People in Between: Conversion and Conservation ofForest Lands in Thailand
Jin Sato
ABSTRACTThe analysis of `ambiguous lands' and the people who inhabit them is most
revealing for understanding environmental deterioration in Thailand.
`Ambiguous lands' are those which are legally owned by the state, but areused and cultivated by local people. Land with an ambiguous property status
attracts many different actors: villagers hungry for unoccupied arable lands inthe frontiers; government departments looking for new project sites; andconservation agencies searching for new areas to be protected. This article
shows, first, how two types of ambiguous land Ð state-owned but privatelycultivated land, and communal lands Ð were created. It then examines how
the Karen, one of the hill peoples living on the ambiguous lands, have been
struggling to survive between the forces of capitalistic development and forest
conservation. Using a detailed study of forest use and dependency conductedin two Karen villages, I argue that the state's efforts to reduce the Karen's
forest dependency, or even to evict them from the forests, are not leading to
the stated objective of conservation. Finally, I draw some wider implications
with reference to James Scott's thesis on state simplification.

INTRODUCTION

Academic studies aiming to illustrate the problems of deforestation in
Thailand commonly compare figures for the country's forest cover in the
1960s or even earlier, which was reportedly more than 50 per cent, withthe present figure, which is around 15 per cent. In trying to understand thedecline in forest cover, regression analyses are carried out using different
abstract variables such as population density, poverty and literacy.
Although this approach, from the aggregate to the particular, may be
useful in analysing how predetermined categories contribute to forest
loss, it bypasses the definition of these categories (what is poverty? who ispoor?), fails to capture the diversity within each conceptual cluster (why, forinstance, do groups with identical population densities have different levelsof success in managing their forests?), and is blind to the politics operating
among the various groups of people to whom these variables apply. Yet, it

Development and Change Vol. 31 (2000), 155±177. # Institute of Social Studies 2000. Publishedby Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.

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is in this diversity and through the politics of resource control that we findelements critical for understanding environmental change.
A more effective analysis begins with the study of a specific people
residing in a specific location, who are likely to be caught between various
interests and power relations representing forces beyond the locale. The
analysis of `ambiguous lands' and the people who inhabit them isparticularly revealing for understanding environmental deterioration in
Thailand. `Ambiguous lands' are those which are legally owned by thestate but are used and cultivated by local people. They do not fit neatly into
the private property regime based on fictions of exclusive use rights andalienability, and consist of the residual lands of state simplification processes on land tenure. State simplification, as described by James Scott,denotes acts by state officials to create a standard grid whereby complex
and illegible local systems can be centrally recorded and monitored (Scott,1998).
The ambiguous property status of such land makes it attractive to avariety of actors, including villagers searching for unoccupied arable
lands in the frontiers, government departments on the look-out for new
project sites, and conservation agencies sensitive to new areas in need ofprotection. Ambiguous lands can be considered geographical spaces inwhich various `stresses' from social, economic, and political demands are
represented. They are the frontiers of state simplification projects, where
various initiatives have attempted to solve the problems of deforestation.
Analysis of the alleged solutions is a promising window through which to
look at how problems are defined in the first place. My primary interest,
therefore, is not to identify the driving force of conservation and development as such, but to investigate what is happening in the spaces between
them. In other words, I am interested in the specific nature of the spaces andpeoples that tend to fall between the powerful forces that are commonly
found in rural areas of tropical countries.
The attractiveness of ambiguous lands invites us to interrogate the distributional implication of their allocation. Distributional consequences are
significant, given that thousands of people either use or actually live onstate-owned resources. The economic characteristics of these lands further
complicates the equity issue. Despite legal enclosure, many state-owned
lands are in reality easy to access, and the actual users and their ecologicalimpacts are difficult to assess. Moreover, local commons, access to which isusually limited to local residents, often contribute in an important way tothe larger ecosystem. From the state's point of view, however, the same
resources may be considered too scarce and valuable to permit the locals toutilize them, so that certain local commons such as forests become
vulnerable to state enclosure. These issues raise questions about how thebenefits of commons should be distributed among unequal power holders.
Political motivations driving state enclosure and the costs imposed on local
people are often obfuscated under the rubric of the seemingly neutral termConversion and Conservation of Forest Lands in Thailand

157`environmental conservation',1 making an analysis of the distributional
dimension even more necessary.
Scholars of common property have tended to emphasize the question of`who has access to what'. It is important to go further than this, and ask why
certain people end up using certain types of resources and not others. The
basic conditions that determine the utilization of various forest resources inThailand have largely been shaped by the state's simplification of tenure on
forests and lands. To identify these conditions, the following section will
examine the history of state simplification in Thailand, showing how the two
types of ambiguous lands Ð state-owned but privately-cultivated lands, andcommunal lands Ð were created,2 and outlining the government activities
that take place on these lands. This will be followed by an examination of
how the Karen, one of the hill peoples living on the ambiguous lands, havestruggled to survive between the forces of capitalistic development andforest conservation. Two Karen villages were selected for a detailed studyof forest use and dependency Ð the type of critical data often missing in
defining the problem. These data are used to compare how market accessand the differences in household wealth within the selected communities
influence their connection to forests. The results of the studies suggest thatthe state's effort to reduce the forest dependency of the Karen, or evento evict them from the forests, has not led to the stated objective ofconservation. The final section presents some wider implications withreference to James Scott's thesis on state simplification.
LOCATIONAL SIMPLIFICATION AND THE `LAND IN BETWEEN'

Pressures from the Conversion of Unoccupied Common Lands
From the Ayutaya period (1350±1767), all lands in Thailand weretheoretically considered the property of the king. However, custom andtradition over several centuries gave the so-called freeman the right to takeas much land as he and his family could cultivate, but often not exceeding
25 rai (1 rai = 0.16 ha) (Wales, 1934: 121). Agricultural land accounted for
only 2 per cent of the land in Thailand around 1850, and throughout thecountry there was an abundance of unused land, which needed only to becleared and cultivated (Ingram, 1971: 12). Underpopulation was seen as the
1. Scholars have tended to pay more attention to the sustainability of regulatory systems andtheir ecological implications than to equity and distributional aspects within a communityand between communities. For an exception, see Jodha (1992).
2. All land in Thailand is either privately owned or owned by the state. All common lands or
local commons, therefore, are state owned. In this article, I will use the term `communal
lands' to indicate the local commons that are created or guaranteed by the government to
be used by the people. The term `common lands', on the other hand, refers to lands thatpeople have been using customarily without state recognition.

