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

with dispossession and land conversion are now at the top of social and political
unrest in the country (Hirsch, Mellac, and Scurrah 2016). In Cambodia, the extreme
Maoist disruption of private landed property of the 1970s has given way to the

other extreme of inequality associated with cronyism and land concessions
(Scurrah and Hirsch 2015). Similarly in Myanmar, land concessions and
unmitigated dispossession of small farmers resulting from business-milit
ary alliances have long since reversed the pre-1988 “Burmese Way to Socialism”
(Scurrah, Hirsch, and Woods 2015). In Laos, land concessions issued by the
one-party state, mainly to investors from neighbouring countries, exceed the
paddy area farmed by small-scale agriculturalists (Hirsch and Scurrah 2015a).
Gini measures of inequality in these four countries based on FAO figures are quite
similar to those of Thailand, but unequal access to land takes quite specific forms
in each. In particular, Thailand has not seen the large scale concessions and
widespread land grabs of neighbouring countries. Rather, inequality in
landholding has occurred more incrementally and is largely a domestic process
rather than associated with transnational land deals. These phenomena are,
furthermore, connected in the sense that Thai corporate land acquisitions in

neighbouring countries can at least partly be explained by the limits put on such
deals within Thailand’s borders. These limits are in part governed by laws
prohibiting ownership or long-term leases by foreigners and in part the historical
outcome of land policies geared to placing formal ownership of rural land in the
hands of (largely smallholding) farmers, albeit for reasons that serve state
interests (Larsson 2012). It has also often been in the interests of agribusiness
to leave land in the hands of risk-bearing farmers and to focus on more profitable
upstream and downstream opportunies for accumulation through commercial
crop production – a more general phenomenon documented by Mann and
Dickinson (1978).

The wider regional context is thus not only significant for comparative
reference, but also as a means for Thai corporate capital to find outlets for
investment beyond the country’s borders. Thai sugar companies have secured
controversial concessions in Cambodia and Laos on a scale far larger than their
direct ownership of land in Thailand. Thai hydropower companies have
dispossessed and/or threaten to dispossess small farmers in Laos and Myanmar,
as they require land for large reservoirs in order to produce hydroelectric power
that is then sold back to Thai consumers. Thai agribusiness has also extended

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

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