Filling in Some of the Gaps in my Knowledge of Thai Land Reform

Time is moving faster than last year. I think that I’m doing more, clearly I know more, but the more you know, the more you realize that there is even more out there that you don’t know. Yesterday was a meeting of NGO folks in the north and discussions of the aftermath of the Bangkok Protests.

It’s been hard getting information about what all actually was accomplished. I basically heard that my boss and 20 or 30 others had met with the Prime Minister, but the only concession I’d heard about was that the government paid for the buses back to the North. That became a bit of a joke. Well, of course, they’ll pay for them to get out of Bangkok and stop the demonstration. It doesn’t amount to much money at all.

But getting to meet with the Prime Minister itself is a major achievement. And yesterday I got to see the report that was written for the other NGO leaders summarizing what has been accomplished and what else needs to be done.


Of course, the reports are in Thai. But I’ve mastered enough of the most frequent vocabulary that I can get through the pages recognizing the majority of the words. I sat next to Ping who would patiently help translate the words I would circle.

I only got through a few pages - even if I know the words, it takes some time to read them - while trying to also listen to what was going on in the meeting. Basically, there are 360 villages identified throughout Thailand, with specific land ownership issues. These are disputes of one kind or another that the coalition has asked the government to help resolve. I’ve written about the key kinds of problems, as I understood them, in a previous post. These aren’t situations where the farmers are simply asking the government to give them land. But rather there are varying levels of complication of farmers having farmed land for generations, in some cases, but having disputes because the land has been declared a national park or a protected reserve, or because of corrupt practices in which well connected, wealthy Thais managed to get title to land the farmers’ land, and other such disputes. The government has to be involved because they issue the documents stating who owns the land.

One task that I’ve decided I want to follow up on is just trying to understand the history of land ownership in Thailand. I vaguely understand that in the past most land belonged to the King, but I’m not sure about that. Ping did say that in 1954 a land law was passed to allow people to gain ownership of the land they farmed, but again, I’m not sure and need to look all this up. One report I saw said

10 % of the Thai People own 104 Million Hectares of Land (6.5 Million Rai)
90 % of the Thai People own only 9.8 Million Hectares of Land (0.6 Million Rai)

That’s not a very equitable distribution if it is accurate.

So the meeting proceeded with people reporting on the villages that they monitored - how close they were to the various goals they were working on and what problems remained in achieving them. I always amazed at how much work my organization is doing and, despite appearances to the contrary, how incredibly well organized their data are. You can see one page of long chart of all the villages in the picture.

Another document in the report that I made it through was the Prime Ministers declaration of the formation of a committee to study and resolve the farmers’ problems. It includes the Prime Minister and high level officials from a variety of related ministries and about 30 of the farmers - including my boss and the farmer that spurred my interest in trying to find out if we can export mangoes to Anchorage. That isn’t moving too fast because the staff is so stretched on other work. I’ve gathered a fair amount of information, but I need the Thai staff to go with me to meetings so they are sure what is said and because they will have to follow through on this when I leave.


I've begun a preliminary search and found a few items relevant to what I've been learning on the ground. It's nice when your experiential understanding of things gets confirmed by the evidence.

The legal pattern of Thailand's land tenure is a product of a long historical process. According to Thai traditions and its laws, all land and natural resources belonged to the King and he grant* ownership in the land to his subjects who has* cleared and cultivate* it. the traditional concept of land ownership which is establish* through occupation and prodctive use is illustrated by the following passage from an early Chiangmai palm leaf legal text which purports to restate the traditional law passed on by King Mangrai in the 13th century which is as follows1:

"If a peasant has claimed riceland, has cleared the fields and built homes and orchards on the land, after he has used the land for three years it is right to collect taxes from him. If one man has worked on the land until it is a decent piece of land and there is another man who comes to snatch it away by offering a price for it, this is not proper, so do not remove the man. No matter how much he seeks to impress you with his wealth or status, you should not be persuaded because of those things. If you give in, then the peasant will truly be discouraged from creating and producing in the future."

[*In strict academic formating I should write [sic] to show that the typos were in the original document. But this was from a paper written by a non-Native English speaker and there are several typos, but I really don't want this to look like I'm saying, "Hey, screwed up again." I know my Thai would be littered with typos. So I decided to indicate the same thing less obtrusively with asterisks. Besides, this is a blog, not an academic paper.]


Wow, sounds like people were having the same sorts of problems 800 years ago when rich, influential people tried to get legal title from officials to land already possessed by poor farmers. I'm not sure of the date of the palm leaf document that copied this older declaration. The paper goes on:

This means that any Thai can claim ownership to a plot of land he cleared out and cultivated and he has only to register his claim for a small fee after cultivating the plot for three years, whereupon it becomes his property.2 [You can see get the pdf of this article by Adibah bte Awang of the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia at the link.]

That's nice in theory, but the experience of our farmers is that things are not all that easy. And I should say that the article goes on to discuss changes in the law since.

