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The Political Ecology
of Deforestation in
Thailand
CLAUDIO O. DELANG
ABSTRACT: This article looks at the history of the
relationship between development policies and
deforestation in Thailand from the beginning of
the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth
century. It first considers the lowland processes
of horizontal expansion that carried on until
the end of the Second World War, at which point
the lowlands had become almost completely
deforested. The article then turns to the
highland forests, and discusses the development
policies pursued there by the Thai government
until the 1980s, when authorities outlawed
logging and declared a closure of the frontier.
Drawing on political ecology, the paper argues
that forest policies of the Thai government have
changed owing to shifts in the relative influence
of different groups – the landed nobility, the
industrialists, the military, and the
environmentalists – in the national political
arena. The group with the least political power,
the ethnic minorities living in the highlands,
is eventually blamed for the deforestation,
in spite of the fact that it is the one that least
contributed to it.
Introduction
FORESTS IN DEVELOPING tropical countries are
rapidly being depleted, and South East Asia is
especially affected. During the 1980s, South East
Asia experienced an average deforestation rate of
1.4% per year, the highest among all tropical
regions (World Bank, 1992). During the 1990s, the
yearly rate of loss in total forest cover was of
between 1.4% for Burma and Indonesia, and 0.4%
for Laos, with Thailand being halfway at 0.7% per
year (FAO, 2000). The reasons for deforestation
are varied, but blame often goes to logging and
agricultural expansion (e.g. Kummer and Turner,
1994). This article discusses the reasons for
deforestation in Thailand, where agricultural
lands have been expanding steadily at the expense
of the forest, which has been constantly declining
from covering about 70% of the national territory
in 1930, to approximately 15% today. The article
reviews the way in which shifting power relations
in Thailand, from the beginning of the nineteenth
century to the present, have resulted in changes
in the uses of the forests. In particular, it describes
the ways in which different interest groups
pressured the national government to pursue one
policy or another, in the name of economic
development, national security, or environmental
protection.
The question of the conflicts over natural
resources is the focus of the literature that falls
under the broad category of political ecology.
Since the 1980s an increasing number of
academics have popularised the term political
ecology with a body of research that was
concerned with, broadly speaking, ‘intellectual
efforts to critically analyse the problems of natural
resource appropriation and [the] political
economic origins of resource degradation’ (De
Jong et al., 2003, p. 4). Political ecology has been
described as a ‘confluence’ of related subdisciplines (Peet and Watts, 1996, p. 6), although
the spaces it occupies within this confluence may
not be so clearly defined. It developed from a
criticism and amalgamation of different research
fields – cultural ecology, environmental
economics, environmental management, environmental politics, environmental sociology – from
researchers who rejected the view of human
communities as fairly homogenous, autonomous
units, and recognised the importance of
incorporating the political dimension into the
study of the interactions between human
populations and the physical environment.
Hence, political ecology is concerned primarily
with the political dimensions of natural resource
use, and the subtleties of those politics. On the
other hand, the ecological dimensions of resource
use (as understood by biologists) are lacking in
many studies (Vayda and Walters, 1999).
Political ecology is not a unified scientific
discipline, with its set of related ideas, premises,
and theories (De Jong et al., 2003), or clear
methodologies that set it apart from other
disciplines. Rather, it is a method of analysis
(Peluso, 1992) with a commonality of themes that
are of interest to those who get to be included into
this topical category. What all these studies tend to
have in common is at least a concern for the ways
in which groups of people use their power to deny
other groups the use of the natural resources. In
the case of Thailand and South East Asia, forests
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are often at the centre of resource conflict and
therefore the focus of analysis.
Political ecology is useful in understanding
the power relations behind the control and
exploitation of environmental assets by different
groups, in three main ways. First, it relates local
findings to a broader body of interdisciplinary
literature, facilitating both a better understanding
of the problem, and comparative studies with
other areas or historic periods. Second, it
facilitates an understanding of the conflicts that
exist over natural resources, giving weight not
only to the overt expression of these conflicts, but
also to the underlying motivations, interests and
power relations that influence the choices and
activities of the different groups. Third, it puts
politics (or political economy) at a centre stage of
the analysis of the impact or transformation of the
environment by human populations (Bryant and
Bailey, 1997).
This article takes an historical perspective
and identifies the conflicts between the various
actors that have been responsible for the
deforestation in Thailand, the roles of those that
are blamed for it, and the motivations of those that
are promoting its conservation. The article is
divided into four parts. The first part deals with
approaches towards lowland forest management
from the beginning of the nineteenth century to
the end of the Second World War. The other three
parts deal with the highland forest, and are
organised chronologically: the first section
discusses the highland forest until the Second
World War, the second from the Second World War
to the late 1980s, and the last from the late 1980s
to the present. Each of these periods were
characterised by the concentration of power in
the hands of different groups, or coalition of
groups, which could influence the development
pattern pursued by the government, and the use
of the forest. The article also discusses the way in
which the present policy – and discursive –
emphasis on the conservation of the highland
forests is largely a result of a shift in the objectives
of the most influential groups in society.
