The Future of Thai forests
3D VISION

The Nation
Wed, Jan 13, 1999
      by James Fahn
   
      Five senior forest-related officials came together last
      week to explain where lies the hope for the Kingdom's
      forests.

      Salween. Sri Nakharin. Ta Chang. Sor Por Kor. Forestry
      scandals all seem to follow a pattern.

      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.