According to a document published by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada which I found at the website of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees:

According to Nabangchang-Srisawalak, the Land Code of 1954 remains the most significant landownership legislation in Thailand (ibid., 84) and it describes the steps that must be followed for the issuance of title deeds "in non-forest areas" (Giné 2004, 4). By 2004, approximately 40 percent of the total land area of Thailand had been classified as private property (Nabangchang-Srisawalak Jan. 2006, 84). However, according to Xavier Giné, an economist with the World Bank (World Bank n.d.), it is estimated that it could take up to 200 years to properly document all current Thai landholders (Giné 2004, 5). [Emphasis added]

The document goes on to list different land ownership documents. The most secure is:

Freehold title deed (Nor Sor 4, NS-4)

The Nor Sor 4 (NS-4) (chanod or chanote) document is an "unrestricted legal title" (Giné 2004, 4) or freehold title deed (Siam Legal n.d.) which grants the owner the right to sell, transfer and legally mortgage his or her land (Giné 2004, 4). According to the Bangkok International Associates law firm, the NS-4 is issued in duplicate, with one kept by the bearer and the other held by the Land Department (BIA n.d.). The NS-4, considered the "best evidence of ownership," contains a description of the property (including area, boundaries and marking posts) as well as a history of all relevant transactions (ibid.). NS-4 documents usually concern land in built-up areas (ibid.).

But then it documents various levels of less secure documentation of land use. The next level, for instance, Nor Sor 3,

is alternatively known as a "confirmed certificate of use" (BIA n.d.) or as an "exploitation testimonial," and demonstrates that the bearer has "made use of the land for a prescribed period of time" (Giné 2004, 4). The document allows the bearer to sell or transfer the land, and (like NS-4 and NS-3) can be used as collateral for loans from financial institutions (ibid.; Siam Legal n.d.). NS-3K documents were introduced after 1972 when officials began using "unrectified aerial photographs" to map deed plans (Giné 2004, 4). The maps used have a scale of 1:5,000 (Siam Real Estate n.d.) and authorities identify the exact boundaries for NS-3K titles (Siam Legal n.d.). The bearer of an NS-3K may request an upgrade to a full title deed at an Amphur (District Office) (BIA n.d.), which may be granted by the Land Department if no objections are raised by any other party (Siam Legal n.d.; Chaninat & Leeds n.d.).

And things get dicier as we go down the list of less and less secure documentation. The next two on the list, for example,

Nor Sor 3 (NS-3)

NS-3 documents, otherwise known as "Certificates of Use" (BIA n.d.; Giné 2004, 4), are similar to NS-3K certificates (ibid.). They were issued between 1954 and 1972, when officials used tape surveys rather than aerial photographs to trace land boundaries, which allowed the representation of a land deed by "an approximate diagram showing the shape of the parcel" (ibid.). The boundaries of an NS-3 document, however, are less reliable than those on an NS-3K certificate (Siam Legal n.d.) since property owners, rather than the government, placed the boundary markers, which increased the risk of inaccuracies (Chaninat & Leeds n.d.).

Nor Sor 2 (NS-2)

The NS-2 document or "Preemptive Certificate" allows the bearer to occupy a parcel of land temporarily, but does not confer any transfer rights (except for inheritance); this document can therefore not be used as collateral (Giné 2004, 4).

The names of these documents (Nor Sor are the names of the Thai letters นส) are well known to all the people working here. When I showed this document to Swe, the student J was tutoring in English before his nine months trip to Japan, he pointed out that some of the land in his village was Nor Sor 3 Kor, some was Nor Sor 2, and some Sor Kor 1. But most was nothing at all, because it cost money to register and money was scarce most of the time.

Our farmers are caught up in these sorts of document difficulties. Pascale M. Phélinas, in Sustainability of rice production in Thailand, explains a little more about why poor and less educated Thais are less likely to have the proper documentation than wealthier, better educated Thais.

...ownership security also raises questions of equity. The establishment of property rights as well as the procedures required to prove legal ownership are always complex and involve significant transactions costs. During the survey, farmers often complained about the delays and costs involved before they could get through the whole official procedure. Since these costs vary little according to the size of the farm, larger and wealthier landowners are better placed to afford them. Transaction costs have thus biased the acquisition of titles in favor of large and wealthy farmers. Furthermore, because of differences in educational levels and, consequently, differences in access to the state administration, some segments of the population are exposed to the risk of exclusion from access to land because they are unaware of the implications of registration or are unable to have their existing land rights recorded. The history of Thailand reveals tha in many cases land records have been manipulated by powerful government officials to allow elite to obtain ownership of land (Feeney, 1982). [Emphasis added.]