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main obstacle to national development. The Harvard sociologist, Carle
Zimmerman concluded from his pioneering economic surveys of rural areasin Thailand that `there is still great under-population in Siam and that healthwork is needed to promote more population because these greater numbers
are necessary to an improved agricultural technique in many of the areas'(Zimmerman, 1931: 225, emphasis in original). With a sparse population in
relation to abundant land, there was no need for either farmers or thegovernment to demarcate property.
Slavery was widespread until the beginning of the twentieth century, andthe ownership of labour rather than land guaranteed the power of feudal
chiefs. The relationship between patrons and freemen was personal, notterritorial (Ingram, 1971: 13). A dramatic incorporation into the global
market economy began after the 1855 Bowring Treaty with the British,
which opened up the global rice market for Thailand. Rice was exported
primarily to western Europe and then to China (Thompson, 1941). Lands
previously considered `wastelands' gradually gained market value and becametargets for occupancy and competition. Teak extraction by European
companies also accelerated in the north: with the destruction of European
oak forests, the Europeans began to use teak for wooden sailing vessels, andlater for the decks of iron steamships (Falkus, 1989: 133).
The population grew together with the commercialization of agriculture
in lowland areas. The rising value of land began to generate conflicts overits use and ownership in the late nineteenth century, and the government
finally launched a massive cadastral survey in preparation for a westernstyle property system based on individual holdings of land. The first
cadastral survey began in 1901 and became the basis for tax collection in
cash instead of in kind. Administrative and legislative action was taken by
the central government to provide more clearly-defined property rights toagricultural land, primarily to facilitate the expansion of rice cultivation andresolve disputes over newly developed areas (Brown, 1988). Through therapid adoption of a western-style property system and by functioning as abuffer between the British and the French, Thailand was able to maintain its
independence and resist colonialization.
Various surveys aimed to create a direct one-to-one relationship between
land and owner (or user). Certain types of land, however, tended to escapethis type of state simplification. These were lands that had been used ascollective property: roads, grazing lands, coastal areas, etc. It was only inthe 1930s that the government created new legislation regarding the use
and ownership of these communal and unoccupied lands.3 The primary
3. The Civil and Commercial Code of 1932 and the Waste Land Act of 1935 were the first torecognize the status of lands other than private tenure. The world economic depression in
the late 1920s put many farmers into severe debt, and accelerated land concentration as
well as the need to regulate common lands, which had not been an issue for centuries. Thiswas particularly important in the densely populated central region (Kitahara, 1973).

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objective of this new legislation was not so much to guarantee communal
rights for all people but rather to secure public lands for state interests andprevent them from being privatized by farmers and other private interests.
These lands legally became the property of the state with the status of`collective assets of the nation', and villagers were officially required toregister for permission to use them.
It is interesting to note that forests were not explicitly included in the listof `collective assets'. This may reflect the fact that up until the 1930s thestate attached no economic value to forest or to other types of collective
lands (such as grazing lands) that demanded protection. Furthermore,forestry was the exclusive domain of the forestry department and someforeign logging companies (especially in areas with valuable timber).
General forest legislation, apart from that which protected valuable species
such as teak, remained vague, as did the definition of `forest' itself. The 1941
Forest Act defined forest as `all land that does not belong to any individual
based on the land law'. Extent of tree cover was not a condition that defined
forests in a legal sense. This definition of forest and state property allowed
for contradictions and ambiguities between those who legally owned theland and those who actually used it. These `ambiguous' areas became thesource of many conflicts. The government attempted numerous forms ofland settlement projects to bring order to these areas, but were mostly
unsuccessful. The goal of these projects was to stabilize the population andsuppress anti-government movements, as well as to deflect the people fromcontinuing to encroach on state property.
Pressures from Conservation Policies on Common Lands
Aside from serving as open-access reserves in case of land shortages, certain
forests have served as local commons to provide an essential source of fuel,food, medicine, and materials for building houses, boats, baskets, and so on(Falkus, 1990: 69). As with agricultural lands, forests were abundant in mostparts of the country; in certain locations where a scarcity of forest wasperceived, local people developed a communal mechanism to regulate theuse of forests to avoid over-exploitation or privatization. In the northern
region, such communal forests are to be found in watershed areas; in thenortheast there are sacred `ancestor forests', connected to religious beliefs
that have prevented them from being cultivated or appropriated privately(Ganjanapan, 1998).
At the state level, the large-scale planned conservation of trees began in
the late nineteenth century, motivated by the expanding European teakindustry in the northern regions. Until that time, the logging of teak in thenorth had been conducted at the whim of feudal chiefs in Laos and largely
operated by Burmese and Chinese merchants. As the teak industry became
profitable, questions of lease and ownership, royalty collection, and160

