poverty and agrarian-forest interactions in thailand

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Geographical Research

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March 2008

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46(1):74–84

doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2007.00493.x

Blackwell Publishing Asia

Original ActicleROBERT FISHER AND PHILIP HIRSCH:

POVERTY AND AGRARIAN-FOREST INTERACTIONS

Commentary

Poverty and Agrarian-Forest Interactions in Thailand

ROBERT FISHER* and PHILIP HIRSCH

School of Geosciences, Madsen Building (FO9), University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Received 24 January 2007; Revised 31 May 2007; Accepted 19 October 2007

Abstract

In this paper we address the often sterile and circular debates over relationshipsbetween poverty and deforestation. These debates revolve around questions ofwhether forest loss causes poverty or poverty contributes to forest encroachment,and questions of whether it is loss of access to forests or dependence onforest-based livelihoods that cause poverty. We suggest that a way beyond theimpasse is to set such debates within the context of agrarian change. Livelihoodsof those who live in or near forests depend considerably on a rapidly changingagriculture, yet agrarian contexts receive only background attention in popular,political and academic discourse over poverty and forests. Moreover, to theextent that agriculture is considered, little heed is paid to social, technical andeconomic change. We therefore address agriculture’s changing relationshipswith the wider economy, otherwise referred to as the agrarian transition, andwith the natural resource base on which it depends. The paper draws on theexperience of Thailand to illustrate our key argument, and more specificallyaddresses the situation on the resource periphery through a look at the agriculture-forest interface.

KEY WORDS

agrarian transition; resource periphery; agriculture-forestinteractions; Thailand; livelihoods; poverty; environmentalism; communityforestry

ACRONYMSNTFP Non-timber Forest ProductRFD Royal Forest Department (Thailand)

Introduction

The relationship between poverty and deforestationhas been the subject of much popular discussion,eco-political debate and scholarly enquiry.Studies of the relationship between poor peopleand forests have been carried out at a number oflevels from local to global. They take bothquantitative and qualitative approaches. Threebroad directions of argument underlie such

discussion, debate and inquiry. One holds thattropical forests disappear because of the needfor the poor in developing countries – wheremost of those forests are located – to eke out aliving, or because the backward agriculturalpractices of the poor are destructive of bio-diverse forest environments. Shifting cultivation,pejoratively referred to as ‘slash and burn’, is aparticular target. The second holds that forest

R. Fisher and P. Hirsch:

Poverty and Agrarian-Forest Interactions

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© 2008 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2008 Institute of Australian Geographers

destruction by loggers and other external resourceclaimants itself is a cause of poverty as forest-dependent peoples lose access to their principalsource of sustenance and as upper watershedforest destruction leads to dessication (dryingout of soils and streams) and other impacts onthe ‘environmental services’ that downstreamfarmers rely on. The third position holds thatrestricted access to remaining forest resourcesdue to lack of tenure and intensified state controlof forests in response to deforestation leads tothe poverty of forest dependent people.

While the popular, political and academicdiscourse often acknowledges the basis of poorpeople’s livelihoods in farming, a considerationof agrarian change is missing from much of theportrayal. Farming practices and livelihooddependence are all too often assumed as a givenand rather static background aspect of livelihood,while the emphasis remains on forests andpoverty. Yet there are clearly problems with suchan analysis, best illustrated by some recentconceptual work based around rural studies inThailand, a country whose dramatic loss offorests has been associated with agriculturalexpansion and whose equally dramatic transitionsin agriculture and trends in forest cover makefor a highly relevant case study. Yet discourseson livelihoods do not take these transitionssufficiently into account. As Walker (2004) hassuggested, for example, the discursive ‘arboreal-isation’ of livelihood is a distortion of the relativedependence on farming and forest-based sus-tenance. Rigg (2001) goes even further tosuggest that rural livelihoods are much ‘morethan the soil’ – and by implication more than thenatural resource base including forests – aspeople’s incomes and livelihood priorities arediversified and ‘interpenetrated’ (Rigg 1998)with urban occupations.