For the farmers in the forest land there are other issues as well. From the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation] Corporate Docuent Repository, we find Decentralization and Devolution of Forest Management in Asia and the Pacific... This comes from Chapter 3.3.3

Land Code of 1954 has the most important bearing on the question of land ownership and by implication on the process of centralization. Pah sa-nguan or the public forest land had many users or squatters for a long time. The Government by promulgation of 1954 land code provided the option that anyone occupying any forest land as of November 30, 1954 can receive a land using claim certificate provided he can prove his claim within 180 days. Few provincial farmers had been aware of this time stipulation, failed to take advantage of it and thus became encroachers. In 1961, the Thai government decided that 50% of the country should be forest land and as such started evicting encroachers to reach the target. In 1985, the National Forest policy reduced the target of forest land to 40% to release some land for other purposes but the objective was not realised. In fact, the Forest department undertook a programme of planting up the degraded forest which resulted in more evictions resulting in a political crisis (Lynch and Talbott, 1995). The net result of all this is that the centralization process for forest management continued in Thailand.

The Thais I work with know all this and take it for granted. As I've written in earlier posts, I believe them, but I also want to see the documentation. This sort of material helps make the case that the farmers aren't having problems with land ownership because they are lazy or because they are illegitimately claiming the land. Rather, the power structure, the education system, and the red tape is stacked against them and wealthier, better educated Thais have often been able to take advantage of this situation to get control of the land of villagers.

Yuzo Sings

There was a flier in the shop where we had the strawberry smoothies. Doc pointed it out. A concert Friday night. I could make out that it said, besides the time and location,

60 minutes
60 years

I figured the concert would be sixty minutes long, but didn't know what the 60 years meant. So last night I went after work - it was close by. J had gone off to Tai Chi and I hadn't expected it to last long. But the music didn't start until 7:30. It was at a house that had a coffee shop attached. There was food and drinks. And I met some Thais my age who were academics and also working on the same issues we're working on.

So, here's the video. Be warned - both the video and the sound are from my little Canon Powershot. On the one hand, being able to capture anything with such a small camera still amazes me. On the other hand, it was dark and the video is poor and the sound doesn't do the musicians justice at all. But you can get a sense of the evening. There's a bit of Dan Bern in the air.

Yuzo sings in Thai, Japanese, and English, though you have to listen closely. See if you can hear him singing about democracy, freeing Aung San Suu Kyithe Burmese (Pamma in Thai) people, and the Tibetan people.

Yuzo is Japanese but I was told he has been coming to Thailand every year for 30 years. He turns 60 this year, so that was the 60 years.

And I put the animation skills I learned last fall to use. It took most of the day, what with my computer pretty full and having to ditch old video to have enough space to save things, even to work the animation in photoshop at times. Anyway, if you look closely - you only get about five seconds - I have a bit of the Thai change into English. But don't blink or you'll miss it.

โฉนดชุมชน Chanot Chumchon Form of Community Ownership

I understood most of the words in the videotape I took (I'll get it up eventually, still waiting on advice on the translation). I didn't necessarily understand how they all fit together. Then there were words I didn't understand. A couple were easy to look up, but โฉนดชุมชน didn't quite make sense. I understood ชุมชน (choomchorn)** or community (though that word has a variety of meanings in English, but it's a word used often here to describe the collective spirit and physical place of the villages my NGO* is associated with.)

โฉนด is defined by thai2enlish.com as

title deed ; title deed to a piece of land

Try to think of a word to use to put those two together. As I discussed this with Swe yesterday over strawberry smoothies, the idea that seemed closest to something that we know in the US was a condo association, where people own the individual condos privately, but own the building, grounds, swimming pool, etc. collectively. Everyone has to agree on some sort of organizational fee to pay for the collectively owned parts of the property. They also have to agree on maintenance and new developments they might want to build.

Well, today, Mi (photoshopped a bit in the pictures) was in the office and I showed him the video and the words I was having trouble with.
He started drawing and writing to explain what chanot chumchon means. And it is something like a condo bylaws/agreement. So let me try to flesh out what I understood him to be saying. (That means, take everything you read next with a grain of salt.)

He started drawing a picture. And then he said a Chanot ChumChon needs five things:

1. Land - they need a piece of land for a group of families I asked how many but it seems to be flexible. He drew 11 on the picture, but said it could be from about 50 to 100 families. Smaller ones exist. So each family has rights over its own piece of land but there are also community rights over the whole larger piece.

2. There's a committee which has the responsibility to look after the everything. The members are representatives of all the farmers who maintain the agreement of the farmers, and are representatives to deal with the government. They develop the plan for what the Group is going to plant, for things like irrigation, and other communal needs. If there is a bigger Group, there might be three committees, a main committee, a management committee, etc. Committees have five to ten people.

3. ระเบียบ this translates as rules, order, regulation. If we use the condo association analogy, it would be something like the by-laws that govern how decisions are made and the structure of the organization.


4. A fund. The Chum Chon needs money to take care of the communal expenses. The group gets money through

• ลงขัน Member contributions - I just wrote about this term at the end of the post on Tricky Translations.
• ทอดผ้าป่า Another tricky term. It literally means "fried clothes forest." (Besides 'fry' ทอด can mean to cast or drop which is the meaning here, as in leaving cloth in the woods. People often make offerings of material, especially for monks' robes.) Swe helped explain it to me today. If a wat (temple) wants to build a new addition. They might send out letters to everyone asking for donations of any size. And you would get your name somewhere at the new structure depending on how much you gave. So this category is for fundraising activities and I suspect it's not too different from fundraisers that any US house of worship or school might have including things like cookie sales and raffles. The ChumChon would do Thai versions of these sorts of money raising activities.
• Money from local or federal government funds (such as the land bank) for specific projects. This might be support for schools and a health clinic as well as information on various agricultural techniques.