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governmental authority became prominent issues.4 Western timber companies demanded that the central government impose strict restrictions ontimber extraction in order to protect the long-term prosperity of theirindustry, precipitating an unusual unity of interest between the Siamese
government and the western logging companies (Brown, 1988: 117).
As part of the westernizing policies pursued by King Chulalongkorn, thegovernment invited H. Slade, an English forester from India, to serve as
the first director-general of the Royal Forest Department (RFD), established in 1896. His task was to regulate the over-exploitation of teak in thenorth. Unlike other exportable resources such as tin, which needed more
foreign investment, the teak business was a target for regulation andconstraints. At that time, forest cover was estimated to exceed 70 per centof the country (Feeny, 1989). The total staff of the RFD charged with thecare of those forests was less than thirty in 1908 and still only one hundredby 1934.5 Increasingly strict regulations imposed by the RFD to protect
British operations favoured large foreign investors, who had the resources
to sustain the increasingly expensive logging enterprise, to the exclusion ofsmall domestic companies. Western companies dominated the teak industry
until the 1950s.
The RFD gradually introduced legislation to classify forests. These laws
reveal government perceptions of important (and unimportant) issues
during each period. With the Forest Protection Act of 1913, the RFD
extended its protection to cover non-teak trees for the first time. In 1938, it
introduced the first territorial conservation policies to secure forest reserves
for future logging operations. Territorial zoning was strengthened by the
first Five-year National Social and Economic Development Plan in 1961, in
which the government designated 50 per cent of the country as state-owned`permanent' forest. Since then, the government has continued to classify
land and forest as a way of determining who will have access to what.
Under the state territorialization of forest lands, no legislation was
prepared to protect the communal rights of local people. All common lands
were legally state property; with the lack of legal recourse and the ambiguityof property relations, local commons (such as forests, grazing areas, etc.)
were increasingly incorporated into national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
Since the late 1980s, in reaction to attempts to simplify local resource
systems, there have been counter-movements led by NGOs and universities
calling for a new bill to guarantee the communal control of forests by
farmers. The enactment of the bill is still pending, and the battle between
villagers and the state is still intense in many parts of the country.
4. The trade treaties signed during the mid-nineteenth century with western countries had
imposed a financial burden on the Thai government. The increase of trade was too gradualto be relied on to produce sufficient tax funds. This situation forced the government toconcentrate on improving the efficiency of its tax collection (Vella, 1955).
5. In 1995, there were approximately 18,000 staff members at RFD (RFD, 1996).

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Battles over the `Land in Between'
There are two dominant forces behind the simplification of forest lands:
converting them and conserving them. Both forces are guided primarily
by the government, although international conditions also have a strong
influence on them. Global market demands prompted the expansion ofrice cultivation, and later cash crop production, into the forest frontier.
The creation of protected areas and the scientific regulation of forests
are responses to international environmental movements, particularly inview of the increasing availability of donor funds for the environmental
sector. These two dominant forces tend to have particular impacts on
certain groups of people. For example, ethnic minorities and landlessfarmers have not only been sidelined in the process of economic development, but have also been burdened with the costs of conservation
initiatives in the very locations where they sought to escape from poverty.6
Forests have served not only as an economic alternative but also as apolitical haven for disaffected groups fleeing political repression, particularly when communist movements were active in the mid-1970s (Hirsch,1990).
The shift in property relations can be illustrated by picturing exclusive
state lands as one dimension, and private farm lands as another. The
ambiguous area, or the land in between the two, is owned by the state but
utilized by local villagers. When land was abundant and population scarce,the public lands used exclusively by the state were limited to areas formining, military bases, and teak harvesting. Private lands with exclusive
property rights were also limited because the majority of the land was, inprinciple, open-access, and guaranteed by usufruct rights based on
customary laws. A large portion of land, therefore, belonged to the state
yet was de facto privately accessible (ambiguous). As the economy became
more market-orientated, however, private assets gained in importance andthe legal structures that protected private rights were extended, resulting in
the expansion of private farm land. This expansion was strongly supported
by development policies and foreign aid. The large-scale introduction ofcommercial crops including sugar cane, coffee, tapioca, maize, andeucalyptus into private lands played a major role in soil erosion. The state,
meanwhile, strengthened its exclusive control over public lands, the area
where forest land was most prevalent.
My focus is on what is happening to the land in between. Typical of theseambiguous areas are the fringes of national parks and other types of

6. Migration may, for example, be due to population growth accompanied by a reluctance tosubdivide land; debt foreclosure; loss of tenancy rights; insufficient capital to purchaseland on the part of young families; or forced displacement caused by infrastructuralschemes and plantation projects (Hirsch, 1990: 36).

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protected areas now often referred to as `buffer zones'. Buffer zones, therefore, are another product of state simplification. In recent literature on
protected area management, fringe areas of core conservation zones areseen as important for providing an additional ecological layer, and also as
places where the basic needs of the local population can be met (Sayer,1991).
Buffer zones attract much attention not only because of their relation to
the core protection area, but also because they happen to fall under twocontradictory national policies in Thailand: land reform and forest
conservation. Competition between the Agricultural Land Reform Office(ALRO) and the RFD in the buffer zone has become acute: on the one
hand, government policy since 1975 has been to redistribute land to landless farmers; on the other hand, a parallel policy aims to expand protected areas to cover up to 25 per cent of the total land area. Based on
statistics from 1996, the protected area is still less than 15 per cent (RFD,
1996). The problem is that there is no land to provide to the landless otherthan the forest reserves which were previously granted to logging concessions. Within the forest reserves, areas no longer suitable for plantation
and areas largely encroached on by farmers are supposed to be handed overto the ALRO. The ALRO will then decide how to distribute this land to thelandless poor. From the RFD's point of view, however, forest reservesin the buffer zones should be the first to be included in the expanding protected area. Unfortunately, there are no clear scientific criteria to determine
which lands should be given to the farmers through the ALRO, and whichshould remain under the RFD's control. For the ALRO, deforestation is
not an issue; in a sense, it is a necessary part of its solution to resolve thelandless problem.
PEOPLE IN BETWEENThe Karen under Simplification
There are nine official categories of hill people in Thailand (Bhruksasri,1989), including the Karen population, estimated to number about 600,000(Hayami, 1996). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Pwo Karenin western Thailand were considered allies by the Thai king. They served the
king as scouts in anticipation of the Burmese invasions from the west, as
well as providing valuable forest products such as ivory, cinnamon, andcotton (Gravers, 1994). The British also valued the Karen's knowledge oftimber and their expertise in mobilizing elephants for their harvesting in themountains and jungles of the frontiers. King Chulalongkorn's administrative reform in the early twentieth century, however, marginalized the
Karen's previous position in the Thai polity (Jorgensen, 1996). During
the 1960s, a communist insurgency extended to the Thai border, and theConversion and Conservation of Forest Lands in Thailand

