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

the locus of conflict in the North has shifted to the uplands, but the inequality in
question is less over issues of unequal size of holdings than over recognition
of ethnic minorities’ rights to occupy and farm land deemed to be part of the

national forest estate.
Central Thailand has, historically, seen the highest rate of absentee

landlordism, a phenomenon that can be traced back to royal land grants of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Johnston 1975). These grants were
associated with land development and canal building, notably in the Rangsit
scheme (Brummelhuis 2007). More recently, the high rate of land titling in central
Thailand has also been associated with relatively high levels of land transactions as
younger people have moved out of agriculture and as land has been converted to
residential and industrial estates. The Eastern Economic Corridor special economic
zone has brought many of these issues to a head, for example as the government
has sought to repurpose land on which long-established communities have been
farming without title deeds as the land is Treasury-owned (Wangkiat 2018).

In southern Thailand many of the conflicts over land are associated with
its rapid increase in value in the context of tourism development. In some cases,
land occupied by ethnic minorities has seen developers acquire the title and
attempt to evict those living along the coastline, for example in the case of
Chao Lay fishers at Rawai in Phuket who have been in a long-running dispute
with a developer seeking to evict them on the basis of a controversial land title
claim despite evidence of continuous community occupation of the land plot
over a period of several decades (Thongtub 2019). Elsewhere, the post-tsunami
dislocation of coastal dwellers saw exclusions as developers moved in to claim
ownership in areas previously occupied without title by fishers and other coastal
dwellers (Wipatayotin 2018).

At another scale, the regional context of land inequality is also relevant
in understanding both how context shapes land inequality from one country to
another in the Mekong Region, and how transboundary land investments put
Thailand’s land inequality in perspective. Each of Thailand’s Mekong regional
neighbours has a political economy of land governance specific to its own historical
conditions (Hirsch and Scurrah 2015b). In Vietnam, land distribution has long

been a key issue, and during the 1950s and 1960s it was the basis of the country’s
anti-colonial and revolutionary movements. Yet, more recent policy moves have
seen reversals of the “land to the tiller” movement, and land conflicts associated

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