Resettlement is a human issue not a financial cost

15 March 1999

The valley could serve as a model for the self-reliance and mixed farming advocated by the King. Oil palms interplanted with coconut. Young rubber trees rising out of fields of pineapple. Orchards of durian and pomelo. Lines of betel palms ("we export the nuts to India"). Hillsides of banana, longong, jackfruit, mangosteen, rambutan. Even on the verge of the dry season, the lushness overwhelms. "Some prices are always up and some down. But with this variety, we are always secure."

The community too could be a model. There is no sign of the hollowing out caused by out-migration of the young. Has the crisis forced people to return to the village? None left in the first place. What about ya ba? No problem here. Over a thousand kids go down the hill each morning to the secondary school. "With this secure income, I can send my children to school, and have some money left to help society."

There is just big flaw in this pretty picture. The irrigation department wants to put this valley several metres under water.

In 1989, Typhoon Gay devastated Chumphon. Since then, the irrigation department has been planning ways to protect the low-lying town from flooding. In most years, there are floods for a few days. And when a typhoon veers in this direction, the flood is deeper and longer. Part of the scheme is to build the Rap-ror dam further up the valley to hold back the rainwater which falls on the hills and funnels down the valley slopes towards the town.

The villagers in the valley were also hit by Typhoon Gay. Houses were smashed, trees flattened. They have re-built this model of mixed farming over the subsequent decade, and they are rightly proud of it. They were poor for many years while the valley revived. Their houses are still small and simple. The wat has a roof but no walls and only an earth floor. But now they are comfortable. The oil palms deliver a monthly income as steady as a government salary. Most families have a pick-up truck. A few more years and they will be well-off. "We don’t want to have to start again. We don’t want our community broken up. We don’t want to be sent to a rocky nowhere and have no money to send our kids to school."

The dam scheme plans to move them to a nearby valley. The map shows an empty area divided up into a neat grid of resettlement plots. The irrigation department claims there are 160 households already living there but still plenty of room. But this valley does not look so much different from the other. Oil-palm and rubber. Durian and pomelo. Stands of coconut and betel. Plantations of mature coffee bushes. Flower gardens. The only empty spaces are hilltops. How many people are here? Around 1400 households with a house registration. Maybe another two or three thousand without. Numbers are difficult because this is the frontier. The core settlers came from adjacent areas of Chumphon some twenty years ago. Others are northeasterners who arrived in the 1980s, or with the logging companies after Typhoon Gay. The neatly gridded resettlement map is a hopeless dream. What will happen if the government really does move the other villagers here? A 15-year resident readying cut flowers for the Bangkok market replies with great elegance and discretion: ‘I think I will have many new friends. But we will all have to go a little hungry.’

The trade-off is not easy. The floods in Chumphon town are bad and costly. The government offices, built alongside the river, go under water too. But damning this valley is not the only way or even the best way. A royal project to divert the flood water into "monkey cheeks" has just been completed. The province is proud of it. Already the project site is part of tourist itineraries. The municipality is cutting and renovating other canals to improve drainage. These schemes should already take care of flooding in normal years. Last year Chumphon did not flood. With some planned extensions, they might take care of bad years too. And when a typhoon makes a direct hit, nothing is going to work.

The irrigation department assesses the dam scheme through the economics of costs and benefits. What is the value of the benefits of flood control and irrigation. What are the costs of construction and resettlement. But this thinking dates from the era when Thailand had plenty of free land. Agricultural tracts destroyed could be reproduced elsewhere. People could be moved with only minor inconvenience. But that is no longer true. The Chumphon provincial forestry officer admits there is really no resettlement land available.

The district officer hangs on to the old thinking. ‘If this dam is necessary’, he argues, ‘we will just have to find somewhere to move these people. If there is nowhere in Chumphon, then in Ranong, Surat or Nakhon. If it is necessary, we will simply have to do it.’ But in these other provinces, the land situation is no different. Because of this lack of land, the trade-off is no longer a simple cost-benefit exercise. It is human. And political.

The floods in Chumphon town are bad, but they usually last no more than 2-3 days. Building the dam will change the life of the villagers permanently. The provincial governor seems sensitive to this human calculus. "If we move the villagers," he insists, "their situation must be no worse than before."

Such sensitivity is new. It has not arisen by magic or by chance. It has been created by the strength of the villagers’ opposition. "When we started," says one of the leaders, "we thought we had no chance of success." The irrigation department promised to ride roughshod over them, as it has done elsewhere. It told them it was planning an ang kep nam (reservoir) which sounded small, undisruptive, even useful. The villagers found out by themselves that it was really a dam which would flood the whole valley. "Each time you are fooled," one of the leaders says with a grin, "you become a little cleverer." They joined forces with the Assembly of the Poor which forced the government to place the project under review. They made the provincial officials agree to stay out of the area during the review. Some who strayed in were "arrested" and delivered back to the district office. They clubbed together to buy the plot of land where the irrigation department wants to site the dam. At meetings with officials, they bring along cameras and cassette-recorders to make a record. The fertility of the valley has provided the villagers with both the incentive and the funds to mount an effective challenge.

The irrigation department still plans projects as if land is freely available. Displaced people can be relocated into neatly gridded resettlements. The costs can be factored into the calculation of the project’s return. But there is no free land. So the costs are not simply financial but human, social and ultimately political. The calculation of feasibility goes beyond simple arithmetic. Standing on a hilltop overlooking this extraordinarily fertile valley, one of the villagers says thoughtfully: "Isn’t it strange we have to fight our government to save our land?"