Subject: 1995 Year-end review
Increasing environmental awareness among the public has led to some action on the government's part. The environment budget has increased more than tenfold over the last four years _ from Bt650 million in 1991 to Bt7 billion in 1995, according to the Budget Bureau. Anti-pollution measures are also gradually being strengthened.
But these measures must be considered halting first steps in the effort to make Thailand's society and economy more eco-friendly.
Responsibility over resources remains divided among dozens of agencies in separate ministries, which rarely act in a coordinated fashion. A total of 30 agencies in seven different ministries have some say over water management issues, for instance.
The impact of tougher anti-pollution
measures will also be limited because they represent the `end-of-pipe'
approach: money is being spent to clean up pollution, rather than prevent
it in the first place.
This approach is not only expensive and inefficient, it is also unfair since the money is coming from taxpayers rather than the polluters themselves.
Preventing pollution and
environmental degradation in general, say environmental economists, will
require an overhaul of the way business is done.
Natural resources,
and the environmental services they provide, first need to be properly
valued. They can then either be taxed accordingly, or else bought and sold
like other goods and services by creating markets through the distribution
of property rights.
The current system actually subsidizes
the use of valuable natural resources, which means they are bound to be
wasted. One of the reasons Thailand worries about a drought every year
is that nobody pays the full price for the water they use.
Ending subsidies is politically difficult, so the first step toward environmental re-structuring will probably come in the form of pollution taxes, which will give polluters an incentive to reduce waste. Environmental protection will only become privatized once the government finally decides to fully implement its much-vaunted Polluter Pays principle.
Polluters currently do pay in some cases _ new cars must come equipped with catalytic converters that prevent poisonous emissions, for instance, and hotels in Phuket now pay Bt500 per room as part of their property tax to go toward waste treatment _ but environmental protection is still dominated by public-sector spending.
But fully implementing the principle is still a long way off.
``Applying the Polluter Pays
principle has become a political question,' says Thailand Environment Institute
(TEI) President Dr Dhira Phantumvanich. ``This is unfortunate, since the
amount of money involved is actually quite small.'
The current environment
minister, the Prachakorn Thai Party's Yingphan Manasikarn, has shown little
interest in tackling pollution problems, prefering to concentrate on promoting
dams and water diversion projects. A proposal by the Royal Irrigation Department
to build the Kaeng Sua Ten Dam in Phrae is sure to be a controversial issue
in the coming year.
The previous minister, Chart
Pattana's Suwat Liptapanlop, was more active during his six months in office.
An engineer and businessman by training, the high-profile politician quickly
sensed that cleaning up pollution would be both popular with voters and
profitable for investors.
Suwat was forceful in asserting
the right of the Science Ministry to oversee waste management efforts and
budgets. He made high-profile visits to `pollution control zones'
_ degraded areas which, under the new law, have been brought directly under
the purview of the science ministry _ in the resort areas of Pattaya, Phuket
and Phi Phi Island and the industrial towns of Samut Prakan, Songkhla and
Haad Yai, to sort out bottlenecks and speed up management plans. Pathum
Thani has now been declared the seventh such zone.
Suwat was also aggressive
within the Cabinet. In May, he stood up to the powerful Interior Ministry,
which had sought a budget of Bt16 billion to buy new garbage trucks and
set up new landfill sites in the greater Bangkok area. Suwat pointed out
that according to the law it is the job of his ministry to find a solution
and provide the budget for all environmental problems. And in a landmark
resolution _ the first of its kind _ the Cabinet agreed.
This does not mean, however,
that the environmental agencies will soon be rich. The Office of Environmental
Policy and Planning has a policy of decentralization. It is asking all
the provincial administrations to draw up environmental management plans.
Once these are approved, the necessary funds should be allocated to local
implementing agencies, most of which fall under the control of the Interior
Ministry.
The fact that such an important Cabinet resolution could emerge out of the garbage issue is no accident. The disposal of solid waste has become Thailand's biggest waste management issue.
Late last
year, the `Rose of the North' began to take on the over-ripe smell more
frequently associated with durian. Huge piles of reeking garbage littered
the streets of Chiang Mai city while residents of a nearby village blocked
plans to dispose of the trash in their community.
The growing
volume of garbage produced by increasingly affluent Thais _combined with
the rising price of land and the government's move to privatize electricity
generation _ has led to a rash of plans to build waste-to-energy incinerators.
The Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA), eager to get into the energy
production business, plans to invest in no less than 40 garbage-fired,
20-megawatt power plants over the next 10 years.
But waste incinerators have
provoked a good deal of local opposition. Protests by villagers in Chiang
Mai have delayed construction of the PEA's Bt1.5 billion pilot plant, which
would be fueled by lignite along with garbage.
And villagers from Rayong's
Pluak Daeng district have also forced Thailand's biggest incinerator project
_ a hazardous waste treatment facility to be built by the partially state-owned
firm, Genco _ to postpone construction pending a public hearing.
Meanwhile, the mammoth centralized
waste water treatment project for Bangkok, now being overseen by the Bangkok
Metropolitan Authority, will in the future be coordinated by the Waste
Water Authority. This newly-established state enterprise has a mandate
to work through joint ventures with local authorities and private businesses,
rather than establish its own empire.
Re-engineering development to make it sustainable will require much more, however. At a seminar organized by the Thailand Development Research Institute in May, acting Finance Minister Tarrin Nimmanahaeminda proposed several steps designed to help privatize environmental protection: establishing joint ventures between the private sector and the public sector at both the local and national level; reviewing regulations to remove disincentives to green investment; and awarding full tax privileges to companies that invest in environmental technology and services in Investment Zone 1 (the greater Bangkok area).
Tarrin never got the chance to implement these proposals, since they were made the day after Parliament was dissolved and a snap election called. But key finance officials attending the seminar were also introduced to the principles of full cost resource pricing, a process by which the ``external' (social and environmental) costs of development are calculated and then ``internalized' by the developer.
Later in the year, a member of the Club of Rome, Dr Ernst Ulrich von Weiszacker, visited the TEI and promoted a similar programme he called ``ecological tax reform'. Von Weiszacker argued that erdpolitik (``Earth Politics') will become the realpolitik of the 21st century as resources become scarcer.
Current development patterns still follow the early 19th century principle of improving labour productivity, he said, but development in the future will rely on improving resource productivity. Companies and economies which hope to remain competitive will have to become more sophisticated by taking part in the ``efficiency revolution', whereby costlier, scarcer resources are used to greater advantage.
These ideas have started to take root in certain areas of the Thai economy. The market for energy efficiency technology, for instance, is a promising one thanks to the establishment of an Energy Conservation Promotion Fund and a five-year demand-side management programme (DSM). Earlier this year, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand raised the DSM programme's energy-saving target to 1,400 megawatts.
These programmes could be dealt a blow, however, if PM Banharn Silapa-archa goes through with his plan to lower the price of electricity, thus decreasing incentives for consumers to use energy more efficiently.
So re-engineering Thailand's
society and economy to become more eco-friendly is likely to be a long
and bumpy road, full of starts and stops. And at the moment, the Banharn
government seems to be heading in exactly the wrong direction.