In this paper, we seek to bring nuance todebates on forest-poverty interactions byfocusing on the ways in which agriculturallivelihoods mediate this relationship. Morespecifically, we look at contexts of agrarianchange – and the more general notion ofagrarian transition – at the agriculture-forestinterface. The following section identifies thisinterface as part of what we term the ‘resourceperiphery’. We base our discussion on Thailand,and show how agrarian transitions have increas-ingly become enmeshed with environmentaldebates including struggles related to resource-based livelihoods. The paper then examines howchange in forest cover has been linked with

poverty, both materially and discursively. This isfollowed by a discussion of the politicalarticulation of tensions at the forest-agricultureinterface, particularly around shifting cultivation,protected areas and community forestry. We goon to suggest a need to move beyond the discoursesentailed in such politics toward a more poverty-and livelihood-orientated understanding of theimplications of forest change. Finally, the articlemakes a supplementary set of observations onneighbouring countries in the Mekong Regionbefore concluding with some suggestions relev-ant to the policy process around forest-basedlivelihoods and poverty.

Poverty, forests and agrarian change at the resource periphery

Debates and discussions on poverty and rurallivelihoods occur in the context of the rapidprocesses of change occurring in agrarian societyin the region, especially at the ‘resource periphery’.The resource periphery can be defined as a zoneof relatively abundant natural forest and landendowment by virtue of limited prior marketintegration associated with remoteness andinaccessibility. Processes of agricultural intensifi-cation and market engagement have shifted orexpanded geographically to this resource peripheryand are making themselves felt in physicallyand ecologically marginal environments.

It is increasingly recognised that interactionsbetween forest and agricultural land at theresource peripheries in Thailand and elsewherein the Mekong Region have implications for thepoverty status and livelihoods of rural people.This is particularly true for those living at theagricultural margins. It is also apparent thatpoverty sometimes has implications for thecondition of natural resources. However, while itis obvious that there are connections betweenforest-agriculture interactions and poverty, thecausal nature of these connections is oftendisputed and usually simplified or even caricatured.

A proper understanding of these connectionsis a prerequisite for addressing both better forestmanagement and opportunities for povertyreduction, for example through participatoryapproaches such as community forestry thatsecure livelihoods through better access to forestresources. Yet these issues cannot be understoodsimplistically in terms of competing argumentsthat impoverishment causes environmentaldegradation, or that environmental degradationcauses poverty. Rather, we suggest that debatesover the relationships between poverty and

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agricultural/forest land issues need to be morecarefully nuanced. We also wish to show that therelationships are dynamic and need to be under-stood in the wider context of what has beendescribed as ‘the agrarian transition’. Theagrarian transition can be thought of as theprocesses of social, technical and economic changeassociated with developments within agriculture. Itis also associated with agriculture’s changingrelationships with the wider economy andsociety and with the natural resource base uponwhich it depends.

There is a need, therefore, to set some of thearguments underlying debates about poverty andforests in a wider frame of reference. Ofprincipal concern in such debates are competingpositions on the reasons why forest-dependentpeople are generally poor and whether thepoverty is mostly a result of marginalised socialand economic status and lack of tenure, or otherfactors. Can poverty be addressed, or partlyaddressed, by providing secure access to forestproducts through programs such as communityforestry? Or, do such programs (and dependenceon forests) represent some sort of poverty trap?We suggest that, without reference to theinteraction between agriculture- and forest-based livelihoods, and changes in the agrarianeconomy, such debates are too narrowly framed.Part of our aim is to bring some of the internationaldebates about these issues to the specific case ofThailand.

Agrarian changes involve a number of actualor assumed environmental impacts, and as suchthe wider agrarian transition of which they are apart is increasingly bound up with environmentaldebates. Such impacts include forest conversion,intensified chemical use, the use of geneticallymodified organisms, agri-ecological simplification(that is, increased dependency on a smallernumber of crop types and varieties), intensifieddemand for water, floods and droughts based onaltered hydrological conditions in catchments,and soil erosion and depletion. Several of theseenvironmental changes are directly relevant toforests. Some of them are also disputed. Forexample, Walker (2004) questions the persist-ence of statements about the hydrologicalimportance of forests, ‘despite the fact thatthere is very little evidence supporting the claimthat forests help secure downstream watersupplies and good evidence that water shortagesattributed to forest clearing are caused ... byvery significant increases in demand forwater’ (p. 315).

