People and trees

9 May 1997

At the 22 April Cabinet meeting, Chavalit announced: "We must ensure people can live in forests and protect them." Evictions will stop. Boundaries will be redrawn, zones reclassified, land deeds issued.

This was a truly dramatic announcement.

From the 1950s to the 80s, Thailand’s growth was based on expanding agriculture. Farmers cleared and cultivated 90 million rai of land, mostly for export crops. At the same time, officials were mapping areas as reserved forest and national park. Their target was 40 percent of the kingdom, or 96 million rai. The two areas overlapped. By the end, the "forests" contained around a quarter of the nation’s villages, rural people, and agricultural land - some 15,000 villages with 10 million people and some 30 million rai.

Three attempts to clean up this mess have come to little. In the 1980s, the Forestry Department tried resettlement schemes. In 1991-2, the army proposed to move all the forest settlers out. In 1992-4, the Democrat government handed out land deeds. All these schemes crashed in flames.

Chavalit’s plan is to bend the rules to allow the forest settlers to stay put. And then to draw up a new masterplan for managing the forest around them.

It’s a visionary scheme. It has clearly arisen from the negotiations between Chavalit, his junior ministers, the NGOs, and the Assembly of the Poor. But it has been greeted with a mixture of anger, disbelief and uncertainty. How so?

Over the last decade, the main battlefield over forest settlements has been in the hills of the north. Here the Forestry Department (RFD) was specially aggressive about classifying areas as conservation forest. The hills provided the best opportunity for reaching the target for 40 percent forest. The hills are also the catchment for the Chaophraya river system.

Many of the settlers inside these forests are hill peoples. Some have no Thai nationality. Others have acquired it only recently. Few have the confidence and contacts necessary to get land deeds. Some cultivate opium. It has been easy for forestry officials to blame these settlers for destroying the forest through slash-and-burn.

In the early 1990s, there was a groundswell of resistance against the RFD’s aggression. The hill communities still have a strong base of community organization for managing irrigation and local resources. In hundreds of places, local leaders, activist monks and NGOs built on these foundations to protest against eviction. With NGO help, these protests were drawn together into the Northern Farmers Network. In 1995, the NFN organized a march of 20,000 farmers through Chiang Mai and Lamphun. They forced the Minister of Agriculture to negotiate. But the agreement came to nothing when the Banharn government fell. The NFN later merged its protest under the Assembly of the Poor.

In parallel with these protests, NGOs and academics developed counters to the RFD’s schemes. They argued that hill peoples’ shifting cultivation was responsible for only a small fraction of deforestation. Much more was due to logging, colonisation by lowland farmers, and tourism. Moreover, the RFD was often an accessory. It was more committed to exploitation of the forest than conservation. It often moved villagers out to make way for loggers and eucalyptus planters. It had a terrible record on reforestation. Classifying a forest as reserved often makes it "open access". Leaving the villagers in place, they contend, is a better way to save the trees. Look at the Lua and Karen.

In the northern hills, the Lua and Karen are often settled on the mid-slopes, between the lowland farmers on the valley-floors, and the hill peoples higher up. They practise a mix of permanent ricefields, rotating swiddens, and gathering from the forest. They know how important the forests above their villages are for the water on which their rice depends. They manage the forests with considerable care because they depend so much on them. A Karen saying runs: "We drink from streams, we must protect streams. We eat from the forest, we must protect the forest."

Many of the villages threatened by the RFD were Lua and Karen. Much of the groundswell of protest began in these villages. The NGOs and academics adopted the Karen and Lua as proof that villagers could preserve forests better than the RFD. They also attempted to spread the best practice found in some Karen and Lua villages to cover much wider areas. In particular, they encouraged the lowland and mid-level villages to negotiate with the communities on the hills above. Between them they could conserve water and trees for mutual benefit.

The NGOs and academics worked this up into a strategy for local development under the title of watershed management. This meant organizing the communities within an ecological zone to manage and protect the resources on which they all depended. Academics also studied Karen and Lua knowledge about the forest to show it provided a more effective guide to conservation than the RFD’s imported scientific theories.

To resist eviction, the villages set out to prove they were better at forest conservation than the RFD. To publicise the commitment, they ordained 50 million trees, protested against loggers, and demanded removal of sawmills. In imitation of the displays in government offices, villages made maps and models showing their zoning of forest and land use. Following government practice, they put up signs defining forest and village boundaries.

The academic work, NGO campaigns, and village conservation efforts all aimed to undermine the RFD claim that people should be evicted because they destroy forest. Chavalit’s Cabinet resolution may just be political opportunism, just another example of his "easy mind". But it is still hugely important. It is quite a victory for this campaign.

So why is this victory not being shouted from the rooftops?

First, because Chavalit is planning to tackle the problem with a land titling scheme which could easily be corrupted and politicised. The past record is not good. Back to 1975, land-titling schemes launched as political flagships have tended to help urban and business interests acquire land, rather than villagers. The scandals over the Democrats’ SPK 4-01 scheme went much further than the well-publicised cases in Phuket. The Tancharoen family’s acquisitions in Nong Khai and Samet Island showed how businessmen can exploit the hopelessly inadequate systems for land titling. Where the Cabinet met in Wang Nam Khieow, a glossy resort sits in the middle of reserved forest. The local NAP MP claims the resort is "not illegal", but that is not the point. Businessmen often find it easy to manipulate the law, to the detriment of local villagers.

Some NGOs fear that Chavalit’s scheme could go the same way. After all, one of its backers is the Agriculture Minister, Chucheep Harnsawat, who recently argued that forest should be sacrificed for cable cars, gas pipelines, logging and prawn farms because "there is a trade-off between prosperity and nature".

Second, the scheme threatens to widen a rift within the environmental movement. Dark green groups like the World Wildlife Fund, Green World and Seub Nakhasathien Foundation argue that people must be moved out of major watersheds, wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. These resources have national and international significance which override the claims of the settlers. Here trees are more important than people. Light green groups like the Project for Ecological Recovery want to win approval for the principle of community forest management. They argue that local management must be better than the RFD. Only people can save trees.

This split dogged last year’s debate over the Community Forest Bill. It flared up again over the Cabinet resolution. "If the policy goes ahead", claimed one dark green, "Thailand’s forests will be gone in five to ten years."

This split runs right down to the ground. Chom Thong district of Chiang Mai was one of the areas where there was a groundswell of protest and organization in the early 1990s, headed by a local conservationist monk. But here the Karen villages failed to negotiate agreement with the Hmong settled higher up.

The Hmong and other highland groups have been moved and messed around so much in recent history that they have lost the link between community and ecology. Opium growing and then opium-replacement schemes like fruit and cabbages have involved them deeply with the market. Now they respond to the market imperative to expand production.

The Karen villages in Chom Thong now believe expansion of Hmong settlement and cultivation is drying up their water supplies. They want the Hmong to be resettled. The dark green lobby backs them. And points to this case as proof that the Karen-based theory of local conservation does not work.

This is a big issue, created by the messy aftermath of rapid agricultural growth, the chaotic state of land management, and the hopeless record of the RFD. How to deal with the human problem of upto 10 million people. How to deal with the environmental problem of conserving the little forest that is left. The light green NGOs say: leave the people there and let them manage the forests. That will solve both problems. Others say: it’s not so easy. The villagers won’t really conserve the forests. They will be overwhelmed by city people with bags of money.