163

economically marginalized hill people found themselves on centre stage once
again. In the 1970s, many of the Karen joined communist groups which
made them politically dangerous `tribes' in the view of Thai society.
The Huai Kha Khaeng (HKK) wildlife sanctuary extends over the Uthai
Thani and Tak provinces of western Thailand. It is a central component of
the kingdom's integrated protected area, which covers 14,000 km2, including
five wildlife sanctuaries, eight national parks, and three would-be nationalparks.7 Cubitt and Stewart-Cox note that `for a country that is widely
known and often criticized for its deforestation, this is astonishing. It would
take a grueling hike for about a month to get from north to south of [HKK]'(Cubitt and Stewart-Cox, 1995: 124).8 The HKK forest was designated awildlife sanctuary under Thai law in 1972 and later, in 1992, became the firstnatural UNESCO world heritage site in Thailand.
Only 22.1 per cent of the total population in the buffer zone surrounding
the sanctuary today was born in the area. They are all Karen (CUSRI,
1992). Originating in Burma, a portion of the Karen population resided
inside the sanctuary along the Kwa Yai River until they were evicted fromthe area in the late 1970s. Government intervention with hill people
intensified in the late 1960s when communist propaganda reached marginalareas on the hills. Various government schemes, such as cash crop
promotion, health care delivery, and education services, were introduced
to co-opt the hill people and keep them from turning to the communist
party.
In terms of the general discourse on the Karen's connection with forests,
they, along with other hill people, have long been identified as `forest eaters'(Gravers, 1994). As early as 1923, a commentator of Karen economy noted
that: `In some places the same clearing is cultivated three years in succession,
but in others a new clearing is made every year. In the past, large tractsof forest have been destroyed in this way, and even now the Forest Department has taken the matter up, a good deal of destruction takes place invaluable forests' (Andersen, 1923: 55).
More recently, the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI)
argued that `for the Royal Thai Government, the hill tribes pose a seriesof profound political, social and ecological problems. Much highland
deforestation . . . can be laid directly at their door' (TDRI, 1987: 80). A
people once blamed for their backwardness and opposition to modernization and development are now being blamed from an environmental
7. For purposes of comparison, Yellowstone National Park is about 5,500 km2.
8. HKK and the adjacent Tung Yai Naresuan world heritage sites consist of a complex
mosaic of evergreen and deciduous forests. They lie at the meeting point of four biogeographic zones and derive elements of their flora from the west and north (Himalayan)
and south (Sundaic) regions. At least 120 mammals, of which 5 are endemic, 401 bird
species, 41 species of amphibians, and 1207 species of fresh water fish have been recorded(Nakasathian and Stewart-Cox, 1990).

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standpoint. The proposed strategy which flows from this position is,naturally, to move people away from the precious forests.
As described by Mr. Chatchawan Phitsamkham, the superintendent of the Huai Kha
Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, people have been attracted to the forest and its resources likeants to a lump of sugar. The ICAD (Integrated Conservation and Development) activities
we propose are intended to turn people away from the protected areas, to attract themto `new and sweeter lumps of sugar' outside the forests. (World Bank, 1993: 11, emphasis inoriginal)

Having been evicted from the HKK and now squeezed into the `buffer zone'of an internationally recognized protected area, the Karen are not only
denied their traditional farming techniques, but also modern chemical
agriculture for fear they will damage the forest. This is a `late developer's
trap' Ð you cannot go back but neither can you move forward in the same
way that `modern' farmers have done. Michael Dove summarizes thedilemma as follows: `the challenge is to achieve the benefits achieved by past
paths while not following them' (Dove, 1994: 1069, emphasis in original).
Due to a lack of documentation, it is difficult to describe how the Karen
used to interact with forests before their eviction from HKK. However, withthe aid of reports by three Danish anthropologists (Ewers, 1994; Gravers,
1994; Jorgensen, 1976, 1996) who conducted their fieldwork in the Karen
community in the early 1970s, and my own interviews with elderly people
in the villages, a general picture emerges. Rotational shifting cultivationof upland rice was the central economic activity of the people. Theirproduction portfolio consisted of yam, taro, cotton, tobacco, chillies, andvarious vegetables in the same plot of approximately 5 rai (1 rai = 0.16 ha)
per household. Banana trees and sugarcane often surrounded swidden
agriculture plots (Gravers, 1994). Metal products (such as knives), guns,
salt, and certain cloth had to be purchased from the local market in the
distant town in exchange for their agricultural products. Although little is
known of the extent to which the Karen impacted on the forests in the past,their long-term continuous residence in the same area demonstrates, at least,a successful implementation of the swidden system. The rotation cycle of a
fallow period was between ten and fourteen years. As a villager once said tome with some frustration, `if our farming system was such a bad thing, theHuai Kha Khaeng forest would never have become a world heritage site; itwould have disappeared by now'.
Despite the blame assigned to hill people and local villagers living close
to rich forests, there are almost no data on the nature of their forest use.
This is surprising because, where real problems are perceived, states usuallygather data that will enable them to address those problems. A project ofstate legibility is often directed towards obstacles so that they can beeffectively targeted and manipulated, as Scott demonstrates with the Nazi's
racial map of Jews (Scott, 1998: 78). Official statements frequently referto the destructive activities of local villagers, but the persistent absence of
empirical data on villagers' actual forest use suggests that the state may notConversion and Conservation of Forest Lands in Thailand