The money is used for communal improvements - irrigation systems, water and sewer, etc.


5. Government support - Like any local community, the Chum Chon needs assistance for schools, health care (small government health clinics), and ways to assist when prices drop below a basic price. Of course, public schools and public health clinics are things people in local communities in the US expect from government too. And US farmers are also protected by various price support programs.


So that's a general overview of โฉนดชุมชน Chanot Chumchon. Don't rely on this too heavily, but it should give you a reasonable head start on understanding this concept.

*I've explained this numerous times on the blog, but I realize there may be people who don't know this acronym who haven't been here before. And I don't like documents full of acronyms. It stands for Non-Governmental Organization and would be called a non-profit in the United States.

**Trying to write out Thai words in western script is tricky. There are different standard phonetics systems, but they only are helpful if you understand the sounds each letter is supposed to represent. So I've tried to make it as close to what would make phonetic sense to a US English speaker. Choom rhymes with 'room.' Chon rhymes something between 'tone' and 'torn.' Of course it also depends on who's speaking. In the tape, the speaker says something that sounds like choomachon.

Translation is a Tricky and Sometimes Delightful Activity

I have a video tape of one of the farmers explaining in Thai what they were doing in Bangkok. I already put up one video tape of him speaking in Hmong. But for the Thai one I want to have a translation. I've got it pretty much translated, but I'm waiting on a few people to confirm parts I wasn't sure of.

I learned when doing research in China that translation is tricky.

• First, some words just don't have English equivalents. There are words that are similar, but don't convey the original meaning. The concept simply has not been captured by a single word in English. For instance, the formal and informal versions of 'You' in French and German, or the distinction between the word for "I" used by a woman and the one used by a man in Thai. These are still easy to understand, but the question for the translator is whether to just say "I" or "you" or to try to explain the subtlety. Other words, like
  
  
• Second, there are words that can be translated, but the cultural context is so different that the English reader would understand something very different from what the original speaker meant. For instance, 20 years ago in China, 'work unit' had connotations very different from what someone in the US might conceive. Just as we get health insurance through work, at that time in China, people got pretty much everything they needed - housing, use of vehicles, access to things like use of vehicles, and many commodities people in market economies would buy in the market place. Work units also needed to give permission for travel and even to get married. So, just translating 'work-unit' really didn't convey the significance of that word to people not familiar to China then. I would hasten to point out that things have changed a lot in China and work-units are no longer so significant in people's lives as they were before the market reforms. But while there is a lot of private housing available now in large cities, work unit housing still plays a big role.
  
  
• Third, translators might not translate your questions correctly if the translator thinks they are culturally inappropriate. In those cases you get answers that seem strange, because some variation of your question was asked.

In any case, there were a couple of terms that seemed like they needed more than a one word translation. A key one - โฉนดชุมชน (Chanot chumchon) - left me scratching my head and so today, Mi explained it to me and I'll do a post on that. But in the explanation, he used the word

ลง ขัน long khan which thai2english.com translates as

[ V ] contribute ; offer money ; take a share in the expenses

and I'm probably going to translate as 'member contribution' with a link to this post.

But when I looked at the meaning of the two words ลง and ขัน, I couldn't understand how that got to offer money or take a share in the expenses.

ลง translates as:

get down ; get off ; go down ; decrease ; drop ; fall ; reduce ; descend ; put down down ; downward write down ; note down ; register ; publish

ขัน translates as:

amusingly ; funnily ; ridiculously ; absurdly bowl ; water dipper crow ; coo laugh ; tighten ; screw tight ; wrench

So how does that get to contribute? This is where the 'delightful' part of translation comes in. The relevant term here for ขัน is 'water dipper'. As Mi explained it to me, you have your water dipper filled with water and you lower it into the communal water bowl. Or you take your money out of your pocket and put it into the communal pot.

And suddenly it makes a lot of sense.

[Update later that day - there was a water dipper at the gathering I went to tonight, so I was able to add in this picture.]

Organic Strawberry Smoothies

Today, Swe took J and me to a little coffee shop - Nada - nearby for organic strawberry smoothies. The strawberries were grown in his village.


Yesterday we talked to our friend Jeremy in Anchorage via Skype. So Swe had to practice his English with someone new. He also helped me to translate the words I had trouble with in a video I want to post.

This is Nada making another smoothie.

So today, Swe had downloaded Skype onto his computer and we practiced using it. While we were doing that, my daughter skyped us from Seattle. In less than a month, Swe will be in Japan at the Asian Rural Institute and will have to speak English most of the time.

Message to US Hmong Community from Thai Hmong Farmer

One of the demonstrators was a Hmong farmer. In the video below he sends a message in the Hmong language to his brothers and sisters in the US and elsewhere.

