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

Introduction

Thailand has been reported as one of the most socio-economically
unequal countries in the world (Phongpaichit and Baker 2016; Credit Suisse
2018: 156). Unequal access to land has figured prominently in both academic

and public discussion (eg Laovakul 2016). One reason that land is frequently
connected with inequality is that Thailand is one of the world’s main agricultural
producers. Despite the halving of the Thai agricultural workforce in percentage
terms within a single generation, nearly one-third of Thai workers still count themselves as
farmers and half live in rural areas, meaning that land remains the basis for
livelihood and, even for those no longer in agriculture, of identity and security.
It is also an important component of inter-generational wealth, source of access to
institutional credit, and – as the 1997 and 2008 financial crises and more recently
the COVID-19 catastrophe have shown – a refuge for urban migrants suddenly
thrown into precarity. Thus, social and economic inequality more generally
may be even more closely linked to land than in countries whose workforce
has for a longer period of time been less dependent on farming for a living and
whose population is more unambiguously resident in urban areas.

Discussion of land inequality in Thailand does not always make clear
whether it is the source of wider societal problems or the outcome of a broader
structural inequality. As a source, unequal landholdings have been associated
with problems ranging from local instances of food insecurity in northern
Thailand (Charoenratana and Shinohara 2018) to more generalised conditions
of low agricultural productivity in global cross-country comparisons (Vollrath
2007). As an outcome, land inequality is the product of the inherently inequitable

nature of Thai societal, economic and political conditions (Hewison 2015).
Land inequality in Thailand tends to be represented in the media and
in scholarship with reference to the very large holdings of a few prominent
Sino-Thai families. In 2014 a Prachachat Thurakit online article, also reported
in the Bangkok Post, named several of these, the two largest being cited as
owning 630,000 and 200,000 rai respectively (Bangkok Post 2014; Prachachart
Turakit Online 2014). While both articles cite an NGO report, however, the source

of the data remains unclear given that Lands Department records are anonymised.
The 41,000 rai owned by the Crown Property Bureau (Crown Property Bureau
2014: 11) includes 8835 rai of prime real estate in Bangkok worth more than
one trillion baht (Porphant 2015: 31). The Royal Thai Army’s significant land

114 Land Governance and Inequality in Thailand:
The Need for Context

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