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perceive villagers as serious threats at all, but uses them to deflect publicattention away from corruption, large-scale infrastructure development, andillegal logging by public officials themselves.9
The following section presents an analysis of the kind of data that havebeen completely missing from the debate over whether to allow the Karen tolive in the buffer zone, which are also important in assessing the legitimacyof the state's project in dealing with local peoples. The analysis focuses
almost solely on the material connections between the Karen and the forests
because this, over and above cultural attachments and non-material linkages
that people have to their forests, seems to be the central concern for policy
makers.
Changes in the Karen Economy
I studied the Karen communities adjacent to the HKK forest complex fromMarch 1996 to March 1997. There are more than twenty villages within a
5 km radius of the HKK boundary. Four of these villages are the Karen
communities with the longest histories in the area. They are also the mostdependent on forest resources. From the four villages, I selected two as
intensive study sites for the following reasons: (1) the populations ofboth villages are about the same and reasonably large, reflecting various
types of livelihood strategies within each village; (2) although their distancefrom forested areas is the same, village A has inferior access to roads andmarkets, enabling me to measure the influence of the market economy inrelation to forest use; (3) both villages have similar histories of migrationand initial property holdings, both having been evicted from the HKK in
the 1970s.
The 1970s were a critical turning point for the Karen economy. A Thai
logging company built the first road that penetrated into the villages. The
road had a significant impact in pushing the subsistence economy into themarket economy. Most notably, middlemen could now reach the formerly
inaccessible villagers, which encouraged the Karen to plant cash crops.
Mono-cropping of maize increased the number of weeds, and ploughing wasneeded to prepare the land. Repeated use of the same land made the soil
harder and more difficult for animals to plough, so that farmers had to rent
tractors from those who owned them, mainly Thai moneylenders in thelowlands. The introduction of tractors reduced the opportunity to harvest
different crops throughout the season. Whereas traditionally there had beena time-lag between the planting of rice and the maturing of other crops
such as vegetables and potatoes, the need to plough mechanically forced

9. For example, the RFD began to count the number of people living inside the conservation
forests only in the 1990s.

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Table 1. Basic Data on the Two Research Villages (1995)

Population
Average annual income1
Self-sufficiency of rice
Frequency of labour exchange2
Ave. size of land under cultivation
Access to the market
Village access to electricity

Khongsao Village (A)Ban Mai 2 Village (B)224
18,270 baht
64%
3.7 days per year
6.3 raidifficult access by car
no230
33,026 baht
39%
3.5 days per year
10.4 raiaccessible by car
yes

Notes:
1. The high average income figure results from the inclusion of high salaried people (schoolteachers, clinic doctors); without these non-farming people, the average income of village A
would be around 10,000 baht and that of the village B around 20,000 baht.
2. `labour exchange' represents the average number of labour days exchanged among villagers
during the planting season of July and August.
(1 baht = 3 ¢; 1 rai = 0.16 ha)

the Karen to give up intercropping.10 From a rice-based economy, whichallowed for cultivation of vegetables, sweet potatoes, sugarcane and some
tobacco and cotton within a manageable labour cycle, the shift to monocropping of maize and cash crops implied a more intensive labour schedule,with two plots to be worked simultaneously (Jorgensen, 1976; author
fieldwork).
Meanwhile, highland development policies initiated by the state from theearly 1960s did not have their intended effects. Attempts to introduce paddy
rice techniques as a way to push the Karen out of shifting cultivation largely
failed, with few farmers adopting them.11 Coffee plantation projects in the
1980s also failed because of inadequate market connections. At the sametime, forcing people to move out of the core area may have had an unintentional negative impact on the forests. The RFD considers forest fireas one of the major threats to the HKK today, with the sanctuary being
damaged by fire every year. Ironically, because there are no people resident

10. The approximate costs of maize production can be calculated. To cultivate 5 rai, which isthe break-even size to make any profit, farmers would need two rotations of ploughing bytractor. Tractors cost between 750 and 1750 baht to rent for the first round and around
500 to 600 baht for the second round. Purchase of seeds came to about 900 baht for 15 kg,
and another tractor rental added 400 baht (80 baht per rai). If the farmer were cultivating
more than 15 rai, he would need additional cash to hire extra labour, a practice that has
become more common than relying on traditional labour exchanges. The reciprocal natureof labour exchange becomes unsustainable when certain people gain access to mechanicalequipment and the land distribution becomes unequal within a community. Hiring labour
then becomes convenient, because it precludes the obligation to return labour in exchange.
11. There were two main reasons why farmers did not adopt this high-yielding technique:(1) the difficulty in obtaining flat land to retain water; and (2) the difficulty of mixing avariety of crops to satisfy their subsistence needs.

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in the area, there is nobody to detect and fight forest fires until the flames
are large enough to attract the attention of the forest fire unit in the park.12
The responses of the Karen to ever-tightening government regulationof forests (such as the abolition of shifting cultivation) and land (theimposition of a private property system) divide the Karen roughly into twogroups: those who have intensified their cash crop production to escapefrom poverty, often at the expense of their subsistence production; and those
who could not afford to follow this strategy and were forced to dependon other means, such as working on other farmers' residual land, andborrowing money from local moneylenders. Many of them are unable towork in the cities to earn cash because they lack citizenship, personalconnections, the language skills or the confidence.
The ALRO is now responsible for implementing the integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) in the buffer zone area. Their latest
approach to both conserving the HKK and responding to the needs of the
farmers, particularly those falling under the second category above, is to try
to shift people's economic orientation away from the forests by promoting
income-generating activities in and outside the buffer zone. This new
approach, although recognizing the basic right of people to live in the area,
still assumes that local people are the main abusers of forests. Poverty,
together with a purported lack of knowledge about how to farm appropriately, are believed to be driving people to unsustainable resource use(PEM Consult, 1996). The next section will examine the validity of theseassumptions.
Karen Forest Use and Dependency
Before discussing the kinds of interventions that might be conducive toconserving forests, it is important to understand how people interact withthem on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the exact nature of forest dependency
by local residents has seldom been investigated, and no site-specificinformation exists on the subject. Previous attempts to measure forest
dependency in other areas of Thailand have tended to suffer from one ormore of the following shortcomings: (1) the research span is often limited,and year-long variability is not taken into account; (2) when potential
seasonal biases are taken into account, the size of the samples is often too
small; (3) where the samples are large enough, the selection of households often ignores the economic stratification within villages, which might

12. In 1994 alone, 68,271 rai (10,923 ha) reportedly burned down inside the sanctuary(Noikorn, 1998). While I was conducting my fieldwork, a villager informed me that firefighters themselves often set fires in the forests because their daily wages double when they
are actively fighting fires.

