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

A longer standing source of development-induced conflict over land is in
coastal and other areas where tourism has greatly inflated land values and where
speculative investment has been rife. Given that nearly 20 per cent of gross domestic

product is linked to tourism, about twice that derived from agriculture, this creates
heavy vested interests in land acquisition and is associated with rapid speculative
gains on the part of investors, often at the expense of farmers and others who sold
land early on but also of those who had previously not had titled claims to their
farms, orchards and residential land.

The issues of inequality raised by all three of these examples go well beyond
the question of who owns more or less land on an area basis. They raise issues of
tenure, knowledge of land markets and future infrastructure development,
access to justice through the courts, and recognition of ancestral rights to residence.

Conclusion: Governance and researching land inequality

Land inequality is an issue in many parts of the world, and in Thailand
it has heightened significance as certain measures appear to indicate that the
country is among the most unequal in the world, that indices of land inequality
are particularly high, and that a significant proportion of Thailand’s population
relies on land-based occupations to make a living. However, beyond these broad
generalisations, I have tried to show that we need to qualify our discussion of land
inequality by recognising that such inequality not only takes different forms in
different countries, but also that within Thailand the nature of inequality is shaped
by context. Moreover, as 70 per cent of the Thai working population no longer consider
themselves farmers, the meaning of land has changed. I have also suggested that
we need to be clear about what we are measuring, given the over-aggregation
and sometimes poor quality of available statistics on land distribution.

Thailand is in a region where land governance has become a key issue,
as indeed it has globally since the emergence of the global land grab discourse
following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. But land inequality does not exist
or arise in isolation from wider structural and historical determinants of uneven
development. This applies not only to the distributional but also to the unequal
recognitional and procedural dimensions. In other words, land inequality is a

symptom or outcome rather than foundational cause of wider political-economic
inequity, especially in a market economy under a capitalist system that encourages
accumulation and in which land has become a speculative as well as productive

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

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