if you can’t see any flaws in that idea, there is a promising career for you in the Ministry of Agriculture.

But this pipe-dream is only the beginning for Minister Yukol.  ‘We need to refocus toward ASEAN and change our attitude: we will produce to feed the 600 million within ASEAN, instead of the 65 million in Thailand. This will then serve as a springboard for us to – potentially – feed the world,’ says the Minister.

So the AEC, one of whose goals is ‘equitable economic development’ across ASEAN, will be used by Thailand as an opportunity to throw out of work and into penury first the tens of millions of peasants across the region and eventually hundreds of millions around the word. 

But the Minister’s pie in the sky thinking – sorry, I mean, blue sky thinking does not stop at agriculture.  He now believes that ASEAN integration and harmonization is being thwarted by the fact that Thailand drives on the left while our neighbours Myanmar, Lao, Cambodia, and beyond them Vietnam, drive on the right. 

This means that trucks crossing these land borders have to ‘change engines’, according to the Minister, impeding the free flow of goods, just as when traffic passes through the Channel Tunnel between left-hand Britain and right-hand Europe.  Travellers to Dover and Calais will have of course noted the massive engine-changing facilities required.

No, neither have I.

Now to point out that Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Brunei drive on the same side as Thailand (i.e. half of ASEAN in terms of countries and well over half in terms of vehicles), as do important trading partners like Japan, India and Australia is just the kind of nit-picking detail that will hold Thailand back in its race toward ASEAN harmonization in 2 years’ time.

And why stop with traffic?  The peoples of ASEAN all have black hair and while on most ASEAN heads the strands are straight, there are unfortunate exceptions.  The Orang Asli of Malaysia and the Papuans in farther Indonesia, for example, are blatantly kinky.  Such peoples will have to straighten themselves out of they want to be part of the bright new harmonized ASEAN.

Rice is the dominant staple of this part of the world, so again in the cause of harmony, the urban residents of Lao will have to give up that effete habit of khao chi baguettes for breakfast.

And what about corruption, where countries like Singapore really lag behind?  I am sure that Thailand will contribute training programmes to help bring Singapore up to ASEAN standards.  For a price.

Finally, there is the well-known sociological fact that the cultures of ASEAN have no particular taste for sarcasm.  So I can’t see this column surviving AEC 2015.

About author:  Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).