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

its indirect control over land through contract farming into Myanmar, largely to
serve the Chinese market (Woods 2015).

Development and points of conflict

Another way to contextualise land inequality is to explore points of

competition and associated conflict over land in specific cases and to employ
such cases to generalise questions of (in)justice and inequality that arise in each
case. In most cases, conflict arises due to overlapping claims to land, more often
than not in the context of development pressures that raise land values and
provoke or facilitate access to land by new claimants.
Some of the most intense competition for land in Thailand is in urban and
peri-urban areas, reflecting the rapid pace of urbanisation and an associated rise

in urban land values. Much of the acquisition of land that has concentrated
it in the hands of wealthy speculators has occurred through voluntary market
transactions, including the sale of former farmland to make way for housing estates,
industrial estates, tourist developments and so on. However, where such land
was previously rented from absentee landowners, such sales also lead to
dispossession, an under-researched dimension of land inequality in central
Thailand in particular. There are also many cases where land previously occupied
has been state land, including high-profile cases such as Pom Mahakan in
Bangkok (Herzfeld 2016) and the displacement of many slum communities
from land owned by state enterprises such as State Railways of Thailand (Elinoff
2017).

In recent years, special economic zones have become particular points
of contention. Employing the Section 44 powers in lieu of martial law in 2014,
the military junta issued a decree allowing the bypassing of normal provisions
regarding the repurposing of forest reserves and land reform areas away from
agriculture and streamlining normal procedures of environmental impact
assessment (National Council for Peace and Order 2015). Ten special economic
zones have been declared, five of which have been pushed ahead as pilot areas.
The land affected goes beyond just that identified for particular projects, for
example industrial estates and customs infrastructure. Each special economic

zone covers several sub-districts, placing larger areas of land under the decree
and users of such land into a situation of uncertainty.

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Philip Hirsch

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