168

Jin Satostrongly affect levels of forest dependency; (4) data collection often relieson the memories of villagers or the recording of daily forest resource
consumption by the villagers themselves, but such data are not reliable when
one is dealing with the use of `illegal' resources.
In an attempt to avoid these shortcomings, my own measurement offorest dependency of local villagers is based on different wealth ranks within
villages; this makes comparisons possible, and questions the common
demonization of poverty per se as the central cause of excessive resource
exploitation. I developed two indicators to capture forest dependency.
Income dependency is the percentage and amount of income people obtainfrom selling forest products. It is important to note that we measure therelative proportion of income derived from forests:13 when one villager
derives all his income from forests whereas another derives only 50 per cent,we can say that the former is more dependent on forests even though the two
may have an identical income in absolute terms.14 Livelihood dependency ismeasured by the variety and intensity of forest product consumption interms of food contained in each meal. Direct use of forest resources requires
labour investments and must, therefore, reflect the importance attached tothe activity by villagers. I did not measure the amount of firewood or
charcoal people consumed in the area because there seemed to be little
variation among the households.
For income dependency, information was collected from all households
through informal interviews and cross-checking. The choice of indicatorfor measuring livelihood dependency was difficult, but I eventually decided
to observe the consumption of meat, for three reasons. Firstly, meat consumption reflects both the household's connections to the market and to theforest; meat was likely to be income elastic and could be expected to reveal
differences in consumption between rich and poor. Secondly, people preferto eat meat if they have a choice; it is an important source of protein,although they do not get to eat it often. The obstacles to meat-eating include
the labour required to hunt, forest guards, and/or the cash required to buymeat at the local market. Thus, meat consumption will likely reflect thegeneral economic well-being of a household. Thirdly, from the viewpointof the forest guards, animals are a forest resource to be protected. Forest

13. Measuring income was more challenging than expected. Villagers in general do not know
exactly how much they earned last year. The total income from maize, which was thecentral source of income for the majority of villagers, was relatively easy to estimate
because they sell this crop once a year. In contrast, bamboo shoots are sold on a day-today basis in smaller units. Based on accounts of villagers, I cross-checked information withthe middlemen who had some statistics of purchases to come up with the best estimate.
14. Unlike an ordinary economic survey that often relies on income data (often unavailable),or the amount of land holding, wealth ranking allows us to observe how villagers
themselves view wealth and poverty in their community. It also minimizes the snap-shot
effect of relying on a single quantifiable measure.

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169

animals are thus contested resources and consumption of them reflects thedesperation of villagers under adverse circumstances.
Using a wealth-ranking exercise, twenty sample households were selectedfrom each of the two villages (forty in total). With the help of two assistantsfrom each village, a number of randomly selected meals was observed to test
the frequency of forest meat consumption in each of the following seasons:thirty meals between July 20 and August 20 (the busiest time of the year forplanting seeds and preparing the soil), another thirty meals in October(a rainy month with no major work, economically very difficult), and an
additional twenty meals from February to March (during the dry season
and after the harvest, when people are generally better off). These sampling
periods reflected various seasonal conditions that may affect villagers' accessto the forest. The Karen in this area normally take two meals per day withlittle difference in the content of each meal. This provided a total of eighty
samples for each household. Village assistants were permitted to choose
which meal to observe each day.15
From the ranking exercise and discussions with villagers, I was able toextract criteria for wealth (and poverty) that people implicitly use toevaluate each other. Some of the common criteria were size and neatnessof house, amount of land, number of children (fewer is better in this case),debt, income, family labour power, and self-sufficiency in rice. Theseelements were combined in complex ways to come up with the total rankingof households. From these indicators, I learned that the amount of land
under cultivation is strongly correlated with income dependency on
forests.16 My hypothesis is that because the busiest time for planting andweeding overlaps with the bamboo harvest season, those with larger landholdings cannot afford to allocate labour for obtaining forest resources;
differences in dependency are not necessarily due to wealth. The results ofthe data collection based on this method are presented in Tables 2 and 3.
Some observations can be made from these data. In terms of income
dependency based on the amount of land, less wealthy families tend todepend more on forest products (i.e., bamboo shoots). This is not surprising
given the fact that their private workable land is limited. Forest products
are important not only in terms of supplementing income but also in

15. Forest animals that are hunted and eaten are mostly `illegal' in a strict sense. To increase
the reliability of the data, I waited about a month before selecting villagers to help withdata collection. Based on my discussions with them, I developed a matrix for documenting
observations: different symbols were used for meat that came from the forest and thatfrom the market to obtain a rough idea of the relative proportion of food originating fromeach source.
16. Initially, I analysed income dependency based on wealth categories. All households weredependent on selling bamboo shoots at a similar level. I needed to look further into thecomposition of `wealth' and decided to use the size of land as a criterion to differentiate
villagers.

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Jin Sato

Table 2. Income Dependency Based on Amount of Land under Cultivation
Village A(limited access to the market)

Village B(better access to the market)

Area undercultivation(rai)

Annualincome fromforest(avg. baht)% share ofincomefrom forest

Annualincome fromforest(avg. baht)% share ofincomefrom forest

More than 20
15 to 19
10 to 14less than 93500 (n=1)
1780 (n= 10)2000 (n=3)
1664 (n=22)

14%
11%
22%
34%

1512 (n=12)2833 (n=6)
2916 (n=6)
4552 (n=19)

4
8
17
35

Notes:
1. The price of bamboo shoots in village A is lower than that of village B by 20% because of badroad access.
2. Area under cultivation is different from area under occupation, because many farmers do nothave enough capital to fully cultivate their land. The figure includes only cash crops.
3. Those who have a regular salary (e.g. schoolteachers) are excluded from the sample. It wasinteresting to find that even a relatively large family did not split up its labour to maximize its
income from the two sources (i.e. forest and agriculture). It was natural for them to work
together in the same place as a family.