The approach towards
the lowland forests
226
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century,
Thai exports were dominated by trade in forest
produce for the Chinese market. Thai rice had
been exported for some time already, but it was
only from the 1820s that its economic importance
grew, gradually replacing forest products. Two
things contributed to the boost in the export of
rice. First, the Chinese market for forest products
collapsed in the 1840s, because of the BritishChinese First Opium War. Second, the demand for
Thai rice gradually increased, especially from
European traders, who increasingly called at
Bangkok to buy rice and other agricultural
products, such as sugar and tobacco. Some of
these goods were to be brought to the European
markets, but most were for the growing Asian
markets. European colonial powers had changed
the economy of many Asian countries, including
Malaya, Java, India and Ceylon, pulling the rural
population from subsistence farming, and
transforming them into plantation labour, cash
crop producers or city dwellers. They now needed
rice and other foodstuff to feed these populations.
What gave a boost to the Thai export of rice
was the signing of the Bowring treaty in 1855
between the Bangkok administration and the
British envoy. This treaty gave Britain trading
rights and limited the import and export taxes that
could be levied on the goods, in the name of free
trade. Over the following years, similar rights were
also given to other European powers. Initially, the
Bangkok administration and the Chinese traders
thought that the main Thai export crop would be
sugar, but the Thai sugar producers were unable
to compete with the Javanese producers, and in
the 1870s the export of sugar from Thailand
dwindled. On the other hand, the export of rice
increased gradually from very little at the
beginning of the century to 15,200 metric tons in
1850, to 62,000 metric tons in 1857-60, and to
100,000 in the mid-1870s. From the mid-1870s and
until the 1930s, a fall in freight rates contributed to
a boom in rice exports, which reached 1.5 million
metric tons in the 1930s (Phongpaichit and Baker,
2002).
A politico-ecological approach allows us to
critically assess the choices made by the Bangkok
elite concerning the ways in which the production
of rice was to increase. Two options in particular
were available: the construction of an irrigation
network in the Chao Phraya basin, and the
construction of a rail network that would allow for
the colonisation of the forested periphery. The
Bangkok based elite chose the second option,
setting in motion a pattern of development that
continued until the 1980s, with very negative
effects on the Thai national forests. This choice is
the result of the balance of power present in Siam
during these years, as is now discussed.
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The Royal Forest Department estimated that
to mature properly, rice crops in Central Thailand
needed 1828mm of water (RID, 1967). However,
the average yearly rainfall during the rainy season
is approximately 1050mm, and the deficit of
778mm has to be made up by flooding. The
response to the problem of such water shortage
was the construction of canals. In the second half
of the nineteenth century the government and
many nobles from the court invested in canal
construction. Most canals were built in the Rangsit
area, and those who built the canals would then
have control over large parts of the land that
flanked them. Much of the land was owned by
absentee landlords who lived in Bangkok and
rented the land to tenants. Carving out large
estates of paddy land for themselves in the lower
delta, a few influential people with close
connections to the royal family and to the
government made a great deal of money.
The canals built served to distribute the
floodwater between the fields, and the watergates
allowed for the retention of water after the floods
had receded. However, flooding was relatively
rare (RID, 1967), and the canals could not deliver
more water than that made available by the floods.
It was not, therefore, an irrigation network. Apart
from this problem, the canals also suffered from
rapid siltation. For these reasons, in 1902 the Thai
government hired an irrigation advisor, J. Homan
Van der Heide, and in 1904 set up the Royal
Irrigation Department, replacing the aristocracy
in the construction of canals.
In 1902, Van der Heide submitted the plan for
the construction of a major irrigation scheme that
would serve most of the Central Plains, through
the construction of a dam at Chainat on the Chao
Phraya River, and a system of distribution canals.
The benefits were to be numerous. First, the
irrigation network would have reduced the effects
of the instability of rainfall, and thus the yearly
differences in yield. Second, it would have
increased the yields during the drought years,
which were 51% of the total years between 18311948. Third, the soil could have been moistened
earlier, which would have facilitated a better land
preparation. Fourth, the irrigation network would
have permitted farmers to plant higher quality rice
varieties, which would have commanded a higher
price. Fifth, each family could have planted a
larger area, since land preparation could have
been spread over a longer period, being less
dependent upon the start of the rainy season.
Sixth, water from irrigation could have been used
during the dry season to grow legumes, tobacco,
and
other
crops,
thereby
employing
underemployed dry season labour, and reduce
the import of these crops. The canals would also
have provided a better transportation system,
which was particularly important for the transport
of the paddy to the city of Bangkok, and its port
(Feeney, 1976).
