EDITORIAL
To save Thailand's fast diminishing forests and biodiversity, state authorities must stop their misguided policies which destroy the green cover, instead of making poor villagers the scapegoats of deforestation.
Here is one disastrous policy which needs to be halted immediately. To qualify for land ownership rights in forests, villagers are required to provide evidence to forestry officials that they have been farming in that same place for an extended period of time before the areas were officially demarcated as national parks.
This has been the cause of deforestation at Lam Klong Ngoo in Kanchanaburi province, as has happened previously in countless other forests around the country.
Before Lam Klong Ngoo was designated as a national park, the ethnic Karen forest dwellers there were primarily engaged in their traditional field rotation system, or rai mun wian in Thai.
Under this system, the peasants will leave the field for five or 10 years to let fallow land regenerate naturally before they return to till that plot of land again.
Research has shown that this ecological farming system has actually contributed to a rich biodiversity in the area. But that is not how the forestry authorities see it. It is a fact that government policy has been the main reason for the massive loss of forest cover in Thailand, e.g. state promotion of mono cash crop agriculture, the military's counter-insurgency drives in the '60s and '70s, and the construction of roads and hydro-electric dams in the heart of forests. Yet, the poor are blamed for deforestation.
To protect the dwindling greenery, forest authorities keep announcing new national parks. When it so happens that there are already indigenous people or small farmers living there, the authorities are legally empowered to arrest, evict and send the forest villagers to jail.
The problem has been compounded by a 1998 cabinet resolution which states that unless the farmlands appear in aerial photographs or there exists evidence of intensive farming before the areas were declared national parks, the villagers must be evicted.
The ethnic Karen forest dwellers cried foul when the authorities refused to recognise their different plots of fallow land which were covered with greenery as part of their rotation farming. For the officials, those plots were proper forest land and if cleared again, the villagers would be sent to jail. In line with that cabinet ruling, forestry officials have also insisted that villagers must routinely till the same fields to get rights to that land.
The result has been a disaster. Many ethnic Karen peasants in the Lam Klong Ngoo forest simply stopped their field rotation system and cleared large plots of forest, turning them into fields of corn and other cash crops. If the city masters wanted them to destroy the forest so they could stay on, they had no choice but to comply, the peasants said.
The bitter irony does not end there. Apart from destroying the villagers' ecological farming system, the forest authorities are also busy drafting a new law to open up national parks to mass tourism.
Unless these misguided policies are stopped and the authorities start involving the villagers in forest conservation and learn from their ecological farming system, the future of our forests is grim indeed.
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