The land mess

11 May 1996

Why does every government have a land scandal? Chatichai was suspected of involvement with a foreign developer in Phuket. The NPKC launched the fated Khor Jor Kor scheme. Chuan was brought down by the SPK4-01 scandal. Now we have Suchart, Chumphon and Nong Khai.

And how come every opposition knows that it can unearth a land scandal? Do Thai politicians metamorphose into land-grabbers the moment they join a coalition?

The whole administration of land is a terrible mess. These scandals are the inevitable result. The really big scandal is that most farmers are denied full land rights.

Around 10 years ago, only 10 percent of all occupied land in the kingdom was covered by a full title deed. Almost 60 percent had no serious documentation at all. Today the situation is only a little better. This lack of legal definition is the root of the land mess.

It results from a very deep-seated attitude. In old Siam, all land theoretically belonged to the king. Farmers had only rights of temporary use. Although the law has moved on, the underlying attitude is buried deep in the official mind: farmers have no fundamental right to own the land they till.

About 100 years ago, Bangkok aristocrats began to invest in land. To make these investments secure, they set up a system for surveying land and registering title deeds. But government made no attempt to apply this system to the whole country. From here began a double standard. Some (powerful) people can get full property rights. Most (powerless) people cannot.

The big frontier expansion of the 1960s and 1970s made the picture much more complex. Bureaucrats sat in offices mapping out 40 percent of Thailand’s land as "forest". At exactly the same time farmers were putting the same land under the plough at the rate of 3 million rai a year.

At the end of this period, some 10-12 million people were living on land which the bureaucrats said was not available for agricultural use, and not qualified for a land deed. While some of these "squatter" settlements were small homesteads in the forest, others were fair-sized towns with paved roads, schools, markets and temples.

Most of the current problems concern this "degraded forest" land. Farmers say: this land is our home and our livelihood; give us a deed for it. Bureaucrats (and some conservationists) say: no, you should not be there in the first place; we want to replant the trees. Many other interests (particularly plantation companies and land speculators) want to exploit this confusion. They say: give it to us, because we will make more productive use of it.

Since the 1970s, bodies like the World Bank have urged the government to give farmers full land deeds. Farmers will only be more productive, the Bank argued, if they have security. The government’s response has been shaped by the bureaucrat mentality. Rather than giving out full title deeds, it has granted flimsier documents which are not supposed to be transferable.

Government used just this strategy with the degraded forest. In effect, government was saying: here is a document for now; it’s not a full deed but it might become one later; just hold on until we work out what to do with this mess.

Now for a long time, the lack of proper land titles was not a big problem for the farmer. The local village community administered land rights without much need for documents or government intervention. The availability of so much empty land meant there was little competition over it.

Over the last generation, all this has changed. The land frontier has closed. The village community is breaking down. Rapid commercialisation is changing the value of land, and heightening competition to control it.

Investors want to get control of land - to develop golf courses, build factories, make plantations, found resorts. They need a full title deed before they will risk their money. Land with a proper title now has many, many times the value of land without a title. Converting land from title-less to properly-titled is one of the easiest ways in the kingdom to make a lot of money fast.

The process of conversion is a kind of obstacle course. The flimsier sorts of land documents can be upgraded into a better title. But the process is difficult. The rules change from time to time. Local officials need to be persuaded to cooperate. In the absence of a land registry, the documentation is confusing. As with many obstacle courses, the only way to win is to cheat.

This obstacle course confirms the double standard. Powerful people can overcome the obstacles. They can get the cooperation of local officials by one means or another. They can gather up the documents, and even create or adjust them if necessary.

For little people, the obstacles are hard. The paperwork is tough for the barely literate. Local officials expect to be rewarded and will not cooperate when there is no prospect.

This double standard is at the base of the scandals in Chumphon and Nong Khai. Farmers had applied for land rights for years, without success. Powerful people secured the same rights in a few months. In some cases they got rights to land the farmers thought they owned themselves.

In these cases the powerful have argued that they did "nothing illegal". They followed the official process. But that is hardly the point. The process itself is systematically unfair.

The scale of the land mess is huge. Most of the complaints brought up by the Forum of the Poor protest were about land rights. Visit almost any village outside the central plain and you will find an issue over land rights. Look at any recent government, and you will find a land scandal.

Recent attempts to tackle the problem have shown how difficult it is. The NPKC tried to move the farmers off the degraded forest land. But the farmers did not want to be moved. And there was nowhere for them to be moved to. The Chuan government rushed to hand out (qualified) documents to farmers who could prove they had occupied the land for a generation. But this scheme was twisted by the double standard. Powerful people could manipulate it at the local level.

There is a danger that the land mess has become simply too difficult to tackle. But in principle, it is not so difficult. A solution needs three parts.

First, a sensible redefinition of what land needs to be preserved as forest, balancing human realities and environmental concerns.

Second, the replacement of all the qualified land titles with a single full title deed, documented in a national land registry.

Third, the appointment of a National Land Commission, staffed by the wisest and straightest in the kingdom, to oversee the implementation.

The really difficult part is getting over the official reluctance to allow farmers to have full land rights, and the double standard which grows from it.

Chang Noi says: where is the government with the guts to clear up the land mess?