The project submitted by Van der Heide was
turned down, and the government preferred to
invest its limited funds in a railway network. The
first line opened in November 1900 between
Bangkok and Korat in the north-east. Specially
from 1910 to 1930, the lines were extended in the
north, north-east and south.
The railway made only a marginal
contribution to Thai agriculture. In the central
plains, the railway had negative impacts,
disrupting drainage and imposing extra costs on
the farmers, while the shipment of paddy rice was
made primarily through the canals and river
system, and it would remain so for decades.
However, the rail network did open up the north,
the north-east and the south for commercial
development, and by encouraging the horizontal
expansion of the Thai farming system, it set in
motion the pattern of development that has led to
extensive deforestation.
The reasons for the government investment
in the rail network instead of the irrigation
schemes suggested by Van der Heide were
numerous. First, the rail network brought the
periphery closer to the centre, and reduced the
risk that local problems in the periphery would
become an excuse for the colonial powers to
invade Thailand. The nineteenth century saw the
colonial powers of France and Britain expanding
into South East Asia, and Thailand was rightly
concerned. Until the 1930s, 70% of Thailand was
covered with forests (Feeny, 1988) and the
peripheral areas were considered underpopulated, thus increasing the risk of invasion by
the colonial powers (Zimmerman, cited in Hirsch,
1987). The first railway line that opened in
November 1900 between Bangkok and Korat in
the north-east, was also made to increase the
ability to defend an area threatened by the French.
While the irrigation scheme would have only
provided economic advantages, the rail network
served national security goals.
Second, the government was confronted with
considerable limits to the amount of capital
it could raise. The irrigation network was thought
by some to cost more than the government could
afford. Third, the government only had limited
means by which it could recoup the financial
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GEOGRAPHY
40,000
8000
30,000
Area of rice
Forest area
6000
20,000
4000
10,000
1990
1985
1980
1975
1970
1965
1960
1955
1950
1945
1940
1935
1930
1925
1920
0
1915
2000
1910
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10,000
Area farmed with rice ('000 ha)
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0
Year
Figure 1: Rice land versus forest area in Thailand. Source: Delang, 2002.
benefits from irrigation, unlike in the case of the
rail network. However, the most important factor
might have been the opposition of the large
powerful landlords in the Rangsit area, who were
afraid that large irrigation schemes elsewhere (in
the Central Plains) would draw tenants away from
their land. Ownership of the agricultural land in
the Central Plains would have been difficult to
organise, since the area would have been very
large indeed. Thus, the Van der Heide scheme
would not have made it possible for the élites to
appropriate a large proportion of the gains, but
would have benefited largely the landless tenants
who were renting land from the influential Rangsit
landlords. Even worse, the Rangsit landlords
would have lost their tenants, and the land value
would have depreciated, while it appreciated with
the Pasak project.
The only large irrigation scheme carried out
during these times was the Pasak project. The
project directly benefited the Rangsit area as the
large Rangsit landowners, many of whom were
Bangkok officials, were able to retain their tenants
while benefiting from the appreciation of land
value. According to the irrigation department,
after the completion of the project, the value
of the agricultural land in the Pasak area
increased by 84% (RID, 1929). Irrigation officials
commented that:
❝ The
228
government took the above course probably
because it was considered inadvisable to disturb existing
arrangements of landlord and tenant in the Rangsit area
and elsewhere, which the opening up of big areas of
land in Subhan, free for all, [would] have done (RID,
1927, p. 6).
The construction of a rail network and its effects
on the opening and subsequent colonisation of
the periphery, set in motion the deforestation of
the lowlands that continued until the 1950s,
when it had to stop for lack of forests to colonise
(see below). The colonization of the periphery
progressed very quickly, and large areas of the
Chao Phraya basin were planted with rice. While in
1850 less than 960,000ha were planted with rice,
in 1905 there were over 1.44 million ha, and in
1950 approximately 5.6 million ha (Figure 1). Most
of this increase in rice production was for export
rather than for the domestic market; between
1855 and 1934 the Thai population had doubled
from 6 to 12 million while rice exports increased
28 times (Mitchell, 1998; Ingram, 1971). However,
progressively less fertile land was opened to rice
farming since ‘only a fourth of the total land area
of Thailand is suitable for agriculture’ (Anderson,
1993, p. 43). The reduced fertility of the land was
coupled with lack of investment to increase
productivity, a pattern that would continue until
the present. In 1974, only 10% of the total
government investment was devoted to
agriculture, compared with 20% in Malaysia and
36% in the Philippines. As a consequence the
productivity of land has constantly declined.
Hirsch (1990) calculated that the productivity
declined by 69% between 1906 and 1940, while
Feeny (1982) estimated it declined by 18%
between 1921 and 1941. It is not surprising that
paddy yields per hectare became among the
lowest in Asia. In 1972, paddy yields in Thailand
were just 42% of those in Taiwan and 29% of those
in South Korea (Douglas, 1983).