So, folks in Anchorage. Those of you who know how to get hold of the Hmong community, tell them to check out this video I took today (March 10, 2009 Thai Time). And people in other states with Hmong communities, let them know this video is available. Thanks.



[Update: Thursday, March 12, 2009 9pm Thai Time; Someone found this post pretty quickly and posted a link at a Google Group for Hmong. Within 24 hours some 60 people had watched the video. Two comments were up on the Google Group, but they're in Hmong so I have no idea what they say. But I'm trying to get the man in the video the information. So, thanks for getting the information out, whoever you are.]

Bangkok Farmers' Demonstration

[Tuesday, March 10, 2009 3pm Thai time]
J and I managed to get over to where my colleagues and the farmers they work with are demonstration. They were originally scheduled to go home tonight, but a group of the demonstrators are supposed to be meeting the prime minister tomorrow, so they aren't sure how long they are staying. But we're headed home tonight. I've written about some of the issues in previous posts. I'll just put up the pictures now.

We got there after they marched to Government House today, so no action shots.

We wandered into the Southern Thai part first.
They were happy to show me their sign and have me photograph it.
Then the sent us to the Northern Thai section.

We passed the stage.

And this is what things look like pretty much. Lots of people sitting around under the blue tarps. It's really hot and humid.

Finally I found my group. It was good to see people I recognized and who recognized me. But everyone was friendly to us, even those who had no idea why I was there.

They were cooking lunch at this point.

And checking to see what news about the demonstration was in the newspaper.

And resting.

Here's the laundry area. I know my group left Thursday night and
today is Tuesday, so they've been here a while.

Here's the water and shower area. Also a nearby hotel was letting them take showers for 5 or 10 Baht a head if I remember right.

Here are some of the farmers I first met in Petchabul
in early January, and then a few times later.

It's hot out there.

And here's J and Ew (from our office) catching up.

OK, I realize this is just pictures, but it will have to do for now. I'm also going to post a video next. I took these pictures a couple of hours ago.

CSAs and other Creative Ways to Sell Vegies

One of the functions of my organization here, and ones it works with, is to help farmers be self-sufficient and sustainable. But ultimately you must have a market for your goods. Tok (it's an unaspirated T that sounds a lot like a D) is working on his dissertation and has been working with farmers for a couple of years now. And despite his T-shirt (a gift he told me) he talks about marketing and about going to a seminar on branding. Last year he took me out to Mr. Diraek's farm when I got here. And last week we talked about getting consumers to buy shares in the farm. I talked about people I knew in Anchorage who did just that, and got a huge box of fresh vegetables every week or so all summer. I promised him I'd get him information on how people do that in the US. So here's some of that information. With pictures of today's trip out to one of the farmers' markets where they sell their organic produce.

I discovered the word is CSA or Consumer Supported Agriculture. It's done a variety of ways. From Local Harvest:

A CSA, (for Community Supported Agriculture) is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become "members" (or "shareholders," or "subscribers") of the CSA. Most CSA farmers prefer that members pay for the season up-front, but some farmers will accept weekly or monthly payments. Some CSAs also require that members work a small number of hours on the farm during the growing season.

A CSA season typically runs from late spring through early fall. The number of CSAs in the United States was estimated at 50 in 1990, and has since grown to over 2200.

UMassVegetable gives a detailed description of CSAs. Here's a bit on how they work:

How Does CSA Work?

Money, Members and Management

A farmer or grower, often with the assistance of a core group, draws up a budget reflecting the production costs for the year. This includes all salaries, distribution costs, investments for seeds and tools, land payments, taxes, machinery maintenance, etc. The budget is then divided by the number of people the farm will provide for and this determines the cost of each share of the harvest. One share is usually designed to provide the weekly vegetable needs for a family of four. Share prices reflect many variables and average between $300 and $600. Flowers, fruit, meat, honey, eggs and dairy products are also available through some CSA.

Brookfieldfarm.org explains what a share includes on their farm.

What's in a share?

• Between 5 and 18 lbs. (14 lbs. avg.) of produce each week from the first week of June ‘til Thanksgiving
• We think this will be sufficient produce for 2 adults (non-vegetarian) or 1 adult (vegetarian)

All shares also include:

• a variety of Pick-Your-Own (PYO) vegetables, herbs, berries, and flowers (we harvest about 90% of the food for you - but some items are strictly PYO - beans, peas, cherry tomatoes, flowers, and strawberries)
• the opportunity to purchase our own bulk produce at wholesale prices for canning and freezing
• the opportunity to purchase Brookfield Farm raised beef and pork
• a weekly newsletter during harvest season with recipes, farm news, and other good stuff!
• access to Brookfield Farm's 50 acres of land for recreational use
• the opportunity for your family to participate in educational programs and seasonal festivals

A Share is Seasonal:

• Throughout the season, your weekly share is made up of the freshest vegetables available from the farm. The variety and amount in the share depend on the season and the weather.
• Here’s a sample of what you might get in one week’s share in June and September: (You can click the link to see what's in the shares)
  

Here's link to a photo tour of the Brookfield farm.