Environmental aspects of agrarian change haveimplications for understanding poverty, which isincreasingly bound up in competing discoursesof sustainability, environmental entitlements andresource access. The community forestry move-ment, which involves an attempt by peopleliving in or near forests to gain control, or at leastincreased access to, forests and forest resources,involves discourses which assert the ability oflocal communities to manage environmentssustainably. The environment (particularly for-ests) is portrayed as a kind of social safety netas well as a source of identity and meaning.

Thailand is a highly relevant case study forunderstanding the relationships between agriculturaland forest land issues for several reasons. Part ofthe reason for this is Thailand’s rather dramatichistory of forest clearance from the early 1960sto late 1980s. Among the reasons for looking atThailand to address the more general problem isthat it is a country that has reached a key pointin the process of ‘forest transition’ described byMather (1992). Mather argues that there is aforest transition in many developed countries‘from a shrinking to an expanding forest area’(p. 367). He concludes that the ‘transition appearsto be related to a slowing of population growthrates and to changing attitudes and perceptionson the parts of both peoples and governments’(p. 377). He speculates that similar transitionsmay occur in some developing countries. InThailand, forest areas appear to have reachedthe bottom of the J-curve (Perz, 2007, 106) or‘environmental Kuznets curve in forest coverchange’ (Rudel

et al

., 2005, 24), and nowappear to be beginning to expand. Such changeis related to the agrarian transition and changesin the interactions between forests and agriculture.

The resource periphery can be thought of atdifferent scales. At the regional scale is thereshaping of Thailand’s Mekong regionalneighbours as a resource periphery for forestryand plantations, as well as hydropower, gemsand fish, all of which supply Thailand’s indus-trialising economy. Within Thailand it is theinterface between forest land and agriculturalland. Significant numbers of people in SoutheastAsia continue to live on or near forest land,either actual forest, or land that is formallyclassified as forest. Although there are differentways to define the agriculture/forest land inter-face as an expression of the resource periphery(such as in terms of tenure or distance from theforest), a useful working definition is that theinterface is taken to include that part of Thailand



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where proximity of forest has a significantbearing on the tenure, use and governance of non-forest land.

Sato (2000) writes about ‘ambiguous lands’which are lands ‘legally owned by the state but... used and cultivated by local people’ (p. 156).This type of situation is a major factor at theagriculture/forest land interface. According toSato, ‘ambiguous lands’ are ‘attractive to a varietyof actors, including villagers searching for un-occupied arable lands in the frontiers, governmentdepartments on the look-out for new projectsites, and conservation agencies sensitive to newareas in need of protection’ (p. 156). Variousstresses become evident in such situations.

The stresses existing at the agriculture/forestland interface need to be understood in historicalcontext. As Delang (2002) points out, followingthe Second World War the government ofThailand promoted policies that led to ‘highlandcolonization’. As described by Delang, theprocess involved cash crop farming, usually bylowland farmers moving into the highlands,promotion of logging through the issuing of30-year leases, and construction of roads topromote settlement as a means of combatingcommunist insurgents hiding in the forests. Inthe early 1980s the military regarded theinsurgents as having been defeated. In the lightof the extensive deforestation which had occurred,strong environmentalist protests, and an incidentin which a landslide, claimed to be a result ofdeforestation, killed 251 people, the governmentinvoked a logging ban in 1989 ‘and declared theclosure of the frontier’ (p. 491). Notably, nationalconsumption of wood increased, with thedifference coming from imports from neighbour-ing countries – extending the resource peripheryon a regional scale.