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Finally, the forests were also the refuge of
slaves, bonded labour and people who used
the forest as a refuge from labour-service
requirements, onerous corvées, and military
conscription. Slavery was officially abolished in
1905 by King Chulalongkorn, but until the midtwentieth century the forests remained a refuge
for those who were escaping poverty,
landlessness, or the police (Hirsch, 1990).
The northern highland
forests – to the Second
World War
During the Lanna period, the northern Thai
highlands were sparsely inhabited. Wild animals,
robbers, and malaria discouraged the settlement
of the highland areas, and the few people who
settled there belonged to two ethnic groups, the
1840s
N
Lua and the Karen. The Lua are said to be
autochthonous to the Northern Thai highlands,
while the origin of the Karen is more uncertain,
but they seem to have settled in the area before
Tai-speaking people settled in the lowlands
(Renard, 2003).
The prince of Chiang Mai had control over
the highlands, and allowed the highlanders to live
in the forest, under his benevolent protection, in
exchange for the payment of a tribute for the
permission to farm the land (Renard, 1979).
However, his control over the highlands was
weak, since there was plenty of land, and limited
interest in what was considered to be rugged
terrain with limited agricultural potential.
Moreover, any unhappiness arising from this
transaction could result in the farming village
shifting deeper into the forest in a bid to
escape tribute payments and detection by the
prince’s envoys.
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Bangkok
N
0
100
km
Bangkok
0
100
km
229
Figure 2: The highlands of northern Thailand. Source: Phongpaichit and Baker, 2002.
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GEOGRAPHY
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70
Proportion of GDP
DEFORESTATION
IN THAILAND
60
Agriculture
Manufacturing, mining, construction
Figure 3: Proportion
of GDP by sector of
origin. Source:
Mitchell, 1998.
50
40
30
20
10
0
1945-49 1950-54 1955-59 1960-64 1965-69 1970-74 1975-79 1980-84 1985-89 1989-93
Year
230
To the lowlanders, the highlands were mainly
used to extract teak, non-timber-forest products,
and people, to be resettled in the lowlands.
Another consequence of the signing of the
Bowring treaty, and of the influence of the British
colonialists on the deforestation of the highlands,
was the logging of teak trees. Britain was involved
in the extraction of teak in Burma, using the
timber to build the boats it needed for its colonial
expansion. From the 1850s, Burmese traders
started operating in Thailand, and by the mid1880s British teak companies had moved directly
into northern Thailand (Grandstaff, 1976).
However, the extraction was selective, with only
teak being cut, hence the deforestation was rather
limited.
During this period, a ruler’s power was
determined by the number of people controlled,
rather than the amount of land possessed. Since
the lowlands were largely under-populated,
various Lanna princes, and later Siamese kings and
local aristocrats, tried to increase the population
in the northern river valleys by resettling war
prisoners from Burma and the Shan states
(Phongpaichit and Baker, 2002), and encouraging
the voluntary migration of mountain people to the
lowlands.
After the kingdom of Lanna was annexed by
Bangkok in 1896, the interest of the new rulers in
the highlands decreased. The influential people in
the kingdom of Siam were then large landowners,
who controlled much of the farmland in the
Rangsit area. Those in power had little interest in
the highlands of northern Thailand because it was
far from the centre of power (Bangkok) and it was
mostly unsuitable for paddy rice farming. Besides,
the lowlands still had very large forested lands. For
these reasons, the highlands were left largely
alone until the Second World War (Figure 2).
The northern highland
forests – from the Second
World War to the late
1980s
The pattern of colonisation of the lowlands
continued until the Second World War, when it
was interrupted by the disruption in world trade
that resulted from the war. The end of the war
brought about a new political-economic
environment. Increased trade in the area which
had come under the influence of the USA
gradually shifted the power from one group, the
landed elite, to another group, the industrialists,
with the Thai economy slowly shifting its
emphasis from increasing rice production to
engaging in import substitution and export
oriented policies. These policies focused on
labour intensive manufacturing, agribusiness and
logging, often supported by foreign capital. Figure
3 shows the gradual shift of the national economy
from agriculture to industry.
Deforestation continued unabated, and from
the Second World War to the 1980s the percentage
of forested land decreased sharply. In 1947, 63% of
Thailand was forested, while in 1982 it was only
25% (Feeny, 1988). As before the war, the loss of
forest was to the benefit of paddy land. The area
used for paddy increased from 35 million rai (1
rai = 0.417 acres, 0.16ha) in the early 1950s to
42.6 million rai in the mid-1960s, and to 59.4
million rai in the late 1980s, before decreasing to
56.2 million rai in the late 1990s (Phongpaichit
and Baker, 2002). However, the causes of
deforestation changed dramatically, as did the
geographic region where it occurred and the
actors who were responsible for it.
