Thailand needs to make its bloated bureaucracy leaner. No one can dispute that. But dismantling an institution created to reduce the country’s land inequality, in the name of civil service reform, raises troubling questions.
The Anutin government announced last week that the first state agency to be axed in a programme of state reforms is the Land Bank, an institution launched by grassroots campaigners to help landless farmers gain access to land.
The move comes hard on the heels of the government’s decision to revoke chanot chumchon, the collective land title system that emerged from years of street demonstrations and negotiations between the state and the land rights movement to grant forest communities land security.
One measure attacks community land ownership; the other removes a crucial tool to help the poor obtain land. Taken together, the two decisions strike at the heart of the movement’s hard-won achievements.
Thailand’s land ownership is among the most unequal in the world. More than 80% of the country’s land belongs to the richest 10% of the population. Millions of rural families own no land at all, or less than one rai. More than 10 million people live in forest areas, trapped in endless conflict with forest officialdom over land they and their ancestors have depended on for generations.
For nearly 30 years, the People’s Movement for a Just Society (P-Move) and countless community organisations have pushed governments towards land reform. Land inequality, they insist, lies at the heart of rural poverty, forest conflict and social injustice.
The Land Bank and community land deeds emerged from this long struggle. They were practical attempts to make land accessible, reduce conflict, and allow forest communities to build secure livelihoods without resorting to confrontation.
Progress, however, has been painfully slow. Forest authorities still cling to the same old laws that cast forest communities as trespassers to be punished, and see these reforms as a threat to their control over forest protection. Community land titles remain rare. The Land Bank has struggled with limited budgets. Forest laws have grown increasingly punitive.
Successive governments delayed, weakened and underfunded these reforms but stopped short of dismantling them. The Anutin administration appears determined to cross that line.
The tension with the land rights movement is not rooted in land policy alone. P-Move is also a pro-democracy movement that challenges government-backed megaprojects it considers environmentally destructive, including the now-shelved Land Bridge.
This raises another question. Why is the government dismantling institutions created to address land inequality and environmental destruction, while leaving intact the structures and policies that perpetuate it?
For decades, forest communities have lived under the threat of eviction and prosecution in the name of conservation. Yet when powerful investors seek access to forest land for mining, energy projects or commercial ventures, the rules suddenly become far more flexible. This is sheer policy hypocrisy.
Communities with secure land rights have every incentive to protect the forests on which their livelihoods depend. Involving them as partners rather than encroachers is not only more just but also more sustainable.
Across the world, conservation increasingly recognises indigenous peoples and local communities as the best guardians of forest and biodiversity. Yet the government still insists forests can only survive under central bureaucratic control. Under that mindset, decentralised, unbureaucratic bodies like the Land Bank have no place.
The Land Bank and chanot chumchon challenged this obsolete thinking. They shifted power, however modestly, from officials to citizens — from top-down control to participatory resource management. Perhaps that is why they had to go.
Real reform would confront concentrated land ownership. It would introduce an effective progressive land tax to discourage speculation. It would protect forest communities from violent eviction and make them partners in conservation instead of treating them as criminals. It would strengthen institutions that work with people instead of eliminating them.
Instead, the government maintains a tight grip on central control, yet calls it reform.
On Monday, the People’s Movement for a Just Society will return to Government House. Officials may dismiss the protest as resistance to change. They should think again.
