Sustainable Farming the Old Fashioned Way - Karen Village

All this is in the context of the modern debates on global warming, sustainable farming, and land rights for the various hill tribes living in official forest land in Thailand. What we saw yesterday was a bit of paradise in some ways. Westerners looking at the pictures of the housing might cringe, but all things considered this is much more comfortable than a lot of the housing in rural Alaska villages. And, what I learned 40 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Thailand, what Westerners have over less wealthy cultures is a physical standard of living advantage (one that has shrunk considerably in the intervening years, at least for Thailand) and what the Thais have is a social, cultural advantage - things like connectedness to the land and to each other, traditions and ceremonies that tie them together, friendships and family connections that are close and supportive. This advantage is also shrinking.


Of course these are generalizations for both sides. But that discussion seems a pertinent preface to the pictures and comments below.

J's been helping S get his oral English ready for his nine month's training program at the Asian Rural Institute in Japan. He leaves next week. Yesterday he picked us up at 7:30am and drove us the not quite two hours up into the mountains. The following will be a bunch of pictures with some description. At 1200 meters above sea level, it was delightfully cooler than Chiang Mai at about 600 meters up. After we passed the tourist elephant camp, the road up got steeper and windier. J's stomach usually isn't too good, but S drove slowly. Then he stopped at a little shop and came out with a plaster (I'd say band-aid, but it wasn't really) that he said to stick on her belly, which she did. She had no problem up or back.



We got to the village and then his house where we met his mother, brother, sister, and niece. All but the sister were in this picture. They were looking at the Alaska calendar we brought them. We were given Karen style shoulder bags she made - a beautiful burnt orange color.

Here's the house. This has been added on to over the years to get to this stage. The original house is what is just the kitchen now.










And just like in any family anywhere, his niece's artwork is up for everyone to admire.



I had to go to the bathroom and I was led to a little building out back with a row of blooming orchids in front. The bathroom had running water and a regular toilet. He said they have a natural draining system with different materials besides a large hole. Unlike tanks, this one drains well and never fills up. My understanding was they used various natural materials as a drain/filter.



In their English lessons, S had told Joan that they had what he called a "lazy garden" around the house. It's where they threw things and let them grow on their own - unlike the more cultivated fields away from the house. We had passed rows and rows of beautiful lettuce, but I didn't get a picture. The lettuce and some other crops are part of the Kings Project and they get picked up and sold at organic vegetable markets, but he's not sure where.
And not everything in the lazy garden is quite so casual either. Here are some seedling avocados. Avocados were also introduced through the King's project.




And a macadamia nut tree.










This is a fishtank where they can get dinner when they need fish. Though we had fish that didn't come from the tank for lunch later.








This earthen house was built by a friend - there's a big hole still next to it where the earth was dug up. It's in there on the edge of the lazy garden.














And this bamboo, look at S standing at the bottom of it clump. It's huge! You may have to double click to enlarge the picture to see S.







Here's a pig pen right next to the house. Ordinarily this could cause some serious odor problems.









S's holding a bottle of a mixture he's concocted to make the pig pen's smell better, well, not so bad. It's got honey, salt, garlic, oyster sauce, ginger, and I forgot the other ingredients. It's mixed with water and put into the pig sty. And it really did not smell bad there at all. Not like the factory pig farms we passed that were pretty disgusting to smell.






Here's another one of the pigs.








Now we are in the kitchen. It was pretty dark in there and they didn't turn on any lights. There is electricity, but I didn't notice it on - except when his sister was ironing. I took some video tape of him explaining how the kitchen works. It's pretty dark, but I'll try to get it up eventually.







There's a lot of stuff sitting around. But it didn't look like a junkyard. Rather things all seemed to have a place. This is a 'modern' electric rice huller.










Next to it is the more traditional type of rice huller.










And there was a cow too. I think elsewhere there are some water buffalo but we didn't see them. And, of course, there were chickens and chicks running around. They eat the eggs, if they can find them. The eggs we had for lunch later were from the market.





And there's a coffee plant too.










Then we got back in the car and drove up what became a more and more marginal road for a couple of kilometers and then got out to go for a hike. One of the joys of this location is that the vegetation change is most notably visible by the existence of pine trees.









