Central govt meddling no forest remedy

A boy sits on a poster calling for community rights to manage land use and forest during one of the street protests. (Photo by Sanitsuda Ekachai)

The Prayut Chan-o-cha administration has vowed to be the first government to end land rights conflicts in Thailand once and for all through its nationwide communal land use policy. Can it? Mae Tha, the first forest community under this system, has the answer.

"Mae Tha community still does not have land rights, nor the right to develop our community according to our needs," said Kanoksak Duangkaewruan, an advocate of community rights and chairman of the Mae Tha Tambon Organisation Administration in Chiang Mai.

Sanitsuda Ekachai is former editorial pages editor, Bangkok Post.

"For example, Mae Tha is not allowed to build roads people want. The villagers cannot even build a pig farm for community consumption. We cannot cut the trees we grow to use or to sell either. Why? Because the governor officially owns the land, not us. He insisted we couldn't go ahead with our plans because our land lacks official ownership status.

"We're stuck," he lamented, evidently frustrated with top-down bureaucracy.

A valley community in Chiang Mai's Mae On district, Mae Tha is well-known for its forest conservation and organic farming. Constant forest eviction threats, however, led Mae Tha to join P-Move, a grassroots land rights movement, to fight for participatory community land ownership or chanot chum chon in Thai.

Under the chanot chum chon system, villagers can use their land but cannot sell it. Land and forest use, as well as forest conservation, are under participatory and transparent communal management and oversight.

Community land ownership is part of P-Move's bottom-up policy package to tackle state violence against the forest poor, landlessness and glaring land ownership disparity in Thailand. Other policies include progressive land tax for equitable land distribution and the Land Bank to help landless farmers.

In a country of 67 million people, three million own 80% of land titles, said Prayong Doklamyai, a land reform advocate and adviser to P-Move.

"Meanwhile, 50 million people do not own any land at all. This scandalous disparity makes it difficult for society to be peaceful," he said during the "Forest is Our Life" conference calling for community-led forestry and land reform.

State violence is part of life for more than 10 million people living in forests. Although many of them have lived in the forests for generations, they have been outlawed by draconian forest laws and forced to live under constant threat of eviction and arrest.

"Over 7,000 villagers are arrested each year for being 'forest encroachers'. That's 21 people suffering injustice every day," said Mr Prayong.

After countless street protests and persistent land reform demands, the Abhisit Vejjajiva government reluctantly agreed to give P-Move's policy proposals a try in 2011. Some 400 communities, including Mae Tha, were promised chanot chum chon community land rights while the progressive tax and Land Bank proposals went back to the drawing board.

After the 2014 coup d'etat, hopes collapsed.

From day one, the junta launched a new round of violent forest evictions to "reclaim the forests" from the "encroachers". Forest authorities are thrilled. For them, this is a chance to evict the forest communities under P-Move and end their challenge to centralised forest management once and for all.

Meanwhile, the Land Bank for the landless has been diluted to become just another commercial bank. The progressive land tax -- the withholding of tax for all land and property under 50 million baht -- ended up supporting landlords and land speculation while robbing local governments of tax income, further eroding administrative decentralisation.

To kill the land rights push from grassroots groups, the junta handpicked Mae Tha in 2015 to showcase its mandate on communal land use called Khor Thor Chor, a Thai abbreviation of the junta's National Land Policy Commission in charge of land use in forest areas.

Mae Tha community leaders said they were pressured to go along with the government's public relations stunt, not knowing they would later lose their say over local development.

In addition, Khor Thor Chor shut out a large number of traditional forest communities in watershed forests. Indigenous forest dwellers continue to be arrested and sent to jail. Many outspoken community leaders have died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

Amid fierce criticism as the general election approaches, the military government launched a new version Khor Thor Chor programme in mid-June this year, hailing it as a solution to land rights conflicts across the board.

According to the government, there are about 10 million people in 2,700 communities in the forest, covering about 20 million rai of forest land.

The new programme does cover communities in all types of forests. It also allows the forest settlements that were excluded from land use permission under the 1998 cabinet resolution and includes communities in watershed forests, national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.

