Bangkok Protest Post 4 - What's it all About?

[Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009 6pm Thai Time]
OK, I've been avoiding this post - probably the most important one about the Bangkok protest - by putting up pictures and saying very little. But it's time to bite the bullet. As I said in the first protest post, figuring out what it is all about isn't easy. They did finally give me a six page report on what the alliance of organizations wants out of the new land reform policy. But I'm not happy with what they wrote.






There is a potential problem for all people who are highly dedicated to a goal and who believe they are fighting 'an enemy' to achieve that goal. The people in the group 'know' their cause so well that they forget that others do not understand all the details and reasons that are so obvious to them. I'm not talking here about the more rationalized groupthink where challenges to the groups ideas are discouraged, but rather the natural tendency to see things alike and not see the problems an outsider might have with a plan or statement. The report I got is like that. It argues for certain things, but doesn't explain things in ways that work for me. One of my new projects is to critique their policy statement to make it more to the point and understandable to people who aren't on the front line and know the problems from the inside.

So, here is my interpretation of the issues facing poor Thai farmers and some urban poor regarding land reform issues that are of importance to my organization:

1. Forest Land Issues - There are people living in the forests of Thailand. We'd probably call them 'inholders' in the US - people who owned property before an area was made into a park or forest. While the Thai government wants these people out of the forests, it seems to me the inholders have some very strong points. It also appears to be different in different places. Here are two examples I'm aware of (even if I don't have all the facts exactly right)
   
   • In an area in Chiang Mai province, there are hill tribe peoples who have lived in the forested area for 50 years or more. It's their home. Now the government is saying they need to leave the forest. Their way of life, their culture are threatened if they are forced to move out of their natural habitat. There are identified problems with some hill tribes in terms of the effect of their cultivation practices and subsistence hunting practices. But I've been told these tribes have been practicing agricultural practices that are sustainable and do not threaten the forests and last year we went to an event to celebrate the maintaining of long fire breaks to prevent fires. There are precedents for getting indigenous peoples to switch from hunting threatened species to being protectors who prevent poachers, so their living in the forest could help protect the resources that the Thai government wouldn't otherwise have the resources to protect.
   • At the Bangkok march I learned about a man in the South, who is being told he must move out of the 'forest.' His argument is pictures of himself and his family planting 'the forest' of rubber trees years ago.
     
     
2. Land Ownership Issues - One of the villages my organization works with received their land maybe 15 or 20 years ago in a government land distribution program. It is now well planted with mango trees. About eight years ago, a group of wealthy businessmen showed them deeds to the land and told them they had to leave the land. The farmers were never giving proper documents when the land was distributed and they believe that the businessmen used their connections or money to get a land official to come up with the documents they possessed. All the people who worked in the office at the time are dead. I was at a public meeting at the Land Office last year when the spokesman for the businesses acknowledged - after repeated questions about exactly who sold them the land - that it was possible that the person who sold the land, did not own it.
   
   So there are these kinds of issues where farmers have been threatened by people who do not have legitimate ownership of the land.
   
   
3. Method of Land Reform - The last Thai government and the new Thai government both had land reform in their platforms. The organization that I work with is affiliated with a number of other organizations that are working with other farmers and urban poor around the country. A major objective of the march this last week was as bargaining power in their negotiations with the new Thai government over the details of the new land reform policy. They want the new government to understand the issues from the farmers' perspective, not simply from that of influential business owners.
   
   There is going to be land reform. The question is how it will be implemented and these groups have specific ideas about how to do this so that farmers are able to productively work the land to help feed the people of Thailand.
   
   
4. Money[/Fund] - Part of the land reform involves monetary distributions. For instance, the government wants, as I understand it, to dismantle some of the slum areas in Bangkok and make monetary compensation to the people living there. How this is going to happen - whether there are payments to individuals, to communities - is part of the negotiations. [There's also a land bank but I don't understand yet the details of how this works.]
   
   
5. Macro Issues - one of the changes in Thailand over the last 20 years has been a change in how, at least some, Thais conceive of land. I don't have a good grasp of the historic ownership and use of land in Thailand. I know for periods much of the land belonged to the King. But land has not, historically, been seen as a capitalist commodity. When the new economy of the Asian Tigers crashed in 1997, those with money first began to seriously invest in land because other investments seemed risky. This has caused - and one of the things I'm questioning about the six pages I was given is how they discuss land ownership - a disparity in the ownership of land. Farmland was bought at inflated prices - at least in the eyes of the farmers who sold their land - but what many farmers thought was great wealth, proved to not go very far. Soon they found themselves without the land that gave them a level of self-sufficiency and with no way to feed themselves. Apparently, much farmland now sits fallow as the wealthy hold onto it hoping to eventually sell at a profit, while farmers sit idle because they do not have land to farm.
   
   Such problems defy simple ideas of fairness, common sense, and work ethic. They are systemic problems that result from buying into a capitalist mentality in a society that doesn't have all the infrastructure to limit the inequity that wealth can cause. Even in the US, we are seeing similar problems in terms of the housing market and the banking collapse.
   

So, these are the issues as I seem them. There are probably others I've missed and there are certainly more and better examples than the ones I've listed, but this is a start.