Another ethnic Karen, R, who works at this village through an NGO in Chiang Mai, joined us for the hike. He actually comes from a different province neighboring Chiang Mai.




It was nice to see greener scenery than we generally have in Chiang Mai, now well into the dry and hot season.




It was a bit late in the day to see birds. We could hear some, but it was also very hard trying to find them hidden in the trees. But S showed us some bird calls. I have a video of this too and will try to get it up in a post later. None of the other three of us could make a sound this way, but then they couldn't copy my whistling with two fingers in my mouth. I was able to get some sound out later in the car and I'll keep practicing.



We stopped here in this spot dedicated by Buddhists, animists, and Catholics who are all represented in the village. There was a sign that S translated as "This Forest Forever."










I posted the insect pictures from there in the previous post. Here are some fungus we saw. They do look fairly similar to things we have in Alaska. Also saw some ferns that - at least superficially - looked like ferns we have too. I suspect they're different.











It was a lovely hike back.












When we got back S began gathering greens for lunch - a late, 4pm lunch. The food would be better, he said, because we were so hungry. These are from a tree which reminded me of greens that our friends in Beijing collected on a trip out to the country side in 2004. But I'm sure there are lots of things that look alike. These ended up inside omelets.







Here's what he collected.










S started the fire in the kitchen. A lighter and a piece of soft pine got things started quickly.





J and S were working on the greens.










There was also some Pak Bung, another key vegetable in Thai diets. But he cooked this up with a bean sauce and some honey and it tasted different and delicious.
















Here the greens go into the egg mix. That's S's niece under the blue plastic basket.












And the Pak Bung gets cooked.















And in less than 45 minutes, lunch was ready.











And we all helped clean up. Really, I did more than take pictures.













The dishwater sink drains out to a small culvert and the grey water gets recycled into the garden and the chickens are the garbage disposal getting all the bits of rice and green that were still on the plates when they were washed.



Things are not perfect here, and there are issues of land ownership, and the government is still trying to get people out of the forest areas. But you can also see that this is a pretty sweet place to live. All sorts of tropical and semi-tropical plants grow, with little effort. S's family - and village - lifestyle is pretty in synch with nature and all the stuff we are trying to relearn in the West. Imagine what he will learn after nine-months of training on an organic, sustainable farm program in Japan.






S also pulled out an album and showed me this document which was a work contract for his great, great grandfather to work for a British timber company. He was hired because he had an elephant that was important for getting the logs out from the deep forest and out onto the roadways. I still think we should consider this in the roadless areas of Southeast Alaska. There are still elephants in Thailand who know how to do this, but they are pretty much unemployed as much of the forest is protected. (The elephants in the earlier pictures are now for tourists to ride.) The document is dated 1908 and shows that S's family has been here for at least 100 years. This is of significance because many argue that the Karen all really came from Burma, but this shows a long provenance in Thailand. The Consulate is in Chiang Mai and the other language is Thai, not Burmese. It is interesting to me, because unlike most Thai writing where the words all run together, in this document, each word is separate like in English.





And here are S's sister with her youngest child as we were leaving.

Catching up - Thai Bugs

I'd like to think that the slowdown in posts here is just a reflection of how busy I am doing things. And this week has been busy. There was the meeting of the NGO's in Chiang Mai on Wednesday and Thursday (I only went Wednesday), an all day meeting with farmers to talk about the Bangkok Demonstrations Friday in Lamphun, and today (Saturday) Swe picked us up at 7:30am to take us to his village about 2 hours out of Chiang Mai, just below Doi Inthanon, Thailand's highest mountain.

There are lots of pictures and some video, just no time to go through it all and post. And then there was the rain, the first rain since we got here in early January. But I'm going to start with a post on bugs. A few I have stored up and not yet posted and some beautiful ones we saw today. I'm also going to give a nod to malaeng.com. Maleang means insect in Thai. It's a website with all sorts of information on Thai bugs in both Thai and English.


Wednesday night, coming home after dinner, we saw this great swarm of flying things around most of the lights. We'd seen this thing last year at the Sunday night market once too.

Mr. Deraek, Thursday night after work, was sitting with a baggie of red ant eggs. He said that the black ant larvae are the ones that swarm the lights. Oh yeah, the eggs were for Tok, who supposedly loves them. You have to wash off the mature ants and the larvae first. Then you cook them.



