The Vanishing Currency of a Bhutanese Village

Growing up in rural Bhutan, the richest people in the village often had very little cash. They were known as chukpo, 'the ones with cattle'. And no one asked how much money a person had in the bank. No one or only a countable few had bank accounts, anyway. Wealth was measured in fields, cattle, grains, and the ability to carry a family through the seasons.

Cash existed, but it played only a small role. Most exchanges happened through barter. Rice for chillies, soya beans for Sichuan peppers, cheese for eggs. I still remember that a ball of homemade cheese was worth two fresh eggs. Nobody needed a calculator because people simply knew.

The most remarkable part of the system was the exchange of labour. During sowing and planting seasons, families needed extra hands, yet labour was rarely paid in cash. If I spent three days helping on your farm, you spent three days helping on mine in return. No contract was needed to be signed. No money changed hands. Wealthier households sometimes rewarded work with butter or cheese—goods that carried value precisely because they were hard to produce but widely desired.

The system depended on trust. As a boy, I remember watching neighbours arrive in our field before sunrise during planting seasons carrying their own spades and other farm tools. Nobody discussed payment because everybody already knew how the system worked. When their turn came, we would do the same. People remembered who had helped whom: who showed up at the harvest or who lent a hand while transplanting paddies. Looking back, the village economy depended as much on relationships as it did on land, livestock, and grain.

Then the cash economy arrived. Roads were built. Shops sprung. Our schools produced graduates who found work beyond their villages in cities. Farmers reached larger markets, and butter and cheese were no longer exchanged within the village. They now found markets in towns and cities.

From an economic perspective, this was progress. From a social one, it was more complicated. A farmer who once traded butter for labour now preferred to sell the butter and hire workers. Labour itself became a commodity, and the old system of reciprocal work began to weaken. Today many farmers must pay cash to men and women to plant and harvest. The young often look for work elsewhere rather than join the agricultural cycle. Cattle, once a symbol of wealth, have become a burden for some families because they now require time and constant care in a world that increasingly rewards mobility.

But the arrival of cash did more than change how people traded. It also changed what people valued. Prosperity, once measured in fields and herds and standing among neighbours, is now measured in larger houses, salaried family members, vehicles, the latest smartphones. A herd grazing on a hillside no longer carries the status it once did.

The change is understandable. Modern life runs on cash. Phones need data plans, children need school supplies, electricity bills arrive every month, and travel costs money. Goods that were once simply unavailable in the village are now available. And so, labour follows cash. A young man who once helped in the fields finds better pay on a construction site or a government project, and the reciprocal exchanges that sustained village agriculture grow rarer each year.

Many families now own vehicles, smartphones, and modern houses. Yet some fields that fed entire households a generation ago sit untouched. The village possesses more consumer goods than ever before but produces less of what it once produced for itself—and now buys from outside what it once grew.

The old system was far from perfect. Village life meant hard work and narrow horizons, and few would willingly give up modern healthcare, education, or transport. The new system offers real opportunity. Yet something valuable slipped away. When labour became something to buy rather than something to exchange, the relationships that once held village life together began to loosen. The economy had rewarded cooperation as much as productivity; wealth was measured not only by what a person owned, but by the strength of the bonds around them.

Today money moves more efficiently than butter, cheese, or labour ever could. Whether it has strengthened our lives as much as it has simplified our transactions remains an open question.

Today money moves more efficiently than butter, cheese, or labour. It has brought convenience, opportunity, and mobility. Yet there was once another form of wealth in the village, one that could not be stored in a bank account. It was measured in trust, reciprocal labour, and the expectation that help given would one day be returned.