Page 130 - _21-0619 OK

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

agricultural land falls under this category, which according to the Land
Development Department is 57.6% of total agricultural land, but according to the
Office of Agricultural Economics represents 69.0% of the total. If all private land

under the jurisdiction of the Department of Lands is taken into account, including
the NS3 and NS2 documents, these figures represent 71.7% or 85.9% of farmland
respectively (calculated from data presented in Laovakul (2020): Tables 2, 6 and 7.
The second type of tenure is land that remains state property but has been
allocated under conditional arrangements to farmers through land reform and
various forest land registration programs. This land is often of lower quality,
cannot be used for mortgages with private banks, and is subject to regulations
regarding transfer. The third tenure condition is land without title, often in
national forest reserves or national parks, where farmers have either encroached
on land designated as such or have, in effect, themselves been encroached upon
by gazetting of forest land status without regard to prior occupation and use.
The types of inequality and associated problems vary between these categories.

Ironically, skewed distribution of landholdings is greatest where tenure
is most secure. Where land has been titled, there is significant concentration
through market processes, exacerbated by the precarity of rural livelihoods in the
form of unstable farm prices, weather fluctuations and other processes that can
throw farmers into debt and hence lead to foreclosure or distress sales. In other
cases debt and associated distress sales arise through health emergencies, social
and educational expenditure. Titled land has become an object of investment,
particularly by better-off members of society. In many cases, buying and selling

of land has occurred at a local level within communities and even among kin
in what Hall et al refer to as “intimate exclusions” (Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011:
chapter 6), while in others the fungibility afforded by alienable land title has seen
accumulation of land by outside investors. In peri-urban areas, corporate owners of
housing and industrial estates have accumulated land, usually with the assistance
of local brokers. Not all land sales are involuntary or distress-induced, however.
In many cases, farmers have sold land to invest in their children’s education or in
non-agricultural enterprises. The rising inequality in landholdings that results
from all these processes is unambiguous, but the causes and effects associated
with them is less so, suggesting a need to drill down into specific circumstances
in order to understand the implications of land accumulation and dispossession
for different groups.

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

5/1/2565 BE 09:04
_21-0619(113-136)7.indd 122
_21-0619(113-136)7.indd 122 5/1/2565 BE 09:04