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Unclaimed land in the lowlands soon became
scarce, and the landless farmers increasingly had
to move into the hills to find unclaimed land
to clear and farm. Without the appropriate
technical knowledge of sustainable upland
farming, when attempting to clear a patch of
forest using fire, they often destroyed a much
larger area than originally intended (Kunstadter,
1978). They neither rotated nor fallowed their
fields so that after only a few years, the land
became infertile. They then moved on and farmed
other areas in a similar, unsustainable manner.
Because of the large number of people involved,
eventually large areas of forests were destroyed
(Kunstadter, 1978). Feeny (1988) estimated that
shifting cultivation accounted for the clearing of
about 500,000ha annually throughout Thailand.
Many of the lowland farmers who moved to
the highlands started to grow cash crops instead
of rice. Rice only generated low incomes because
of the rice premium, a tax on the export of rice
introduced in 1955 by the government, under
pressure from the increasingly influential elite
linked to the entrepreneurs in the manufacturing
sector. In spite of different opinions on its many
consequences (reviewed by Ingram, 1971), there
is widespread agreement that the rice premium
decreased the price of rice. This had several
advantages for the manufacturing sector. First, by
reducing the income received by Thai farmers, it
forced a larger number of farmers to supplement
their incomes by working in labour intensive
industries.1 Second, it lowered the salaries in the
industrial sector because of the large supply of
labour it generated, and because the workers
needed less money to feed themselves. Also, in
the highlands it was not always possible to build
paddy fields because of the lack of streams nearby,
or because of the steep slope of the land. Land
farmed with dry rice is half as productive as, and
the harvest more variable than, that farmed with
paddy rice (Kunstadter, 1978). This resulted in
very low incomes to the rice farmers, and cash
cropping became a preferred alternative.
From the end of the nineteenth century, the
ethnic minorities that originally lived in the
highlands, the Karen and the Lua, had been joined
by other groups, this time from China through
Laos: the Hmong, the Lahu, the Yao, the Lisu and
the Akha. In 1860 China lost the British-Chinese
Second Opium War, and was forced to open its
market to British-Burmese opium. To reduce the
imports of opium, China encouraged its
production on the national territory. Since opium
grows best at altitudes above 1000m above sea
level, it was the ethnic minorities living in the
highlands of Yunnan who became predominantly
involved. The scarcity of suitable, fertile land
above 1000m above sea level encouraged the
migration of some households to Laos, and
further south to Thailand, where some continued
to grow opium. By no means all members of these
ethnic minorities groups were growing opium,
and the farmed areas were relatively small. In
1960 (the first year reasonably reliable surveys
were made), the total ‘hill tribe’ population was
estimated at around 217,000 people (Young,
1962). Elsewhere (Delang, 2002 p.493) I estimated
that in 1960, the Hmong – the largest of the ethnic
groups that migrated from China during that time
– only had approximately 0.41% of the highland
forest under active cultivation. It is true that
including the areas being left fallow, the members
of the ethnic groups that migrated from China
might have been responsible for the deforestation
of up to 5 or 6% of the highlands. However, most
of this was naturally returning to forest, while the
(larger) areas deforested by the lowland Thai
were not. So, the blame often put on the ethnic
minorities for the deforestation of the highlands –
especially in the press (see Kanwanich, 1997;
Hutasingh, 1998; Janchitfah, 1999) – seems to be
largely unfounded (see below).
Nevertheless,
the
Thai
government
encouraged projects to find crops that would
substitute opium, usually with the financial
assistance of the UN, the US, and various other
governments (foremost German and Australian).
It is quite likely that these projects have further
contributed to deforestation, since they came
hand in hand with the construction of roads, and
the creation of a lowland market for temperate
agricultural products, which encouraged the
production, and facilitated the commercialisation,
of highland crops. Many highlanders had an
economic incentive in farming larger areas than
they had farmed thus far.
Agribusinesses, which had little in common
with the old lowland rice producing landed elite,
became involved in the production of temperate
climate cash crops, often with financial help from
the government. In 1966, the government set up
the Bank of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) whose purpose was to increase
the capital available to cultivators. Commercial
banks were forced to lend a fixed proportion of
the money deposited with them to farmers.
However, ‘as most commercial banks found it
difficult to administer loans to small and medium
peasants, they preferred to lend to big
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DEFORESTATION
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1200
Area ('000 ha)
GEOGRAPHY
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Maize
Soya beans
1000
800
600
400
200
0
1950-2
1958-60
1965-7
1980-1
1989-90
Rest of Thailand
Year
1950-2
1958-60
1965-7
1980-1
1989-90
Northern Highlands
Figure 4: Area under major plant crops by region, 1950-1990. Source: Phongpaichit and Baker, 1996.
232
agribusiness or to make deposits with the BAAC,
which in turn lent mainly to agribusiness or big
cultivators’ (Phongpaichit and Baker, 2002, p. 60).
