Farming the forest: Managing people and trees in reserved forests in Thailand

Abstract

The accelerated rate of global forest depletion poses a series of complex problems for development planners and resource managers in many developing nations. Among the issues being confronted are the need for foresters to gain new skills in managing human resources, design forest use systems which are both productive and sustainable, and to insure that the benefits of these systems are disrtibuted more equitably. In the last quarter of a century reserved forest lands in Thailand have been seriously degraded through deforestation, overcutting, and the illegal encroachment of poor and landless farmers. To counter these forces the government proposed two new forest management programs in 1975 which would grant certificates of use or limited land use rights to some degraded forest land in areas of national reserved forest. This paper examines the use of this policy in the Forest Village and National Forest Land Allotment Projects in northeast Thailand. Since their implementation in the Dong Mun National Reserved Forest 8 years ago, these projects have been plagued with conflicts over de jure and de facto land rights, public misperceptions about the government's grant of amnesty to illegal forest residents, problems controlling immigration, and the small 2.4 ha land allotments given to project participants. These conditions have produced unequal access to and distribution of land, allotment of land poorly suited for agriculture, the destruction of reforestation plots, continued degradation of reserved forest, and a pronounced pattern of social and economic inequality within and between the villages participating in both projects. We argue that these problems are fundamentally caused by government failures to correctly assess population pressures on land in the northeast and to modify program design to better fit community needs, capabilities, and insure equitability in the distribution of benefits.