Poverty at the resource periphery has beenthe result of social processes and resourcedegradation produced as part and parcel ofthe agrarian transition, rather than a direct resultof physical peripherality. For example, oneconsequence of the highland colonisation(which Phongpaichit and Baker, 2002, refer toas ‘peasant colonisation’) was that new agri-cultural land was largely taken up by migrantlowlanders, leaving much of the existingpopulation of mainly ethnic minority peoplesliving in dwindling forest areas. Amongmajority populations, an effect of the closingof the frontier was the creation of a pool of‘landless peasants employable by industry’(Delang, 2002, 491).

Forest change and its causal link with poverty

The extent of deforestation during the period ofexpansion of the frontier was extensive and hasbeen widely discussed and documented. It isimportant to put the discussion of the extent offorest decline into context and to note thatfigures on forest areas are notoriously unreliableand inconsistent. They are plagued by problemsof definition of what constitutes a forest in thefirst place, as well as by technical difficulties incarrying out accurate measurement (Tucker

et al.

,2001). Definition is often based on a certainminimum percentage of crown cover, and theamount of land classified as forest will decreaseor increase according to the percentage used. Inany case, accurate assessment of percentagecrown cover from aerial photographs or satellitesis a difficult process, requiring high resolutionimages.

In addition to the methodological issues, thereis the tendency of forest agencies and otherinterested parties to inflate or deflate estimatesfor strategic political reasons. In Thailand,Royal Forest Department (RFD) surveys oftenreflect the legal status of land rather than treecover. Noting this caveat, it is nevertheless clearthat Thailand has suffered severe deforestationat least since the second world war.

According to Suraswadi

et al

. (2005), forestdeclined as a percentage of land area inNorthern Thailand from 69% in 1960 to 43% in1998. This compares with a decline nationally inthe same period from 54% to 25%. Significantly,farm land increased in the same period from11% to 27% in Northern Thailand and 20% to41% nationally. These figures suggest thatconversion to farm land was a major componentof forest loss.

Other sources give somewhat differingestimates of forest area and loss. It is, however,not possible or necessary in this paper to reviewall the various estimates or to analyse thereasons for the inconsistencies. Whatever thedifferences in estimates, the various reportsconsistently suggest that forest areas in Thailandas a whole declined by 50% or more from about1960 to 2000.

Seeking reasons for forest loss in Thailand’spoliticised environment is often a matter ofapportioning blame. Consequently, there is littleconsensus over what or who caused the declinein the forest estate. Furthermore, deforestationhas been a complex process attributable to bothproximate and underlying or remote causes. This

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all makes it difficult and perhaps meaningless toquantify responsibility for change in a ‘factorised’sense. Deforestation was largely due to develop-ment processes including road development,agricultural diversification and expansion intodry-foot upland crops, and both legal and illegallogging of forests. In the public arena, blamehas been disproportionately laid on shiftingcultivation by ‘hill tribes’, fires set by poorfarmers, and landless fuel collectors or charcoalmakers. Attempts to understand change in theforest estate more systematically have rangedfrom econometric approaches and factor analysis(Panayotou and Sungsuwan, 1989), to detailedsocial science studies of agricultural landclearance (Pinthong, 1991), to regional analysisthat has looked at both development and povertyas causes for deforestation (Hirsch, 1987). It isclear from these analyses that there is not asimple causal link between poverty and defor-estation, nor between deforestation and poverty.The social and economic causes and effects ofdeforestation are complex, contingent and dynamic.

Shifting cultivation (swidden agriculture)is often blamed for having a major role in defor-estation. The negative image is particularlyevident in public discourse by environmentalistsand forestry officials. This is not the place toenter the international debate about the sustain-ability or otherwise of shifting cultivation,although it is clear that the blame placed on ithas been exaggerated in comparison to processesdiscussed above (Schmidt-Vogt, 1998; Ganjanapan,1998). Nevertheless, the extent to which shiftingagriculture has been blamed demonstrates theway that the politics of blame has been conven-iently linked with ethnicity – most shiftingcultivators being members of ethnic minorities.Associated with this is an essentialist approachto agricultural practices among ethnic minoritiesthat takes little account of change and context(Hirsch, 1997).

