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

respects. First, by aggregating urban and rural land plots into the same data set
and measuring the Gini coefficient through area of land held, high value urban
household plots would be counted among the lower deciles, whereas larger

rural holdings even on poor soils of the Northeast, for example, would be
assumed to be better-off land holders within the higher deciles. Unfortunately
disaggregation is not possible given the format in which the data are released
by the Department of Lands, making a more realistic context-specific set of
measures impossible. A second qualification is that if non-titled land holdings
were to be taken into account, given that they tend to be located in less fertile
areas and to be larger than average, the Gini coefficient would likely still be high
but of a different order to that calculated from titled land alone. The huge
difference between Duangmanee’s calculated Gini coefficient of 0.89 and,
for example, that calculated for Thailand from FAO figures of 0.47 (GRAIN 2014)
is likely largely due to the inclusion of urban residential plots in the former
figure and the basis of the latter coefficient on agricultural census figures that
only include rural plots and that also incorporate farmland with non-private
(mainly land reform) tenure.

If agricultural land alone is considered, there are other challenges to
measuring inequality. Accuracy of data is a big challenge, given the difficulties of
surveying sensitive topics such as land ownership. Under-reporting is an issue
where land taxes are based on area farmed. Where there is no secure title, and
in particular where there is a significant need to keep land fallow, as in shifting
cultivation systems, farmers can easily be dispossessed when formal recognition

subsequently is based on the area hitherto reported for tax purposes. In Thailand,
the agricultural land census appears to suggest that there has been relatively
little change in the smallholder pattern of land holding over half a century from
the 1960s, with maintenance of a smallholding pattern in which 85 per cent of
holdings are 40 rai or smaller in size (Figure 1; see also Hirsch 2019). The most
recent survey on which this is based, however, contains a number of flaws,
in particular the under-enumeration of farmers overall with the omission of
18 per cent of registered agriculturalists from the 2013 census (State Audit
Office of the Kingdom of Thailand 2017). Nevertheless, the consistent pattern
over five decades clearly establishes that smallholding remains the basis of
Thai agriculture. Larsson’s seminal work on land policy in Thailand also
emphasises the relatively even spread of landed wealth that has resulted from

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