Peoples, trees, and nationalisms

18 September 2000

Plodprasob Suraswadi wants to be the first forestry chief ever to increase the area under forest. This ambition deserves every support. The question is: how is this to be done.

Two years ago, Chomthong lowland farmers blocked roads and burnt effigies to demand removal of hill peoples from the slopes of Doi Inthanon. Last month one of the Chomthong leaders appeared alongside Plodprasob and deputy minister Newin as part of the "government side" at the Thammasat forum and on TV talk shows. In Nan, lowland farmers raided orchards owned by hill peoples and savaged thousands of lychee trees. Plodprasob endorsed the action by presiding over a replanting drive in the devastated orchard. Similar events are under way in Phu Pan, and brewing in Chiang Dao.

Plodprasob is acquiring a public profile which rivals those of political leaders. He oozes the confidence of a solid bureaucratic background and roots in the old local nobility. He has the education, looks, dress sense, and fluency which appeal to the Bangkok public. He performs well on TV talk shows. His simple message makes a lot of sense. He has been nicknamed "Rambo" after Stallone’s populist hero. This is very telling. Plodprasob is becoming a populist technocrat of a new breed.

His alliance with the lowland farmers is based on a common desire to preserve forest, but also on nationalist rhetoric: the forests are under threat from hill peoples who are not Thai. At the Thammasat Forum, Plodprasob lamented that the territory of Thailand, which once all belonged to the king, "is gradually being given away". Newin said the problem was that "90 percent of the hill peoples are not Thai".

The Chomthong farmers claim the waterways flowing down from Doi Inthanon have been drying up over 20 years. They blame this on the Hmong who live near the watershed. These Hmong have been coddled by the government and foreign agencies trying to wean them away from opium. Now they grow cabbages with too much water and pesticide. They cut wood. Their numbers increase. The only solution is to bring them down. One of the Chomthong leaders said last week: "This land is ours. We were here before. Hill people are not our people (chao khao mai chai chao rao). If they were Thai they would live down here in the lowlands."

Nationalisms often rewrite history, and this is no exception. Some 15-20 years ago, many of the hill tops were stripped bare—by the army’s campaign against the insurgents, and the orgy of logging concessions in the 1980s. Since then, much of the cover on the tops has returned—through natural regrowth, replantation schemes, and efforts by the hill peoples themselves. If the health of the watershed forests determine the flow in the lowland waterways, then the Chomthong farmers’ story of a 20-year decline does not make sense. The hill peoples’ cabbage fields may have increased. But so have lowland plantations gradually creeping up the lower slopes—including the lamyai plantations owned by the Chomthong protesters.

On the slopes of Doi Inthanon there are both Karen and Hmong. The Karen are experts at living in the forests, and know how to conserve for their own survival. If handled properly, they could be agents of forest preservation. The Hmong are more complex. They came to grow opium. They are basically commercial farmers. Commerce has an inbuilt dynamic to expand. But they are also compliant. Their strategy for survival is to do as they are told. Stop growing opium. Yes. Grow coffee. Yes. Stop growing coffee and grow cabbages. Yes. Survival now, they understand, means becoming part of the drive for conservation. They have cut down dry-season cultivation, reduced chemicals, begun moving from cabbages to cut flowers, and started their own forest conservation areas.

But Plodprasob and the Chomthong farmers see only one solution: resettlement. The Hmong resist because they have seen the results of earlier schemes (Pa Cho). The allotted land was poor. The Hmong girls finished up in the brothels and the men in the drug trade. These Inthanon Hmong communities are still strong and healthy. They have seen others, especially along the borders, shattered by resettlement, war, politics, drugs, and zooifying tourism. Naturally they resist. But they also know they have to change. "Our future is uncertain. Our kids have to study to a high level and find work elsewhere." Some thirty are studying at the secondary level and four in universities. This is the way to an orderly exit.

The Plodprasob/lowlander alliance has built its case on two propositions: the watersheds are critical for the water supply; and the "real Thai" are lowland rice-growers. The result is ecological nationalism—the hill peoples have to be sacrificed to save Thai water for Thai farmers.

Opponents fear this is bad ideology, bad history, and bad environmental policy. They argue that "Thai" has always been a diverse (lak lai) culture including many ethnicities and many landscapes. The forest was destroyed in the past because the forestry department handed out logging concessions, and lowlanders profited from logging and land expansion. The hill peoples are being scapegoated to erase this history. Perhaps this new forestry/lowlander is again about profits—not from logging, but from tourism, orchards and tree plantations. The mobs who trashed the orchards in Nan left untouched the nearby orchards owned by lowlanders. So did Plodprasob’s replanting.

Plodprasob is right to choose this opportunity to reverse the forest decline. He has stood up against the army, one of the obstacles in the past. The northern lowlanders are right to fear their region may become as stripped and parched as Isan. But an empty forest will also be an unguarded forest. Maybe this alliance should stop seeing the hill peoples as all of the problem, and start seeing them as part of the solution. Certainly there is a threat of unchecked expansion. But the Karen have conservation skills, and the Hmong know compliance is necessary for survival. In the short term, these benefits can be managed. In the long term, education is a better solution—both for hill peoples and nation—than socially destructive schemes of resettlement.

The current mix of technocrat populism and state-licensed local violence underwritten by crude ecological nationalism is drawing a line through the hills, to the detriment of both people and trees.