Heirloom farms has 'workshares' as well as CSA:

What is a Workshare?

A workshare is someone who works 8 hours a week from the middle of May through the end of October in exchange for a share of the farm's produce. Workshares differ from one-time volunteers and CSA members who perform a work commitment in that they develop some skill and speed over the course of a season, which gives them an important role to play in meeting the farm's labor needs.

These are jackfruit.

This is Khiew - it means green. Mr. Diraek is her husband. She was tired after getting up around 4am to get things to the market by 5 or 6am. We got there late when most people had already left. She said this was hard work. Tok showed me a powerpoint yesterday where he's got various marketing ideas in the works - from CSA's to home and office delivery. In some ways, this is really a return to Thailand's past where food was grown with natural fertilizers and not full of pesticides and farmers sold their produce locally. And it's also part of a worldwide trend. They key is making it work right. As Khiew's tired face shows this isn't easy. But they are doing the most important job - producing good food.

These are the prices agreed upon by the farmers. They're a good buy.

And here is one of the farmers' id certifying his organic credentials. A New York Times article today says that consumers aren't always aware that US organic labeling doesn't mean the food is safer than non-organic food. It's only about how it is grown. That farmers work hard seems to be true around the world. But they are trying out new ways to connect with consumers.


Continuing with the varieties of CSAs,

Alaska's Glaciervalleycsa expands the idea by getting produce from Outside Alaska as well as Alaska (it's year round). The interesting thing is that you can order a
box (they choose what goes in the box) when you want, but you don't have
to get a box every week. One reader posted a message that this wasn't really a CSA because they imported food from elsewhere. The response was, well, if they are going to provide food year round in Alaska, they have to. Are the vegies they get any different from what Safeway and Fred Meyers sells? I don't know.

And there is even a site that advertises for
Internships, Apprenticeships, and Jobs on Organic and Sustainable ...
Here's a site looking for organic volunteers and employees. It says
"Educational Exchanges in Sustainability" This appears to be the page
for Alaska farms. I'm not excited how the site looks on my computer.

Here's from one of the Anchorage Daily News blogs about CSA's in the
Anchorage area.


And an Alaska Farm: Alaska Organic Farm

To what extent can Alaska farms feed Alaskans? How much can rural Alaskans grow in the summer? In greenhouses in the winter? You can argue that these kinds of grown foods aren't traditional foods, but they would be much healthier than a lot of the food sold in rural Alaska.

Start of a Busy, Productive Day

This is the morning view from our bed. Today was relatively clear compared to last week and the temperature seemed cooler than it's been. You can see the outline of Doi (Mt.) Suthep in the background.

I'd been asked early last week if J would be able to come teach English at work. (She done that some last year.) This year they had a Karen villager who'd gotten a scholarship to to to the Asian Rural Institute in Japan for nine months training. Only about 30 people are selected for this from all of Asia and (I think) Africa each year. Although the program is in Japan, the work is in English. We didn't know how good his English was, but he did have, we were told, a Bachelors Degree which means he's studied English.

So, today, J set up class in our building for her one student, who turned out to be smart as could be and whose English, while not fluent, is already fairly good, by Thai standards. She began with some vocabulary from the Asian Rural Institute website on the assumption he needs to know some of their most frequently used words.

Here's S just before class started. He was already excited to be getting some serious help with his English. He leaves for Japan at the end of March.

Meanwhile our 30 days comes up again in two weeks, so the weekend after next, we're headed to Hanoi so we can pick up another 30 days in our passports for Thailand. By the end of that 30 days, it will be time to go back home to Anchorage. Air Asia, while inconvenient in some ways, has really inexpensive fares. Ours wasn't the best deal we heard about, but the two us fly from Chiang Mai to Bangkok and then to Hanoi (these are booked and treated as totally separate trips) for under $400.

There are lots of other interesting stories from the last few days, but they'll have to wait.

Chiang Mai T Shirts

We had dinner tonight with Rachel, one of the other AJWS volunteers who's working with a Burmese related organization. We ate at the vegetarian restaurant across the street from the North Gate of Chiang Mai University. After dinner, we wandered around the little night market there, which like the one near us on the south side of the University, is geared toward students. Rachel has been getting pictures each day of the number of days she's been here. Today she was looking for the number 41. She has them on the photo section of her blog.

While we were looking I discovered a really neat T shirt shop. The guy said he did them all himself. I liked their originality but none of them had my name on it. He said some were sold in Germany.



Then we found another spot selling T shirts. These were also neat, but again, there was something not quite right - in one case the word nigga - in the middle of the T shirt, so I ended up with some pictures of T shirts. The second batch were from Bangkok they told me.

Bangkok Protest 5 - Sufficiency Economy

[Monday, February 16, 2009, 5pm Thai Time - well that's when I started. I let this set yesterday while I did other things and now it's Wednesday about noon.]

Note: This is going to be somewhat rambling as I'm ruminating on this topic. In some ways it is new to me, in other ways it's old, but with new names. So consider this an exploratory look.

