Private Story
The Human Cost of Reforesting Thailand
Having lived and worked as a photographer in Thailand for over 15 years I had heard promises like this before and was sceptical of such populist announcements. But at the same time, hopeful and welcomed it. More trees can only be a good thing, right? Sure, but at who’s expense?
As I delved deeper in to this issue I began to realised that this project would happen at the expense of many and of course it would disproportionally affect the poor. The policy’s aim was to increase Thailand’s forest cover by 40% or 4.35 million hectares. Locations were assigned by the then Military Junta’s National Council of Peace and Order (NCPO) and government agencies simply moved around the country removing those who they believed had encroached in the last 20 years regardless of proof saying otherwise.
According to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the Thai military junta prosecuted more than 28,000 people with forest encroachment covering over 128,000 hectares between 2014 and the end of 2018.
Stories of affected villagers become to come out in local media and one North-eastern province called Chaiyaphum began to be mentioned a lot.
The first major story I read was in 2016 of Den Kamlue, a prominent land rights defender, who’s community was facing forced eviction. On April 16th, he left to collect mushrooms in the forest and never returned. His body was never found but the villagers and rights groups are certain he was abducted.
Then in early 2019, 14 villagers from another Chaiyaphum community, including 10 women were charged with encroachment, fined tens of thousands of dollars each and imprisoned for months by the provincial court after years of resistance. I managed to visit the village the day before several of them were convicted.
And then there was an announcement that another community called Bo Kaew would be forcibly evicted on August 27th 2019. The villagers have tax receipts that date back more than 60 years but this evidence was ignored by the court.
I rushed up to the village to cover this eviction as did other civil groups, sympathetic political parties and NGO’s. This large presence forced the authorities to ‘delay’ the eviction. But since this event the community and others have travelled to Bangkok to voice their injustices, even camping outside the UN Headquarters to make sure they are heard.
This story is on-going and would focus on the plight of the villagers in these 3 communities and the wider picture of this controversial policy.
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