The military-led government has governed the country for the last three years with the lofty ambition of reducing the wealth gap between the rich and poor. Many policies have been turned into action to achieve this goal, or promise, including a challenging new policy on forest and land management for those on the bottom rungs of society. But critics say the policy has fallen short of the mark and argue that more aggressive action is needed.
The National Committee on Land Policy was set up in 2014. Chaired by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, one of its chief mandates is to help the poor make a living by allocating land to them in the form of cooperatives, rather than granting them individual rights of ownership. The government believes this is a firm step in the right direction to reducing inequality.
The committee has been looking at distributing around 4 million rai of land to the poor. The deteriorated forest land in question falls under the purview of the Royal Forest Department.
But as local people have not been invited to participate in driving the policy, the government has fallen into a bureaucratic trap, according to a representative from Land Watch Thai.
Meanwhile, there is not enough state-owned land to go around to help all the poor people who need fields to farm and land to make a living from. As such, the government should start looking at private land, she said.
The representative said the Land Bank has been set up to help the poor. It would extend loans to landless farmers to help them buy or rent private land at low interest rates. The bank's main source of income would derive from its collection of land taxes.
Affluent members of society who possess large tracts of land were supposed to face high tax rates, encouraging them to release at least some of their land to the market.
This is an important step as about 10% of the population now owns 70% of the nation's land, according to estimates by Land Watch Thai.
The problem is that the concept of an "advanced land tax rate" was not included in the long-awaited land and building tax bill, which was intended to narrow economic disparity and was approved by the cabinet in March.
This means the wealthy landowners had little incentive to sell and the poor still lacked access to land.
Pralong Damrongthai, a spokesman for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, admitted recently that progress in allocating land to the poor has been slow because the procedures are complicated.
He said the National Committee on Land Policy has allocated 95,072 rai to 8,500 people living in 17 provinces.
Of this, 83,886 rais has come from national reserve forests, while the rest is either Sor Por Kor land from the Agricultural Land Reform Office, mangrove areas, public land, or land dispensed by the Treasury Department, Mr Pralong said.
He said Prime Minister Prayut Cha-o-cha would like to see 4 million rai allocated to the poor within the next two years.
The committee plans to speed up its work by having private firms work with the Royal Forest Department to conduct land surveys, the spokesman added.
"We admit there have been delays because we conducted some of the work manually, such as the forest land surveys," he said.
"Now we are considering outsourcing some of the work that also involves the Royal Forest Department. We hope this will speed things up and keep the plan on track."
In addition to managing land for the poor, the government is also working to suppress forest encroachment in line with orders 64/2557 and 66/2557 under the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO).
Yet this, too, has seen a slew of cases that have raised much concern among environmental and other activists.
Sumitchai Huttasan, director of the Centre for Protection & Revival of Local Community Rights (CPCR), said the orders have done more harm than good for poor people in forested areas.
Even though impoverished members of such communities are supposed to be exempt from legal action under the second of the two orders, many legal cases are pending against them, he said.
Mr Sumitchai said that the government's policy on protecting and conserving forest land has taken a wrong tack because it has not involved the participation of the public.
He hailed other successful projects that have included the public, such as those concerning community title deeds, but suggested the government has erred by centralising its management of forest resources.
Mr Sumitchai also claimed it is the local people, rather than state agencies acting alone, who are responsible for increasing forest land from 27% of the nation in 1989 to 30% at present.
"I've seen less cooperation from local people to protect and preserve the forest as they don't get any benefits from it, which I see as a dangerous sign," he said.
"The government should make more efforts to encourage people to get involved."
Meanwhile, the Royal Forest Department said it has reclaimed 351,622 rai of land since 2014 and seen 10,939 cases of forest land encroachment.
This week, the Bangkok Post is interviewing people from various sectors for its '3 Years after Coup' series. This is the third of the series, which will wrap up next Monday.