But the devil is in the detail.

For starters, the keywords in the Khor Thor Chor programme are "regulation" and "control" of land use which reject community rights to manage local resources.

Sustainability and forest conservation may be Khor Thor Chor's buzzwords but how to achieve it -- right down to what trees to grow -- are determined by the mandarins.

In addition, the communal plots are called plaeng ruam in Thai, meaning collective farming, which is against local farming practices. Its ambiguity also allows officials to impose land use rules without prior local consultation.

Joint land use surveys between the locals and officials are the prerequisite of Khor Thor Chor. But it's clear that state authorities will have the last say, particularly when they involve the indigenous forest dwellers' rotational farming system which is viewed as slash-and-burn farming by the government.

In addition, the surveys move at a snail's pace due to red-tape, deeply-ingrained animosity against forest dwellers and forest authorities' reluctance to let go of central control.

Mae Chaem, a mountainous district in Chiang Mai, is a case in point.

Since the junta wants to tout Mae Chaem as a successful model, the community believes its bottom-up land use zoning will be accepted. Despite promises and a field visit by the natural resources minister and junta man, the land use survey is stuck in stubborn inaction on the ground.

It's clear. Even the seemingly absolute power of the coup government cannot fight the country's real stumbling block against change -- its centralised bureaucracy.

That's not all.

The Khor Thor Chor land use deal lasts only 30 years and there's no guarantee if it will continue after that, particularly when the administration changes hands.

"What if we grow trees and protect the forest for 30 years and the government takes them away from us again?" asked Kanya Pankitti from the Bantad Mountain forest community network.

Her concern is valid. State betrayal is nothing new to her.

Her village engages in agroforestry and is under chanot chum chon arrangement with the government. Yet forest officials used the junta's forest reclaiming scheme to violently evict the villagers and clear-cut their forest-like rubber holdings, leaving the area bare and plunging the community into deep hardship.

Meanwhile, the fishing communities along the coast have been hardest hit by the top-down Khor Thor Chor scheme.

Citing the need to restore mangrove forests, Khor Thor Chor orders communities to move at least 100 metres away from the coast and at least 20 metres from canals.

This means most fishing villages will be evicted.

A big question arises. Will resorts and hotels along the beach be evicted too? Will double standards be again the name of the game when only the poor is the target?

And why punish small-scale fishermen when the biggest mangrove destroyer is the government's policy to promote prawn farming for export money?

Learning from Mae Tha's Khor Thor Chor ordeal, Nam Phang forest community in Nan province is determined to go ahead with its own land use and forest conservation under communal management.

"We want land security and community-led land use and forest management," said community leader Porawit Khamhom. "Khor Thor Chor cannot give us that."

So what do forest communities want?

"We want to have a say over our land, forest and natural resources," said Ms Kanya.

"Each community has a different topography and way of life," she added. "The government's one-size-fits-all policy doesn't work. We want a policy that allows us to answer different needs on the ground."

To avoid nature's wrath from climate change, research and evidence from around the world clearly show that the key to successful reforestation is community-led forest management. To make it happen, outdated forest laws and bureaucratic systems must change to embrace local communities' participation on equal terms.

It's not happening here.

"The problem is the lack of trust," said Kanoksak Duangkaewruan from Mae Tha, weary of the deeply-ingrained contempt of rural people in mainstream society.

His community has pooled resources to make Mae Tha green with forest and organic farming without state support. "We have proved the villagers can protect our forest homes, yet distrust persists, especially among people in the city," he said.

"That's why the chanot chum chon community rights demand was rejected and replaced by the top-down Khor Thor Chor policy," he added.

Even though Khor Thor Chor is relatively progressive compared with the forest authorities' draconian stance, state resistance to community rights is linked to officialdom's opposition to decentralisation, asserted Mr Kanoksak.

Like other major problems in the country, it remains unsolved because bureaucracy clings on to central power.

Decentralisation is the key, he stressed. "If that happens, if local communities can protect and manage our natural resources, real change will happen."