As I'm reading the English version of the Recommendations for the New Government, the policy recommendations made by the Thai Land Reform Network (or Network for Thai Land Reform, depending on who's translating), a coalition of organizations representing farmers and other poor Thai communities, I'm being pulled in different directions. I support the basic sentiments, but I think that the arguments could be better organized and documented.

As an US citizen reading this, one who lives in a red state (bizarre isn't that a 'red state' means a conservative state?), I've been sensitized to expect strong criticism of anything that isn't strongly pro-capitalist. The six months we lived in Portland, I was constantly surprised at how the liberals were as free and loose in their philosophy as the conservatives are in Alaska. But when you are always about to be criticized, you're forced to think about what you believe much more carefully and how to justify it.

And my academic training always wants an argument to so logically lead to the conclusions that the attentive readers already knows the conclusions before they reads them.

Anyway, this document basically assumes that the government has strong responsibilities to redistribute land to poor farmers, and I think it is this part that makes me feel, as a member of one of the organizations, vulnerable to challenge. I say that knowing that a document like this in Alaska would be blasted as 'socialist' (by people who probably couldn't tell you exactly what socialist means) and un-American. Of course, I'm not in the United States now, so that really is irrelevant. Also, I don't think you can really call it un-American after first the Bush Administration gave out $700 billion or so followed now by the Obama Administration doing the same. And, of course, both the US and Alaska have given away land to homesteaders in the past as well. But I would like to see this document's arguments better organized. There were a number of declaratory statements like this one:

Land is a social resource and an important productive resource. Thai society needs for there to be a just and fair distribution of land holdings so that the poor and small-scale farmers can have their own land for use in building up food security and security of settlement. . .

The phenomenon of land that is being held for purely speculative purposes, with an owner but not being put to productive use, indicates the injustice in land holding patterns in Thailand. This land should be used for production and distributed efficiently and appropriately for the benefit of landless farmers and the poor who lack land for settlement.

OK, I thought, you can say this, but many would argue that owners have the right to leave their property 'unproductive.' You have to link this to something that shows this is basic Thai policy or at least congruent with Thai values.

So, finally I got to the part of the document that mentioned Section 85 of the 2007 Thai Constitution (oh my, the Thai Constitution is 97 pages long, while the US Constitution is only 17 pages). But before I get to that, let's go back to another reason for concern about grounding these arguments.

I'm also thinking of my former student (forty years ago) who I visited Thursday on the way back from Bangkok. His grandparents immigrated to Thailand from China maybe 70 or 80 years ago with almost nothing. They took what little they had and bought a plot of land and planted bananas. They lived in a very basic house - I was in it a number of times in 1967 and 1968 - that had no electricity and water came from a well outside. It had a dirt floor. Every baht they had, they reinvested into land and production of bananas. They are no longer alive, but their son and grandsons have a great deal of land planted mostly, now, in sugar cane. Mook lives in a comfortable house and has, by anyone's standards, a good life - both in terms of material needs and spiritual needs. As I was reading the document, I could hear him saying, "My grandparents came here with nothing and worked extremely hard for their land. Why should the government be giving away land to farmers?" In fact on Thursday he bemoaned how hard his mom worked, going out early (before 7 am) every morning with the cane workers and getting back about 5pm when she would prepare food for all the workers. So, I want to be able to respond to Mook.

Additionally, I know there are lots of examples where rich investors were able to corruptly gain title to land. The document briefly cites some examples:

. . .there are many cases of land use/ownership documents that have been issued illegitimately and illegally. This applies to private land and land used by communities, such as land for production, community forests, public land, and land distributed by the Agriclutrual Land Reform Office. This land, for which use/ownership documents have been issued fraudulently, was often later deposited as collateral for loans, on which debtors defaulted. In these cases, classified as non-performing loans, the banks sue in court, seized the land, and sold it on the market. However, the land then sat vacat, as if abandoned. When the people adopted measures to solve the problem of land in a just manner by carrying out land reform themselves by occupying and putting this land to use, the state used its legal power to arrest and prosecute the landless poor.

As you can see, things can get messy.

But let's hold off on that line of reasoning for now.

I want to raise the issue of "Sufficiency Economy" which I found in Sections 83 and 84 of the Constitution.

Part 7
Policy Directive on Economics

Section 83. The State shall promote and support the implementation of philosophy of sufficiency economy.

Section 84. The State shall follow the Policy Directive on Economics as follows:

(1) Encourage a free and fair economic system through market force, and encourage the sustainable economic development by abolishing and refraining the enactment of laws and regulations supervising the businesses that are inconsistent to the business necessity; shall not engage in an enterprise in competition with the private sector, except it is necessary and beneficial for maintaining the security of the State, preserving the common interests, or providing public utilities.

This unofficial translation has been provided by IFES Thailand and the
Political Section and Public Diplomacy Office of the US Embassy-Bangkok.


20

(2) Promote the practice of virtues, ethics, and good governance in business affairs. . .

