Wed, Jan 13, 1999
An information leak leads to a frenzy of headlines as it turns out that a huge swathe of forest has been illegally logged, or some land title deeds in a protected area have been handed out improperly. Then come the calls for justice. Investigative committees are set up. But in each case, the controversy simply dies out after some political points are scored.
Oh, a few low-level officials may get transferred to an inactive post (being paid to do nothing is apparently considered punishment enough), but the real big shots pulling the strings are never caught.
''When the logging ban was passed in 1989, I was so proud of my country,'' notes Pisit na Patalung, the secretary-general of Wildlife Fund Thailand who has recently been named head of the Zoological Parks Organisation. ''I thought we would finally be able to protect the forests.''
But that has not been the case, he admitted. By some estimates, one million rai of forestland continues to disappear every year, roughly the same rate as before the ban. Over the last 50 years, Thailand's forest cover has diminished from 60 per cent of the country to perhaps 15 per cent today. Meanwhile, some 40 per cent of the Kingdom's indigenous wildlife are considered threatened, and at least half a dozen major animals have become extinct. How do you stop the bleeding? That is the question five senior forest-related officials sought to answer last week during a panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondents Club in honor of Mark Graham, a conservationist who died in the crash of THAI flight TG211 last month.
Kasem Snidvongs, the former permanent secretary of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, would like to see better management of the Kingdom's more than 100 protected areas.
''The forestry department tries to grab more areas to be set up as parks first, and worries about management later,'' he explained. ''Park chiefs have to be diplomats as well as managers in order to deal with the demands of provincial governors, but the chiefs are often absent, and payment to rangers is never on time.''
Pisit put it this way: ''In Thailand we have good intentions and good people, but we don't have a good system. We have perfected only two systems, a system of corruption, and a system to deny responsibility for solving problems.'' Plodprasop Suraswadi, director-general of the RFD, focused on the impact of the estimated one million families (5-10 million people) currently living illegally on forest land. But he also argued that tree-cutting is only done on a small scale these days, and that encroachment has declined by half in recent years, probably as a result of drop in crop prices.
Somsak Sukwong, director of the Regional Community Forestry Training Centre, questioned what alternatives the millions of forest squatters had, particularly with unemployment currently at a record high. It would be better to pass the long-proposed Community Forestry Bill to give these people a stake in preserving local forests, he claimed, allowing villagers to become a kind of ''social buffer'' to help fight off influential people.
Petipong Pungbun, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, agreed that increasing local participation would be key to protecting the forests, although he also said he had yet to see a realistic implementation plan. ''After we let people get involved, I would hope that they would represent an electoral force for conservation,'' he explained. ''That is the only force which can fight the power of money.''
Petipong and Kasem, both economists, called for better research to help set priorities for forestry and wildlife management. Meanwhile, Somsak and Pisit seemed to pin most of their hopes on the new Constitution, particularly the provision that allows people to petition the government once they have collected 50,000 signatures. But it's hard to see how this will end the scandals, which are manipulated for political reasons just as the forests themselves are used for economic benefits.
Just last year there were headlines about the tens of thousands of logs cut down in Mae Hong Son, sent across the river to Burma and then re-imported. But news about the affair has now died out, the logging firms involved are lobbying to re-open the border checkpoints, and a sawmill in Tak province has just won a court order to re-gain possession of 13,000 logs which allegedly came from the Salween protected areas.
In the end, the Democrats simply seemed to use the scandal to embarrass the preceding Chavalit government, and to gain revenge on Prawat Thanadkha, an RFD official who had reportedly helped expose the Ta Chang scandal that had embarrassed the Democrats. As usual, the culprits behind the scenes were never caught. To paraphrase an old saying: While the political elephants battle, it is the forest that gets trampled.
Part of the problem, as Petipong noted, lies with the media, which is too ready to let a story die out. But there were reports about the Salween logging for many months before action was taken. They were largely ignored until word of Prawat's alleged bribe was leaked; in other words, the story only became a sensation when it became political. Plodprasop complained that there are simply too many laws governing how land and forests are used, and too many loopholes in those laws. But he also admitted that corruption within the RFD is a major problem.
''When I first became director-general, I found there was a safe in the office,'' he explained. ''Every month, many chiefs of important divisions had to visit and contribute something. At every promotion or annual reshuffle, officials had to pay a minimum of Bt50,000, up to a maximum of Bt5 million.'' Because it is so difficult to change the culture, not to mention the reputation, of an institution that has been corrupt for so long, Kasem and many others have urged a move to a new Ministry of Environment, where officials could get a fresh start in managing natural resources. Petipong seems open to the idea, and said he is currently studying it along with the Civil Service Commission. But a proposal to the Cabinet was reportedly dropped at the last minute, perhaps because Plodprasop seems dead set against it. ''There is no need to separate the RFD,'' he said. ''It won't happen in my time. If it does, I'll resign.'' That is a pity, because as an outsider who is independently wealthy and has the Democrats' backing, Plodprasop is in an ideal position to introduce a new and cleaner system of natural resource management for Thailand for the next century.
Perhaps Plodprasop feels he can buck a century-long tradition of corruption and clean up the RFD on his own. But if he indeed aspires to be the saviour of Thailand's forests, he may want to reconsider the best way to go about it. ---------------
