Anand Duangruenkaew has every reason to be happy. For two decades, Anand and thousands of farm families in tambon Mae Tha in Chiang Mai's Mae On district have been fighting for their land rights with forest officials. Now they can go to sleep without fear of arrest and forced eviction.
Their battle officially ended when Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha gave them land use documents on Sunday. To prevent land from changing hands, Gen Prayut said they would receive only land use rights, not land ownership. In exchange, they must help protect nearby community forests.
Community land ownership and forest conservation duty are part of forest communities' land rights and land reform proposals. But they face fierce opposition from forest authorities.
There are more than 700 fierce land rights conflicts in the country. Many involve forest communities like Mae Tha. The conflicts arose from forest authorities' rush to expand forest reserves and national parks. Their top-down forest demarcation has eaten into farmers and forest dwellers' farmlands. Worse, farmers in the overlapping areas have been turned into illegal forest encroachers subject to arrest, imprisonment and eviction.
Is Gen Prayut's Mae Tha land use model a game changer?
The government has promised to find more than 100,000 rai of land to give to the landless. With nearly one million landless families in the country, is his land distribution land scheme ushering in a new era of land reform?
Not so fast.
Decades of land rights conflicts have produced a nationwide grassroots movement for land reform. Many of its proposals were endorsed in previous charters. They included community rights to manage forest, land, and local natural resources. Yet the people-sponsored community forest bill was shot down by forest authorities. Their proposals on land use rights and community land ownership in exchange for forest conservation duty - which were adopted by the Yingluck and Abhisit governments - were also ignored by the mandarins, particularly forest officials.
Apart from community land ownership, the land reform movement has also proposed amendments to draconian forest laws which treat forest peoples as criminals, the setting up of land banks for the landless, a progressive land tax, and a fund to help farmers who are abused by unjust forest laws.
The Anand reform committee did not only endorse these proposals. It went further by proposing a land ownership ceiling - a controversial matter which no government has deigned to consider.
In short, the government needs to do much more than giving some land to some landless farmers.
The land ownership divide in Thailand is among the most scandalous in the world. One liquor tycoon alone owns more than 600,000 rai of land when millions of people are landless or do not have enough land to till.
The government wants to showcase the Mae Tha land distribution scheme as its use of absolute power to solve deep-rooted problems. The fact is Mae Tha people do not consider themselves landless and they had actually solved most their problems before the Sunday ceremony fanfare.
For starters, they had long united to set up a land ownership agreement within the community. Their forest conservation work and green farming had also won them nationwide admiration. The threats of eviction were always there but the Mae Tha's success managed to prevent forest authorities from carrying out violent acts.
They succeed because theirs are bottom-up efforts based on community participation and consensus.
For me, it is a little farcical to see the prime minister ordering villagers to do this and that so they can live in peace on land that was originally theirs.
Admitting the Mae Tha's success, the government agreed to lift preconditions on farmers' income levels and land plot sizes so it could showcase Mae Tha as its land distribution achievement. Other areas won't get the same privileges.
Meantime, the government continue to raid other forest communities which, like Mae Tha, were there for generations before the areas were demarcated as national forests.
Millions of rai are now available for landless farmers to rent now that oil palm concessions have expired. Yet, the government refuses to do it.
Short of tackling structural problems that perpetuate land woes and without respecting bottom-up land solutions - absolute power cannot solve landlessness here.
Sanitsuda Ekachai is editorial pages editor, Bangkok Post.