ABSTRACT
Thailand and Vietnam have done relatively well in terms of containing the COVID-19 pandemic. While hundreds of thousands of cases and thousands of deaths have been registered in Indonesia and the Philippines, Vietnam's number of cases was only 2550 (and only 35 deaths) and Thailand 26, 679 (85 deaths) by 15 March 2021. Nevertheless, it is also important to investigate to what extent weaker sections of society have been affected by the pandemic. As is widely known, the pandemic and lockdowns have led to dramatic socioeconomic upheavals. In this chapter attention is paid to relatively under-researched groups: farmers, fishers and their households. How have they fared amidst economic disruptions? Whereas the media has focused on the impact of lockdowns on urban areas, this chapter highlights livelihood challenges as experienced in rural areas based on 240 semi-structured interviews with farmers and fishers in southern Thailand and northern Vietnam conducted between July 2020 and February 2021. Results show that domestic trade in farm products and both domestic and international trade in seafood were battered by demand slumps, lockdowns and the collapse of the Thai tourism industry. Factors that co-determine the intensity of impacts are socioeconomic status, the crops farmers grow, the size of fishing vessels and numbers of boat crews, jobs and opportunities of relatives and age. This chapter contributes to debates on the nature of poverty reduction given concerns that the pandemic is currently undoing years of progress in middle-income countries and offers options for further empirical and policy-oriented research. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.