Keynote: Life Is Easy, Sustainable Living and Saving Seeds

Everything was supposed to get easier. It got harder. Jon Jandai spent seven years in Bangkok working long hours for short money, and could not work out why food, a house, and health had become things you spend a lifetime paying for.

So he went home to his village in Yasothon and tested it. He grew rice. He built a house. He kept the seeds. The numbers surprised him, and they are the spine of this keynote.

Two months of work gave him enough rice to eat for a year. A few minutes a day gave him vegetables. His first house took three months and no debt, on a plot he could afford. Once he stopped buying what he could make, the cost of living stopped setting the pace of his life.

This is not nostalgia for village life. It is an argument about cost. What do we actually pay for convenience, what does self reliance really require, and which parts of it transfer to a life that includes laptops, clients, and a city?

Jon will also make the case for seeds. Pun Pun runs one of Thailand's best known seed saving centres, because a seed you cannot save is a seed someone else owns. Twenty years of teaching people to grow their own food has given him a clear view of where food sovereignty is won and lost.