National agribusiness firms were also encouraged
with tax breaks, duty privileges and other
promotional measures (Phongpaichit and
Baker, 2002).
The government also encouraged foreign
investment. From the mid-1960s, ‘the returns
from uplands cash crop exports played a major
role in the balance of payments. The government
had an interest in promoting expansion’
(Phongpaichit and Baker, 2002, p. 59). The
consequence was a boom in the land taken over
by these crops, especially in the northern
highlands from the 1980s onwards (Figure 4).
Deforestation did not only take place to
increase agricultural land. Until the 1950s, logging
companies concentrated on high value timber
(such as teak), leaving the majority of the other
trees standing, so that the forest area diminished
slowly. However, from the 1950s onward, demand
increased for all kinds of woods, and logging
activities expanded at a rapid rate. In 1968, the
government passed a law granting logging
companies 30-year concessions to cut the forest,
on condition that the area be replanted. Policing
was difficult and there was little interest in
enforcing the law. As a consequence, some tracts
were grown with commercial trees, while others
were transformed into agricultural land, or were
simply left bare.
In the 1970s, another factor exacerbated
deforestation in the highlands. The competition
of the two superpowers for ideological hegemony
in the political-economic realm was played out in
many areas of South East Asia. This also affected
the highlands of northern Thailand, where the
forests became a refuge for the opponents of
military regimes. Members of the Communist
Party of Thailand had established bases in the
forests in many provinces. These were joined by
people ‘fleeing political repression following the
massacre at Thammasat University on October 6,
1976’ (Hirsch, 1990, p. 52), and some members of
highland ethnic minorities, most of whom were
Hmong.
To deny territory to these people, the
government built roads into the forests, and
encouraged lowland farmers to settle along these
roads. While the rail network (the expansion of
which stopped at the beginning of the Second
World War) had been developed to colonise the
lowlands, the road network, largely financed by
the USA (Muscat, 1990), facilitated the
colonisation of the highlands, and expanded
rapidly after the Second World War (Figure 5).
In theory farmers were only permitted to
settle within a one-kilometre radius from the road.
(Phongpaichit and Baker, 2002). However, when
land there had become scarce, the farmers
opened new fields further into the forest. Because
every new village or field created in the forest
meant less land for the communist insurgents, the
army tacitly welcomed the diminution of land
under the control of insurgents and did nothing to
stop the farmers.
Logging also helped the policy of denying the
forest to the insurgents, and it is not surprising
that the government encouraged it. From 1973 to
1978, when the campaign against communist
insurgents was at its peak, the forest in the north
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3500
Rail network (km)
3000
Rail
Road
2500
30,000
GEOGRAPHY
25,000
DEFORESTATION
IN THAILAND
20,000
2000
15,000
1500
10,000
1000
Road network (km)
GJ_90_03_233
5000
500
Geography © 2005
0
0
1900 1905 1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980
Year
Figure 5: Rail and road network, Thailand, 1900-1980s. Sources: Mitchell, 1998; Uhlig, 1984.
alone was being cut down at a rate of 345,600ha
per year (Phongpaichit and Baker, 2002).
Thus, from the end of the Second World War
to the 1980s, the policies towards the highlands
were increasingly run by interest groups linked to
industrialists. These involved not only labour
intensive manufacturing industries operating in
the lowland, but also agribusinesses, mining
concerns and logging companies operating in the
highlands. Their flourishing was dependent upon
international trade and good relations with the
USA, which was financing much of the
infrastructural development this group needed to
prosper (such as road, electricity, a telephone
network, and schools). The support of the USA,
who needed an ally in the region when it was
destabilising the neighbouring countries (Laos,
Cambodia, Vietnam), helped the industrialists to
thrive, and can help understand the pro-American
policies of the Thai government (Muscat, 1990).
By the 1980s, this group had become the most
powerful, and would determine the shift in
policies towards the forest.
The northern highland
forests – from the late
1980s to the present
The policies described in the previous section
went on until the early 1980s, when the situation
changed quite suddenly. In 1981-82, after closing
the last forest base of the armed opponents to the
regime, the military declared that the insurgents
had been defeated. The end of communism
reduced the justification for the military pushing
back the frontier, while it was also in the interest
of the industrialists, now by far the most powerful
group in Thailand (Figure 3), that the frontier
be closed.
In the early 1980s, to help create the political
climate to stop land colonization, the Royal Forest
Department (RFD) published satellite maps
showing the extent of deforestation that had
occurred during the previous two decades. In
November 1988, a massive mudslide carried away
two villages in the south causing the death of
251 people and affecting the livelihood of over
300,000 (McKinnon, 1997). Logging and the
planting of rubber trees that replaced the original
forest on the slopes above the villages were
blamed for causing the mudslide. In 1989, after
fierce protest by environmentalist groups, the
government revoked all logging licences,
outlawed the felling of trees and declared the
closure of the frontier.