Table 3. Livelihood Dependency: Proportion of Meatderived from Forest, as Percentage of Total Meat
Consumption, by Wealth Rank
(one-year weighted average)
Wealth Rank

Village A

Village B

1 (sufficient)2
3 (average)
4
5 (poor)

39%
60%
39%
56%
52%

33%
33%
44%
37%
46%

Note: Figures are calculated based on the weighted average of frequency
in each season. For wealth rank 2, the sample was n = l, so it is likely to
be more biased than others.

equalizing the flow of income throughout a year (bamboo shoots generate
income during the months of July and August when no other income
sources exist). In terms of livelihood dependency, no clear disparities were
found between the higher and the lower-ranked. However, access to themarket and good roads seems to differentiate the level of dependence
between the two villages. Furthermore, the year-long study showed that,regardless of wealth and market access, most of the villagers' meals arecomposed not of meat but of rice, chilli, and some vegetables. Meat

Conversion and Conservation of Forest Lands in Thailand

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consumption depends on the season, on the villagers' willingness to go into
the forest, and on mere luck. Much of the villagers' protein intake comesfrom fish and small animals such as wild chicken that are not the central
target for conservation. There is thus no justification for characterizing
the Karen as poachers of wild animals. At the same time, however, thefrequency of meat intake, although lower than expected, should not give theimpression that forest resources are unimportant to Karen lives. For many,
especially the poor, the forest remains their only source of livelihood.
The dependency on forests observed among the majority of the population in the research site, set against the strict policing of the forests by
the RFD, indicates that the Karen have limited opportunities to generate
income and secure food. Hunting activities are often carried out not in
the forest but in the Karen's fields during harvesting, when wild animals
such as pigs come out to feed on the crops.17 There is almost no selling ofanimals inside or outside the village. Timber use is also very limited Ð mosthouses are constructed with bamboo. Encroaching farmland into theconservation areas is too risky and too easily detected by the guards. On theother hand, some Karen do take advantage of the ambiguous demarcationof the sanctuary and look for forest products around the border. In manycases, they know where to look for the products while escaping the eyes ofthe forest guards.
Shifting cultivation has almost disappeared in this area, mostly because,
as a result of state conservation policies, there is no place to shift to.
Furthermore, shifting cultivation is ill-suited to the prevailing land
registration and economic system where rewards are given to those who
cultivate the same land every year and generate cash. In this sense, thenature of the Karen's forest dependency has changed dramatically fromfarming in their forests to collecting resources from the state forest. The
separation of farmland and forest land is becoming increasingly sharp.
Ironically, Karen living on the fringes of the HKK are now the target ofdevelopment projects aimed at reducing the impacts of their non-traditional
agriculture, which they only recently adopted after being forced to abandon
their traditional shifting cultivation.
The living conditions of marginal hill people on the edge of biologicallyrich forests illustrates a concentration of stress from various forces. The
twin facts that hill peoples are concentrated in the northern and westernforested areas and that they traditionally practice shifting cultivation haveencouraged most government officials to see them as the principal cause of
deforestation (Rigg and Stott, 1998: 108). However, one can also argue that
if the forested areas survived for so long with hill people living in and

17. In this sense, at least, forests are not only helping the local people, but the local people arealso helping the forests. I thank Professor Michael Dove for encouraging me to explore
this insight, although it is not possible to do so in full in this article.

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around them, the Karen cannot be the cause of environmental destruction.
The future connection of the Karen with the forests has to be examinedin the larger context of increasing privatization of lands and intensifying
calls for preservation of biodiversity. The increasing scarcity of resources
and space for livelihood were not naturally generated: they were socially
produced by the establishment of the sanctuary and the regulations ofland use.
SOME WIDER IMPLICATIONS: SIMPLIFICATION AND DIVERSITY

In developing some of the theoretical implications of this case study, James
Scott's `state simplification' thesis serves as a useful point of departure.
Scott argues that the state often fails to improve the living condition of its
own people by over-simplifying the `local':
The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as state's
attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified theclassic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion . . . But it isharder to grasp why so many well intended schemes to improve the human condition havegone so tragically awry. (Scott, 1998: 2±4)

Whether states typically intend to improve the quality of life for their
populations is open to question, but before deploring the repeated failuresof state projects, it is certainly useful to focus on how the state actually
prepares simplification. The investigation of state preparation may allow
observers to minimize the negative consequences derived from wrong
interventions. For this preparation, Scott coins the terms `legibility'. Legibility, according to Scott, is a condition of manipulation and inventionof units that are visible to the state (Scott, 1998: 183). In this study, I havedealt primarily with two subjects of state simplification that are related
to forests: land and the treatment of hill people. Three general lessons
concerning state simplification can be drawn from this case study.
First, the state does not always simplify or impose legibility but often
takes advantage of existing illegibility. States choose when and where to
impose simplification to make a system more legible and controllable.
Simplification is only a means to achieve the competing goals of the government. Confiscation of communally-utilized land, swidden fallow, and theirsubsequent transformation into protected areas, occurs because of farmers'lack of established tenure and political power, not because of the illegibilityof local systems. The ecological consequences of this are clear. If the forests
such as those of the Karen are taken away and the pioneering settlers are
rewarded with lawful land certificates, what incentive is there for local
people to manage forest lands sustainably? Despite its purported objective
to conserve forests, state intervention often provides a negative incentive for
local people to do so themselves.