(8) Protect and maintain the interests of farmers in production and marketing; promote the highest price possible for agricultural products; encourage the grouping of farmers in the form of the farmer council in order to work out on the agricultural plan and protect their common interests. [emphasis added]

That sounded vaguely familiar, or maybe it was just that I'd heard both those words before - Sufficiency and Economy - but I looked it up and found it was a philosophy put forth by the King of Thailand. The King of Thailand, by the way, is the longest reigning Monarch in the world. He was born in the US while his father Prince Mahidol was getting his MD at Harvard. He was educated in Switzerland and he has a long history of taking a strong interest in the spiritual and economic well being of his people - all people of Thailand including members of ethnic minority groups. He's well educated, plays jazz saxophone, is (at least was, don't know about now) an avid photographer, and traveled extensively around Thailand to meet with ordinary people to understand how to make their lives better. No, I'm not working for the palace, this is my sense of him having paid some attention over the years. He has been King for over 60 years now. He's truly a remarkable man.

So, this is not some backwater monarch coming up with some nationalistic plan with no practical basis.

As I googled and read more, this appears to me more general principles, not a micro-economics plan. But it attempts to balance the needs of people and communities against the realities of international capitalism. From Reflected Knowledge:

Sufficiency Economy advocates taking the middle path in life as the optimal route for personal conduct at all levels: individuals, families and communities. It counsels moderation, self-reliance, honesty and integrity, while exercising knowledge with prudence.

Sufficiency Economy posits that an individual should be able to lead a reasonably comfortable life without excess or overindulgence in luxury. That is, if extravagance brings happiness it is permissible only as long as it is within the means of the individual. As His Majesty stated in a Royal Speech on December 4, 1998, “If one is moderate in one’s desires, one will have less craving. If one has less craving, one will take less advantage of others. If all nations hold this concept of moderation, without being extreme or insatiable in one’s desire, the world will be a happier place.”

Economics professor Mehdi Krongkaew writes in a Kyoto Review article:

The philosophy can be summed up in one paragraph, as translated from the Thai:

“Sufficiency Economy is a philosophy that guides the livelihood and behavior of people at all levels, from the family to the community to the country, on matters concerning national development and administration. It calls for a ‘middle way’ to be observed, especially in pursuing economic development in keeping with the world of globalization. Sufficiency means moderation and reasonableness, including the need to build a reasonable immune system against shocks from the outside or from the inside. Intelligence, attentiveness, and extreme care should be used to ensure that all plans and every step of their implementation are based on knowledge. At the same time we must build up the spiritual foundation of all people in the nation, especially state officials, scholars, and business people at all levels, so they are conscious of moral integrity and honesty and they strive for the appropriate wisdom to live life with forbearance, diligence, self-awareness, intelligence, and attentiveness. In this way we can hope to maintain balance and be ready to cope with rapid physical, social, environmental, and cultural changes from the outside world.”

There's a Wikipedia article on localism in Thailand which discusses Sufficiency Economics which also includes some criticism, but this particular feature caught my eye:

Loan.

Another example in the philosophy: one must save money enough before investment, and do not overinvest such that you become deep in debt. Some believe this idea is in conflict with the concepts of economy of scale and economy of scope in economics and exploitation of the future demand.

It seems to me in the aftermath of the crash of the US housing market, this sort of philosophy should have a much better reception in the West than it might have had a year ago.

Overall, I think that black and white, good versus evil, picture that many in the US have of the world is not an accurate reflection. Rather, the social world is a complex set of forces constantly in tension. I think the King's sufficiency economics reflects that better than much of what we get in the West. There's a sense of moderation that we can also see in Greek tradition in Western heritage. There is a recognition of the need to be prepared for unforeseen catastrophes. As I visit different villages, I see farmers, with which my organization works, who are able to feed themselves through their farming and would be much more self sufficient should this economic crisis get worse. Certainly they are much better prepared than most people living in Alaska who are totally dependent on the outside world for nearly everything we consume.

So now I'm left to try] to recraft the document, taking the points they have, and reorganizing how they are presented, and getting more information in some areas. At the very least, I'll understand this all better afterward.

Lineated Barbets Alarm Clock

[Wed. Feb. 18, 9am Thai Time]
This morning we awoke to Barbets calling. Bu Bok, Bu Bok, Bu Bok. Oh to have more than 3X optical zoom. But you can see them. (Double click to enlarge the pictures) They're there, in the middle of the picture, two one a little above the other.

Does this help? With the binoculars, they were crystal clear, green birds with greyish mottled heads.


Yesterday, on the way home from the Consulate, I passed the DK Book Center, along the outside of the moat of the city center on the East side. It's basically a Thai bookstore and there I met a tourguide, Sun, who has worked for an NGO giving micro-loans to hill-tribe villages and was interested in my idea of training villagers to be bird guides. I told him I was looking for a Thai bird book and they had one at the counter. I bought the Thai version - I want a copy for the office and it does have the names in English and an English index. The two on the left are the same book - one in Thai, one in English, which was published first.

I'm hoping Sun can meet with people at the office to talk more about the bird guiding idea. He seems to know the birds and the different books well.

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.