In Pang Khon, a village 1,245 meters above sea-level in Thailand’s northern Chiang Rai province, coffee is the main livelihood. Yet it is one of many villages whose lands will be affected by new governance policies.

In the past three years, Pang Khon has gained a reputation for its high quality specialty coffee, which has brought new sources of income to local coffee growers. In addition to trading green beans, selling parchment coffee and sending their processed microlot coffee to competitions, villagers are now opening homestays to visitors hungry for the highland experience.

Forest laws regarding land use, however, are complicated. For villagers who have lived through several generations of intimidation and land eviction from state authorities, fears persist.

In Thailand, forest and agricultural land has historically been governed as two distinct land use types. Coffee, however, grows best in highland areas primarily governed by forestry laws, without either individually or community-owned land title deeds.

The policies, so far, have been slow to support the growth of agroforestry crops like coffee. Policy instruments assembled by the National Land Policy Committee, under the National Land Policy Commission Act BE 2562 (2019), were meant to support secure land tenure for Pang Khon and other highland villages in Thailand.

However, the lack of clarity on policy implementation and inconsistent messages from state authorities have made progress on securing land tenure slow and created ongoing concerns among forest-users.

The challenge is global. RECOFTC, an NGO working with communities in northern Thailand, noted in one training manual published in 2020 that agroforestry development was restricted by “an overdependence on conventional agricultural methods and inadequate knowledge of sustainable approaches” among policy-makers.

Despite agroforestry’s increasingly recognized environmental benefits, local governance measures worldwide still lag behind in their ability to fully support forest-based communities to interact with the global economy.

The need to address this lag is clear. Conflicts over land use have regularly emerged at different flashpoints. In 2021, the Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex in central Thailand was declared a UN World Heritage Site despite human rights groups’ outcry over the forced eviction of ethnic minority people. China and Russia backed the bid to recognize the forest on the World Heritage List.

The fear of Chinese real estate securing such land prevailed among land defenders. Northern Thai farmers are no strangers to land expropriation, and while this is not unique to Chinese investors, they are skeptical of Chinese interests. Thai politicians have been reported to be involved in non-transparent infrastructure deals with Chinese extraterritorial capital in Laos. Land grabs by transnational capital, mostly Chinese, are well-documented in Laos PDR.

In 2021, the hashtag #savebangkloi, referring to a village that suffered eviction in the same forest complex, trended on Twitter in Bangkok. Such topic rarely makes headlines in the city. The hashtag was appended to posts with images of Bang Kloi homes burned down, and posts mourning the death of Karen activist Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, whose death in 2014 added to a string of disappearances of land defenders in the region.

Between 2021 and 2022, as many as 1,636 violations were committed against human rights defenders across 22 monitored Asian countries with the highest number of violations logged in Myanmar, followed by Thailand and India. Up to 84 cases of targeted killings were recorded.

Rifts within Mekong forests

The Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex application was accepted in 2021, only one year after it was rejected in 2020 over human rights and wildlife poaching concerns. A plethora of scandals were exposed around Kaeng Krachan and its neighboring forest complexes, including the poaching of a black panther by the CEO of Italian-Thai Development Plc and more than 30 elephants were killed for their tusks.

Chinese involvement in UNESCO’s decision to support Thailand’s application was clear. Mulu Songphonsak, who works at the Thai NGO IMPECT, Chiang Mai, said the pursuit of “green watersheds” characterizes Chinese forestry officials’ planning decisions around watersheds and forests, including those that cross into Thai territory.

This replicates, he added, the Yellowstone National Park conservation paradigm that is now considered outdated in the US.

While Chinese influence at the UN may be criticized for enabling forest and land expropriation in Southeast Asia, it is equally important to understand how local governance created a friendly collusion with such practices – in the name of “win-win” outcomes.

The black panther poaching case gave an insight into the way infrastructural projects were planned to link Thailand to a port in the Andaman Sea, via Myanmar, which exposed the forests of the Dawna Tenasserim Landscape to rampant disregard for human and animal life.

China’s influence is not only through private investors’ partnerships with local Thai landowners. The use of UN discourse without regard for local governance conditions has created prime conditions for resource extraction and the rule of tyrants. It loses the opportunity for China to support new paradigms of community forestry and biodiverse agroforestry.

In Thailand, the current interest in carbon credits and reforestation repackages a decades-long land use negotiation into a new formula: one that places a faceless “global” on one end, and the many faces of the “local” on the other.

Planners, farmers and officials encounter a global market appetite for climate adaptation and mitigation, without a working structure to address the rifts within clunky governance infrastructure.

The carbon market builds on these governance structures created by Thailand presents a worrying trend of the well-known “conservation paradigm” that separates people from forests in order to preserve an abstract ideal – that is, the forest. 

Conflicts between the global and local forces could be observed in Chiang Rai. From 1994 to 2016, oil giant PTT reforested areas in Chiang Rai in a program under the slogan “pluk pa chalem prakiat” (Planting forests in honor of His Majesty).

Cooperating with the National Park Office under the Department of Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, PTT planted teak trees on land villagers had left empty to fallow. Years since, villagers have planted their own crops there, but continue to be worried that this land will be again taken away by the state.

On August 8, 2022, the National Park Office announced a proposal to establish a National Park on this area covering these villages and beyond: a swath of 300,000 rai of land (587.47 square kilometers) covering 15 subdistricts, five districts and two provinces.

Villagers remember well how Forest Department officers burned down their parents’ farm sheds.

While language posed a hindrance to clear communications in the past, this is not the case today. The opportunities presented by improving local governance, working with villages and local subdistrict administration, surpass a quick side-stepping in the rush for the carbon market.