As a New Year's gift, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) has promised to return happiness to the people by giving 53,000 rai of state land to landless villagers. On paper, it looks like a generous present.
Activists protesting against the junta in November over restrictions put on public forums discussing land reform.
However, the plan is possible only by implementing a much-criticised master plan for forest conservation. Introduced in July after the military coup, the plan aims to increase forest coverage by 10% in the country. One of the means to achieve this is through a crackdown on "encroachers" in national parks and forest reserve areas.
Businesses such as food shops, resorts as well as many local communities have been forced to leave their land and resettle elsewhere. Observers have called the whole operation a forced resettlement programme. The plan drew resistance and criticism because some traditional villagers have been forced to leave despite the previous cabinet's motions to acknowledge their rights to stay. Last November, affected villagers and activists launched a campaign to walk from Chiang Mai to Bangkok to protest against the policy, but the General Prayut Chan-o-cha-led junta ordered them to stop. Activists who spoke against the plan, like academic Prapas Pintobtang, were summoned for a brief "discussion". Public forums that discussed this problem were asked to tone down content, or change speakers, if they were not annulled altogether.
Prayong Doklamyai is an activist from the Northern Peasants Federation. He chats with Life about why villagers have become restless with the junta's policy on forest conservation and what needs to be done to create fair and just land reform for all.
Prayong Doklamyai.
Why do local villagers and activists oppose the NCPO's master plan for forest conservation? I believe the junta is sincere in its efforts to reclaim forest land and protect the forest. But the plan is an example of how good intentions are spoiled by poor execution. The NCPO gave a blanket order to national park staff to reclaim forest land. Then it becomes a display of how much and how fast the national park staff can reclaim the land.
At first, the crackdown focused on businesses that encroached on national parks and gradually shifted to hundreds of communities living in national parks and public forests. Some of them are traditional communities that have stayed on the land for half-a-century or more. Previous governments have issued cabinet motions to acknowledge the rights of some of the traditional communities to stay on their land. But this policy disregards that.
Now, over 10 million villagers are possibly considered encroachers and trespassers, and subject to eviction. It will be a mass migration and might lead to major uprisings in the future.
What should be done to solve forest encroachment?
The NCPO needs to involve local villagers in the reform process. They need to recognise the rights of villagers who settled in the forest before national park laws became active.
The current government is actively involved with land reform, including revising land tax and land inheritance tax. Is this good enough?
Any government that tries to revise land tax and land inheritance tax always gets good publicity. But the point is the amount of the tax. In my opinion, the amount of land tax proposed is too small. It covers the general public, instead of targeting wealthy landlords. The motivation of the land tax proposal is to collect more tax revenue for the local administration, not to take away land from rich landlords. Our land tax policy is still a means for the state to collect more tax revenue. But what we need is land tax with a progressive rate that collects tax from landlords who own a lot of idle land. We propose that large land-hoarders need to pay more. We also need other mechanisms to create more equal land distribution.
In fact, the "Stop 1+4" land reform campaign proposed by the Northern Peasants Federation is pushing for the implementation of four draft laws on forest management that recognise community rights over ancestral lands. These are a land bank bill; a community rights in land and natural resources management bill that highlights community land title deeds; a land tax bill; and a justice fund.
Under the junta, has it become increasingly hard for local villagers and activists to campaign on the environment?
Local villagers are becoming more displeased with the junta. They put a lot of faith in the army because they are fed up with democratically elected politicians. They hoped the army might be different. The problem is the junta does not differentiate between politically-driven groups that try to stoke unrest to undermine the regime, and local villagers and activists who have real problems. The NCPO chose to make all of society quiet in order to proceed with its scheme. But how can reform take place without participation from people? All I can say is that martial law and censorship are counterproductive and push many supporters away.
You are considered a supporter of the Suthep Thaugsuban-led People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), but now you seem to be against the junta, the regime which the PDRC supports. Environmental activists and local villagers working for environmental movements seem to always have problems with political groups. How does this happen?
Local villagers and environmental activists have always locked horns with almost every government and every political party, and do not belong strictly to any red or yellow shirt camp. "Green" groups always choose to follow policies that affect the community and environment and hardly subscribe to any particular political ideology. Indeed, natural resources like water, soil, land, forest or energy resources are indeed capital that can generate a lot of money. Thus, the environmental issue is the competition to control major capital investment, such as land for millions of farmers to live and make a living as opposed to real estate development and resources for energy companies.
If you look at the country's development policies, you will realise they are closely involved with the use of natural resources. For example, the 300 billion baht water management plan. Another example is power development that leads to construction of dams or even coal-fired power plants in land that local people live in. Even the forest conservation plan involves the spending of billions of baht.
A clearing of encroached resorts in Taplan National Park, Prachin Buri province.