According to McKinnon (1997), logging and
the planting of rubber trees was wrongly blamed
and the logging ban was in fact imposed ‘to
provide a fillip for friends of the military who were
placed in a position to take advantage of the ban
by extending their logging operations not only
[into Burma] but also into Cambodia and Laos’
(McKinnon, 1997, p. 125). Logging concessions
were granted to Thai companies after General
Chavalit, the army chief and future prime minister,
had talks with the Burmese military. The sudden
change from domestic production to imports is
shown in Figure 6. Until 1988, domestic wood
production was at about 2 million cubic metres. In
1989 this halved to less than 1 million cubic
metres, and in 1990 it halved again. However,
domestic
wood
consumption
constantly
increased. The difference was made up by
233
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DEFORESTATION
IN THAILAND
4.5
Geography © 2005
Million cubic metres
GEOGRAPHY
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Figure 6: Origin of
wood consumed in
Thailand, 1985-1995.
Source: Royal Forestry
Department, 2000.
Domestic production
Imports
4.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5
0.0
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
Year
234
imports, which increased almost four fold
between 1987 and 1990, to account for 88% of
domestic wood consumption in 1990.
The closing of the land frontier ‘was not a
question of expansion coming up against some
kind of natural limit, although that was how it was
often expressed’ (Phongpaichit and Baker, 2002, p.
81). The ban on logging and land colonisation was
also to the advantage of those who had invested in
the manufacturing sectors, and who had become
the most influential group in Thai politics. This
group had invested in labour intensive industries,
which needed cheap labour. Since the closing of
the frontier increased the number of landless
peasants looking for work in the lowland labourintensive industries, the owners of labourintensive manufacturing industries looked
favourably upon the logging ban.
The ban was also supported by a new
influential group, the Bangkok based middle class.
Traditionally, in Thailand, the forest has a negative
connotation. For example, the term Khon paa
(forest people) is a pejorative term for the
backward, uncivilised, and wild, as opposed to
Khon meuang (town people), which relates to the
modern, civilised, clean, and well educated
(Hirsch, 1990; Pinkaew, 2003). The new middle
class, Bangkok based and increasingly
westernised, with little contact to the countryside
and the forest, gradually adopted a more romantic
view of the forest, emphasising its beauty and the
magnificence of the remaining highland forests.
This increasingly influential group, whose
concerns became conflated with that of the
western conservation movement, was using moral
concerns and ethical arguments to push for a
conservationist approach to the remaining
forests.
O’Neill (1996) and Hopkins (1995) have
discussed the process by which the urban middle
class is able to put pressures on governments to
create protected areas in the humid tropics. The
sequence of events that leads to the creation of
protected areas usually begins with a threat, which
can be of two kinds. First, rapid deforestation:
when deforestation is particularly rapid, people
might envision ‘the end of the forest’ more easily
than when deforestation occurs at a lower pace.
Second, little forest left in the country: when a
country contains little forest, there is the fear that
further deforestation would completely destroy it.
The threat is felt particularly strongly when an
unexpected disaster suddenly mobilises a large
number of those who already felt the threat to ‘do
something about it’, while also persuading the
sceptics that indeed the forest is under threat. The
large mudslide of 1988 was this unexpected
disaster, and it occurred in a period when the
large, educated middle classes living in the urban
areas had the time and wealth to worry about the
forest, and when the government had enough
money to finance the creation of protected areas
– the last condition for the creation of protected
areas (Bates and Rudel, 2000).
In Thailand, the argument used to close the
frontier is both environmental and economic, and
can therefore appeal to the rest of the Thai
population, including the farming community.
The majority of the Thai population, 64% in 1994
(World Bank, 1996), are at least part-time farmers
and dependent upon a constant supply of stream
water. This constant supply is thought to be
guaranteed by mature forests in the water
catchment areas, many of which are found in the
northern highlands. The popular press (e.g.
Kaseem, 1996; Bangkok Post, 1997, 2000;
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Nicholson-Lord, 1998), as well as some academics
and non-government organisations (NGOs)
(Kanwanich, 1997) blame deforestation for
increasing sedimentation, reducing the amount of
rainfall, and compromising the regular water runoff, causing flooding during the rainy season, and
drought during the dry season. This water
imbalance, in particular the droughts during the
dry seasons, cause financial losses to the lowland
farmers, since it compromises their ability to grow
a second crop after the rice that is grown during
the rainy season. These droughts also affect city
dwellers, since they force the rationing of urban
water supplies.
This argument on the negative consequences
of deforestation in the highlands was used to
justify the closure of the highland frontier.
However, it is an argument not entirely backed by
scientific evidence, since the relationship between
deforestation and hydrological supply is not
straightforward, and many other factors can be
responsible for the water imbalance (Enters,
1992; McKinnon, 1997; Giambelluca et al., 2000;
Walker, 2002).