And here's from our trip today with Swe.

A small honey comb.

This was one of those cases where my Canon drives me crazy. I just could not get this damsel fly into perfect focus. It certainly posed ok, but it was always a little blurry. I finally took a short video and maybe I'll just have to post that.

And the butterflies wouldn't hold still at all so I gave up and used the video.



I also have some audio of cicadas which are probably hitting the 60 or 70 decibel level at times. I haven't gotten it post ready yet, but those were quieter cicadas in the background of the butterfly video.

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.

The Air Was Thick

"The air was thick" is a cliche that no one should ever write. Except when the air is so thick that it embraces you the way water embraces you in a pool. Wednesday it was like that all day. Hot. Sticky. No one really wanted to move much. They put the air on at the office, but when I went out the air was again a living presence. The sky was greyish, but who knows how much of that was March haze and how much was actual cloud?

It finally rained late that night, accompanied by thunder and lighting. But it was a pathetic rain, nothing befitting the prelude. It happened again Friday afternoon. But this time when the rain came, it came pouring down. We'd had dinner and had walked up the street to buy some things when the first drops came, here and there, dotting the ground. There were flashes in the sky. The street market folks went into a flurry of pulling things down, packing things up, and heading out before it started for real. We made it back to our bikes, the locks off, when the floodwaters came pouring down. So we slipped back into the restaurant we'd eaten in 20 minutes before and waited for things to settle down a bit.

Twenty minutes later, with the pounding on the overhead covering lessened, we got our bikes and rode home in the rain. It was cool and refreshing and not so heavy that we were soaked. But even with all that cleansing, Saturday morning's view of the mountains was still not particularly clear.

I do remember forty years ago in Kamphaengphet at the end of the dry season that the sun went down fiery red behind a grey haze. Farmers burning rice fields in anticipation of the rainy season were probably part of the issue. In recent years hill tribes and Thai farmers have been blamed for burning the fields. But I can't help wondering how much factories and auto and motorcycle emissions are part of the problem.

And what blows in from Burma and Laos where there is much less control over burning?

Here's Doi Inthanon, Thailand's highest mountain, yesterday, the day after Friday's heavy rains.

People Looking for Steve Keudell

[Update: Thursday morning Thai Time/Wednesday evening Oregon Time: I got the following messages. From Sue at the Stayton Area Relay for Life:

Those looking for information on Steve Keudell's condition can do so at: http://stevekeudell.blogspot.com Thank you!

Rebecca sends the same link and adds (dated 3pm Wed. March 18 Oregon Time:

This is the site for Steven's family blog. Steven is undergoing 8-12 hours of extensive surgery today (3/18) and can use all the prayers he can get. Hope this helps! ~Rebecca

The latest update at that site (7:30pm Oregon time Wednesday) begins:

Steve was in surgery for approximately 8 hrs. today. His surgeon said "it went very well...like text book". They were able to complete the free flap with a skin graft to his head injury. The blood supply to that area after the surgery is looking great. He feels very good about how it all went.

You can get the whole report at the link above.

I've had trouble connecting, or I would have had this up sooner. Here's hoping for Steve's (we Steve's have to stick together you know) full recovery.]




I'm not sure why they are getting here, but I've had several people today get to this site looking up Steve Keudell. So I googled to find out why the interest. Here's a short article I found. You might be able to get more current news through the link to Capital Press.

Farmer hospitalized after power-line accident
Steven Keudell, a farmer in Turner, Ore., remains in critical but stable condition after serious burns and head trauma in a tree-trimming accident.

Keudell is being treated at Emanuel Hospital in Portland, where he is to undergo surgery Monday afternoon.

According to Turner Fire Chief Kevin Henson, Keudell was on a tractor working to remove tree limbs on Thursday, March 12, when a branch fell onto a power line, bringing the live wires down on top of him.

Steve, get well soon. Working with an organization that helps Thai farmers, I'm sure they all wish you well too.

[Update: It's Wednesday in Thailand Tuesday evening in Oregon: A fair number of people are getting here looking for news. I'm in Thailand and don't even know Steve. So if anyone knows where there is another website or other place to get current news, or if they have more current news, please leave a comment or email me and I'll post it.][I've fixed the email link, so try it again. Sorry.]