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

With the move out of agriculture and the increase in value of land for
other purposes, it becomes even more problematic to discuss inequality on an
areal basis. The starkest expression of this is between rural/agricultural and

urban land holdings, where the monetary value of the latter is measured in
square wa (4 square meters) and the former in rai (1600 square meters). Grouping
these together negates the meaning of measures of inequality. Similarly, even
within rural areas, post-agrarian values of land for tourism, recreation and other
aesthetic and related economic purposes mean that those with relatively small
areas of land may in fact hold landed wealth that are worth amounts, and that
generate returns, many times those of farmers whose holdings are much larger.

Inequality is not just about what land different members of society own
or can access. There are also inequalities in who is recognised as legitimate
owners of land, for example in terms of ethnicity and gender. Ethnic minorities
living in northern Thai hills, in coastal area of southern Thailand and, most
numerically pervasive, in the Northeast, have been systematically deprived of
secure land tenure. This has happened both as state control defines who has
legitimate claims over land, and as the power of capital to displace those at the
bottom of society’s heap has given urban middle classes control over the country’s
beauty-spots – and the monetary returns that these earn in a tourist economy.

Women’s and men’s rights to land are shaped both by customary
practice and by law. On the one hand there is evidence of longstanding de jure
and de facto control of land by women in Thailand (Chankrajang and
Vechbanyongratana, 2021), and matrilocal residence patterns have served to keep
family homesteads in the hands of daughters. Even a critical review of land titling
in Thailand suggests that formalisation has not served to disadvantage women,
whose rights in a family context are protected by the Civil and Commercial Code

(Leonard and Narintarakul Na Ayutthaya 2003: footnote vi). On the other hand,
the assignment of head of household status to men can restrict women’s ability
to use land to access loans in their own right, for example, and public decision
making is often made with reference to male household heads (Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 2020).
Equality before the law is fundamental to equitable land relations.

In Thailand, unequal access to the courts is partly based on status, partly on
financial inequality, and partly on highly differentiated access to knowledge
and information. The blatant impunity of the wealthy to prosecution for forest

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Philip Hirsch

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