With the attention turned to the highland
forests, it is their traditional inhabitants, the ethnic
minorities, which become the ‘natural scapegoat’
(Janchitfah, 1999) for the deforestation that had
taken place during the previous decades. As nonethnic Thai, the members of these groups have a
low social standing and are the least powerful, of
all those who live in the highlands (although
alliances with NGOs do help them promote
common interests [see Walker, 2001]). Many
members of highland minority groups do not have
Thai nationality, and are restricted in their civil
liberties, freedom of movement, and access to jobs
and social services (Ganjanapan, 1996).
A disproportionate amount of blame for the
deforestation of the highlands is now put on the
highland minorities, both by the media and official
government discourse. As a senior government
official said in the 1980s: ‘Forest destruction in the
Northern region could chiefly be blamed on the
hill tribe people’ (quoted in Pungprasert, 1989, p.
364). In fact, placing such blame on the ethnic
minorities was nothing new even in the 1980s.
The National Reserve Forest Act of 1964, written
while the government was busy building roads to
facilitate the access of the highlands, and
encouraging logging and the migration of lowland
farmers, mentioned that ‘swidden cultivation is
regarded by law as harmful to the economy of the
nation and is indirectly prohibited’ (quoted in
Rerkasem and Rerkasem, 1994, p. 10).
While deforestation was caused by a number
of different groups and for several reasons, it is
swidden cultivation which was considered the
main source of forest loss. It cannot be denied that
shifting cultivation can be destructive of the
forest. However, while both lowland Thai and
highland minorities were swiddening in the
highlands, it is the latter, among them especially
the Hmong, who were primarily blamed (e.g.
Kanwanich, 1997; Bangkok Post, 1997). This is in
spite of the relatively small number of people
belonging to the ethnic minority groups. In 1960
the ethnic minorities living in the highlands were
estimated to number around 217,000 (Young,
1962), in 1987 they were 551,000 (Tribal Research
Institute 1989), and in 1996 there were only
790,000 people (Kampe, 1997).2 Many ethnic
minority villages were – and still are – threatened
with resettlement to the lowlands (Buergin, 2002;
Delang, 2002).
In fact, secondary forest swiddening, as
practiced by the Karen and the Lua, has been
described over and over again as a sustainable way
to farm the highlands, and a very environmentally
friendly farming technique, as it increases
biological diversity and species diversity
(Kunstadter, 1978; Schmidt-Vogt, 1998, 1999). It is
then somewhat ironic that people who have lived
fairly sustainably in the forest for centuries are
being blamed for deforestation, and are being
forced to move out of the forests by those who
were the primary cause of deforestation.
GEOGRAPHY
DEFORESTATION
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Geography © 2005
Conclusion
This article described the historical development
of forest use in Thailand and the reasons for the
deforestation that occurred from the beginning of
the nineteenth century to the present. During this
period, deforestation was influenced by power
relations at both the international and national
levels. At the international level, deforestation in
Thailand was influenced by the policies of the
colonial powers (Britain, France, USA), not only
towards Thailand, but also in the neighbouring
countries. At the national level, deforestation was
influenced by the shifting power relations within
the Bangkok elite, between landowners,
industrialists and environmentalists, and by the
conflicts between lowland Thai farmers and
highland minority people. Some of these interest
groups have similar objectives, and are therefore
able to collaborate. This was the case of the landed
elite and the industrialists until the 1980s, as
well as the industrialists, the military and the
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environmentalists after the 1980s. However,
sometimes groups have different objectives, and
they enter into conflict. This is the case of the
ethnic minorities living in the highlands and the
three groups just mentioned. This article has
shown that even though shifts in the political
realm have altered the causes of deforestation, the
latter has continued unabated until the end of
the 1980s.
The article also looked at the ways that moral
discourses about the forest are constructed, and
how the idea of nature has shifted through time,
mediated by the processes of economic and social
development. Finally, the article dealt with the
discourses of responsibility for environmental
degradation. When the media looks for an easy
scapegoat for the problems that its readership – or
its owners – may have created, it is often the
groups that have the least power and political
representation that are disproportionately
blamed. In Thailand, this is the case with the ethnic
minorities living in the northern highlands.
Unfortunately, continuing to single out a segment
of society prevents solution to these problems – be
they deforestation or water imbalance – from
being sought.
Notes
1. Without the rice premium, the farmers would have
received 23-85% higher prices for their rice (Hirsch, 1990).
2. In fact, according to Anderson (1993, p. 43) more
lowland Thai practised shifting cultivation than did all
the tribal people combined.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Theresa Wong, Yoko Hayami and
two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive
comments on earlier drafts of this article. The opinions
expressed here, as well as responsibility for any omissions,
are entirely mine.
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