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Second, state simplification affects different people differently. We haveseen in Thai history that forest conservation in the form of state imposed
restrictions to forest access often entailed denying access to local people
while granting access to societal interests such as energy, mining, andplantation industries Ð interests which have had more damaging impacts on
the survival of forests. In the past, restrictions on access to forests worked
to the advantage of European companies, the only groups capable of paying
the costs for expensive logging operations. Today, protected areas without
local residents often become the best candidates for dam construction sites.
Large-scale illegal logging inside the national parks by high-ranking officials
is a frequent occurrence.18 International organizations are pouring funds
into the government to fill this incentive gap without questioning the ways inwhich the state attempts to conserve forests. The consequences of restricting
access to forests are by no means equal.
Third, in the residual lands produced by the state simplification process,competition occurs not only between villagers and the state, but also among
the government departments themselves. In this sense, one department's
attempt to make a system more legible may be creating illegibility for otherdepartments within the government. As we have seen, there is inherent
conflict between the RFD and the Agricultural Land Reform Office overcontrol of the buffer zone, even though they belong to the same ministry.
Functional specialization and increasing divisions in the government
bureaucracy create diverse groups of interests even within the RFD. Some
officials, though limited in number, are sympathetic to the plight of villagers
and support progressive legislation on community forestry that grants
people lawful access to forests.19
Especially since the ban on logging, forestry projects have emphasized thepreservation of resources and not the ways in which resources are used bydifferent people. Hill people have benefited little from the `development' of
the highlands, despite the valuable resources in these areas. In addition,
hill people have been blamed for the deforestation that has destroyed
about half of the nation's forests, even though they make up only 1 percent of the population. The level of attention and intervention devoted
to certain locations and people are quite independent of their measurable

18. The most recent incident was reported in the Salween national park in Mae Hong Son
province adjacent to the Burmese border. Thousands of logs were secretly brought toBurma where they were stamped and smuggled back to Thailand as if they had beenlegally imported. This operation allegedly involved high-ranking officials from themilitary, the forestry department, and the police department (Kaopatumtip, 1998).
19. Diversity applies to NGOs as well. Environmental NGOs are often characterized asemphasizing either villagers' rights (the light green) or wildlife (the dark green). However,in opposing mining in wildlife reserves, for example, both types of NGOs and local
villagers can all agree (Achakulwisut et al., 1998). Attention to issues rather thanorganizations will provide more room for inter-organizational alliances.

174

Jin Satocharacteristics (soil, climate, ecology; population, poverty, distance fromforests). It is the political economy that makes a particular combinationof resources and people more prominent than others. I contend that thisparticular combination of marginalized people residing next to a rich forest
has not occurred by accident but has been structurally produced.
CONCLUSION

State simplification often complicates more than it simplifies. I haveattempted to show in this study that, despite the state's consistent effort todivide lands clearly into public and private spaces, irreducible and perhaps
growing ambiguity remains not only at a national level but also within
villages and within state agencies. This ambiguity is due partly to thevaguely worded legislation and policies that allow for various and often
conflicting interpretations. It is also the result of the failure of the state
to incorporate the ambiguity and establish communal property as part ofthe system. In areas where forests are still critical to local economies, stateprovision of these as communal forests may be the first move towards
conservation; but, for conservation to be effective, it must go hand-in-handwith the suppression of illegal logging by eÂlites and the building of capacity
for the locals to organize themselves. This is not because eÂlites necessarily
do more damage than farmers, but because failure to build this capacity will
weaken the credibility and the moral foundation underlying all legislation
on forest access. The role of local people in forest conservation (anddestruction) should be understood not only from the angle of how theyinteract with forests directly; it should also be assessed in terms of thefunction they perform as a buffer between the larger political/economic
forces and forests.
The global discourse on environmental issues, particularly since the 1980s,
has significantly affected how upland minorities are categorized. These shifts
in categorization, however, have almost nothing to do with how the Karen
actually interact with forests or how they define themselves in a wider
context; they serve solely as political tools to justify new forms of intervention. Moreover, international concern over scarce resources provides
the state with an additional reason to intervene, and to utilize whicheverdiscourse serves its interests (Peluso, 1993). Resource politics also affects the
position of the people living close to the resource in question. The Karen
have traditionally resided in between the lowland Thais and the upper
highlanders such as the Hmong. They have placed themselves in between
Burma and Thailand, not only geographically but also politically. Now theyalso find themselves situated in between conservation and development.
In terms of the direction of future research, the categorization of NGOs,
the state, and local people as distinct entities is no longer useful for the
analysis of forest control. Each of these is often composed of conflicting

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175

subgroups and factions. The heterogeneity of the state, on certain occasions,provides room for manoeuvre from the viewpoint of local villagers. By
exposing diverse departmental interests, one might find ways in which
farmers could take advantage of potential allies within the state apparatus
to counter other, more constraining influences of the state (such as thefarmers' general preference for land reform rather than forest protection).
How to match up components with similar interests and create alliances is a
key question.
The human capacity to develop institutional mechanisms to manage aresource that is locally perceived as abundant yet globally defined as scarceis being challenged. History shows that once the scarcity of a certain
resource is detected by powerful agents, it is doomed to be overexploited(Dove, 1993). Incentives to conserve a scarce resource, therefore, go handin hand with incentives to exploit it all the more, to the exclusion of local
people. Can we initiate an equitable, long-term management strategy for a
resource which has not been perceived as scarce? Scholars have the freedom
to shift between the various viewpoints that define `scarcity' Ð but they also
have an obligation to contextualize these points of view and address thesocio-political implications of privileging one definition over another.

Acknowledgements
The research upon which this essay is based was made possible by the Regional Community
Forestry Training Center (RECOFTC) in Bangkok, to which I was affiliated as a visiting
scholar from August 1995 to March 1997. I would like to thank Dr Somsak and Dr Vitoon for
their assistance. I am also grateful to Dr Wirachai of the Agricultural Land Reform Office(ALRO) and Acharn Somporn for their generous assistance in village selection and contacts
with local people. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Agrarian Studies
Colloquium at Yale University on 2 April 1999. I am grateful to all the participants of thecolloquium, and to Steve Striffler, Eliza Darling, Seth Cook, James McCann, Pierr Minn, Kay
Mansfield and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.

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Jin Sato is a research associate at the Institute of Environmental Studies of
the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, the University of Tokyo, 7-3-1
Honho, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan. His field of interest is thepolitical economy of natural resources, particularly the forces that work
towards decentralized management of natural resources in developing
countries.