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Thailand
This Week in AsiaHealth & Environment

For Thailand’s female land rights defenders, activism is a dangerous and daunting necessity

  • The country’s 2014 forest reclamation policy was meant to target businesses, but smaller farmers have been disproportionately threatened with eviction
  • As more women join the fight, rights groups say more than 200 women have been subjected to judicial harassment, while two have been murdered

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Thai land rights activist Waewrin Buangern, or Jo, working in the fields in Ban Haeng village. Photo: Lam Le
Lam Le
Growing up, cassava farmer Nittaya Muangklang did not think she would ever become an activist – let alone that she would lead a group of land rights defenders in the first-ever bid to challenge Thailand’s government and its “take back the forests” policy at the Supreme Court.

“We did encroach on the national park, but as poor farmers, we should be eligible for exemption,” said Muangklang, who is fighting eviction, imprisonment and fines.

Faced with what farmers and rights groups perceive as increasing judicial harassment, more women living in rural areas have joined the fight for land rights in Thailand – amid the spectre of intimidation and the threat of jail time or even being killed for their activism. The appeal court last year sentenced Muangklang and 13 other land rights defenders from Ban Sap Wai village in Thailand’s northeast to up to four years in prison, and ordered them to pay fines of between 40,000 and 1.6 million baht (between US$1,300 and US$52,000) for encroaching on and damaging land in Sai Thong National Park.

The court said the farmers failed to prove they had occupied the land before the park was established in 1992. Muangklang, out on bail since last August, said her family had not applied for a land certificate when they moved to Ban Sap Wai in 1986 because they never thought it necessary until the day they faced eviction.

Thailand’s forest reclamation policy, passed in 2014, aimed to increase forest cover in the Southeast Asian nation from 31.6 to 40 per cent in 10 years as a way to mitigate climate change. It was targeted at businesses and commercial investors operating in the country, with the poor and landless meant to be exempt – but rights groups say that, in practice, small-scale farmers are being evicted in the name of environmental protection.

Thai NGOs estimate that at least 8,000 households have been threatened with eviction since 2015. Meanwhile, Thailand’s ruling junta has in the past five years given away around 999 hectares of forest conservation land as concessions to large corporations, including cement and mining companies, according to Land Watch Thai.

Nittaya Muangklang is leading a group of land rights defenders to challenge the forest reclamation policy of Thailand’s government at the Supreme Court. Photo: Lam Le
Nittaya Muangklang is leading a group of land rights defenders to challenge the forest reclamation policy of Thailand’s government at the Supreme Court. Photo: Lam Le
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