Page 118 - _21-0619 OK

The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XII, 2020

improve. Protection of the natural environment, support for smallholder farms
and eco-agriculture may remain popular objectives approved by urban people.
Recognition of the importance of local participation in planning and adequate

levels of property tax and sharing of development gains may be harder to
establish and must be demonstrated convincingly as a basis for future urban
development.

Conclusion

The first part of the paper described the sequence of events over the past
60 years that established the pattern of inequality in land ownership and wealth
that prevails today. The story began with a review of the expansion of land
occupation and registration of private land between the 1950s and 1990s.
Since then, as the state blocked further encroachment on forest areas and
economic growth slowed in the aftermath of a major financial crisis in the late
1990s, export-led industrialisation and more recently tourism have combined
with growth of domestic service sectors to sustain expansion of towns and cities,
while farmers, now dependent on national and international markets, have been
left in an increasingly precarious economic position with little or no new land
available for new generations. This part of the paper concluded with a resume
of government action to fill the main gaps, namely shortage of farm land for
low income people in the countryside and land for low-income housing in towns
and cities.

The second part of the paper sought to quantify the monetary value
of private land as a major component of private wealth and estimate the
distribution of land area and value between different types of household and
categories of land use that has resulted from the development process outlined

in the first part. The reader must be warned that this is a speculative exercise that
requires many assumptions and some guesswork. The author hopes that this
attempt will stimulate further work to improve data sources and clarify specific
causes and effects of rising rents and land values on communities in each part
of the country.
The statistical evidence confirms that well over half the population are

owner-occupiers, whether for housing or farm, with state land providing an
important resource for the agricultural sector where smallholders still
predominate. Most non-farm households live in detached or semi-detached

110 The Value of Land in Thailand Today

5/1/2565 BE 09:04
_21-0619(085-112)6.indd 110 5/1/2565 BE 09:04
_21-0619(085-112)6.indd 110