Thai villagers still seeking security

22 July 1996

Looking at statistics on the gaping rural-urban income gap, a foreign investor asked Chang Noi: is there going to be serious trouble? The Forum of the Poor demonstration in April was the biggest rural protest in the heart of the capital since the mid-1970s. What happens next?

Most of the Forum protests were about land rights. Today’s story looks at the background to these protests in one village.

Baan Mai lies in a pretty valley in the northeast. Thong-In came to the valley in the first group of settlers from Korat. He met his wife who migrated with her family from Sakon Nakhon. Their neighbours were from Ratburi. All were washed up here by the last waves of agricultural expansion in the 1970s. The big trees in the valley had already been cut by the logging companies. Egged on by the agribusinesses and by the government promoting crop exports, Thong-In and his friends cleared the scrub and planted maize. Several years on they had growing families, a neat village, a new school, and a little bit of savings.

Then in 1991 the army arrived, bulldozed the maize fields, dismantled the village houses, and forced them to leave. Baan Mai had been included in the army’s Khor Jor Kor land resettlement programme.

Around the time Thong-In and his friends had been planting their third maize crop, Forestry Department officials in Bangkok were drawing the boundaries of a new national park. Baan Mai fell inside the park. Nobody in the valley knew about this. The district officials who collected the land tax didn’t tell them they were now illegal squatters. Like millions of other settlers all over the country, Thong-In and his friends hoped to get land titles if they sat tight and paid their taxes long enough.

Most of the national park lies on the slopes of the Dongphrayayen, the range dividing the central plain from the northeast. The valley is a flat strip of land, some 3-4 kilometres wide, between two side spurs of the range petering away into the plain. The backdrop of hills certainly makes the valley pretty. But the valley floor has no special flora or fauna, no asset as a national park. The map-makers probably drew the park boundary carelessly because they had limited information.

The army’s resettlement scheme was killed after widespread protests in 1992. A few of the villagers returned to Baan Mai immediately. Most could not. Their homes and crops had gone. Their savings had been used up during the disruption. Some like Thong-In worked in contract labour gangs cutting sugarcane. Others like his neighbour went to Bangkok’s construction sites. But over the next three years, two-thirds of the village households trickled back. The valley was home.

But not a secure home. For these settler families, life had always been a struggle for survival. After the "ophyop", the forced resettlement, the struggle consisted of fifty percent hard agricultural labour, and fifty percent local politics.

Politics of a very elusive kind. At first, the villagers hoped to gain security through land titles. The Chuan government’s SPK 4-01 scheme promised to provide land titles for settler communities like theirs. Thong-In became the village’s barefoot land lawyer. For two years he tramped from government office to government office. His file is stuffed with maps, petitions, government orders. But the designation as a national park made his job difficult. No-one wanted to listen to the argument that the valley has little value as a park. Then the SPK 4-01 scheme ran into political trouble at the national level. Thong-In’s file ends with a photocopy of the ministerial order suspending the scheme.

If they could not secure their land, then the next strategy was to get security for the village. Thong-In now switched his lobbying to the district office. He petitioned for Baan Mai to be officially defined as a sub-village. When the number of houses in the village passed one hundred, he took the petition right up to the provincial governor. It worked. In 1994, Baan Mai got the official recognition.

Next Thong-In entered into the politics of education. The village had already started a small school. Thong-In asked friends in the NGOs to help find a rich patron. Thong-In himself started banging on the door of the provincial educational office to have the school recognised. The NGO friends did well. One of Bangkok’s business families agreed to sponsor a new school building in memory of the family’s recently deceased founder. With this in hand, Thong-In managed to talk the education officials into granting the school official status.

Thong-In then planned to make the opening of the new school building into a landmark event. He called on every important provincial official to ask them personally to attend. He dashed off invitations to the education ministry in Bangkok. He circulated a rumour that the prime minister’s daughter might attend. He invited all the important local businessmen who might want to meet the Bangkok patron. Then he had to beg help from all over the province just to find enough chairs to seat all these important people.

The school building is a very modest affair of concrete blocks, corrugated sheets and whitewash. But when the Bangkok patron, the provincial education officer, the local MP, and the deputy governor stepped up to cut the ribbon, the roots of the village dug a little deeper into the valley soil.

During the ceremony, Thong-In tackled the MP. A hundred households means a couple of hundred votes. The ten kilometres of road from the village to the highway is a potholed track, scarcely passable in the rainy season. How about paving it with money from the MP’s constituency fund? Thong-In knew his request had a good chance of success: a chunk of the profits from building the road would go to the MP’s gravel quarry. As the officials were leaving, Thong-In asked the district officer about setting up a sub-post office.

On many of his lobbying trips, Thong-In took his daughter along. She soon became his helper. Despite all the disruption of the "ophyop", she managed to remain a star pupil. Even though the secondary school was 15 kilometres away, she and her friends made the trip on most days, often walking most of the way there and back. She was chosen to represent the province in a school delegation to Bangkok. With the prime minister in the audience, she talked about the village’s struggle to survive. He promised to make a visit.

In the evening, Thong-In starts up his generator, pulls out the little TV that one of the NGOs gave him, and hooks up the home-made aerial. One by one the village kids arrive and tumble together on the mat. Tonight they watch a drama about spoiled Bangkok teenagers. The episode rises to its emotional climax when the hero’s glossy new BMW suffers a small dent. The kids watch with the wide-eyed, overwhelmed stare of first-time visitors to a strange museum.

The largest chunk of Thailand’s poor are people like the Baan Mai villagers - recent settlers in outlying villagers. The income gap is not their main concern. Most don’t have secure land rights, and that is their focus. Over the last few years, they have grown more skilled, more confident, more ambitious in the way they deal with officials, MPs, ministers, businessmen - the whole power structure beyond the village. "Things are not yet right," says Thong-In, "but they are better than before. Still we have to go on fighting."

But their kids are watching the income gap dramatised every night on TV. With them, the politics of envy may be more intense.

Chang Noi says: fix the land problem - before bigger problems emerge.