A slightly different explanation of therelationship between highland farmers anddeforestation is the idea that poverty causesdeforestation. There is a slight shift in emphasisbetween the discourse which links deforestationwith the actions of ethnic minorities and the ideathat poverty causes deforestation. In the firstcase the cause is assumed to be ignorant orirresponsible behaviour, or both. In the second,this behaviour is seen as being the result ofpoor people having no alternatives to their over-exploitation of natural resources. Both theseviews ignore the evidence that much, if not

most, deforestation has been associated withState-sponsored development (Hirsch 1987).

We have argued that the causes of deforestationare complex and dynamic. The outcomes ofdeforestation in terms of poverty are alsocomplex and we will return to some of the issuesrelated to this later. Nevertheless, it is possibleto identify several broad types of outcomes, suchas decreased sustainability of livelihoods as thequantity and diversity of available forest productsand resource security decline. Given that peoplewith relatively high dependency on forests arelikely to be relatively poor in the first place, theimpact of these factors is increased poverty andeconomic marginality, particularly affecting alreadypoor people. Loss of income and subsistencefrom forest resources, especially for people with-out agricultural land, frequently leads to increasedindebtedness. It is important to note that theseare the outcomes of reduced availability of resourceswhich is a product of both the quantity ofresources that exist and the capacity and right toaccess these resources.

The politics of marginalisation and conservation at the interface

There are several key stress points at the agriculture-forest interface. One of the most crucial is thestress between upland ethnic minorities involvedin shifting cultivation, and the continuing pres-sure to limit or eradicate this practice. Much debatehas occurred about whether shifting cultivationshould be absolutely prohibited in reserved for-ests and protected areas. In fact, the RFD (nowsubsumed in the Ministry of Natural Resourcesand Environment) has often been forced totolerate shifting cultivation, but this tolerancehas frequently been grudging and has not preventedcontinuing harassment by officials.

One of the consequences of the 1989 loggingban was a shift in emphasis within the RFDtowards conservation rather than management ofthe logging industry. A major result of this wasthe declaration of large numbers of protectedareas in places where forests continued to exist.Most of these were declared in the 1980s and1990s. By July 2001, there were 81 territorialnational parks and 21 marine national parks inThailand, representing 18% of the total landarea (ICEM, 2003). Almost invariably, the newprotected areas had resident populations ofteninvolved in shifting cultivation agriculture andother economic activities, and these people veryquickly found themselves at the centre of a newconservationist politics. Buergin (2003) refers to



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a ‘coercing conservationism which focusesincreasingly on the so-called “hill tribe” ethnicminority groups’ (p. 375). The politics of con-servation led to odd alliances, such as a con-vergence of interest between mainly middleclass urban conservationists and the RFD.

Some people were forcibly relocated from thenew protected areas. Those who remained hadno formal rights to resources on what waslegally State land. This was often complicatedby the absence of citizenship rights becausemany officials were reluctant to recognise orprocess claims for members of ethnic minoritygroups.

To a large extent this conservationism waslinked with the politics of ethnicity, although itdoes sometimes transcend ethnicity. Wong(2005) argues that debate about protected areasand local peoples in Thailand tends to be phrasedin terms of issues typical of Northern Thailand,with the rights of hill tribes to remain in and usethe resources from protected areas being themain theme. In a case study of Khao YaiNational Park in Central Thailand, he shows thatethnic Thai people have also to interact withProtected Areas from which they have beenrelocated in the past and to the resources ofwhich they have restricted access.

The conflict over people living in protectedareas involved urban-upland tensions, with urbanpeople concerned about the quality of theirwater supply, which they saw as being underthreat from hill farming, as well as withconcerns about biodiversity, also allegedly underthreat. The conflict also involved lowland-upland tensions as lowland farmers claimed thattheir supplies of water for irrigation were underthreat. Both these conflicts are heightened by theethnic minority status of the upland-livingpeople in or near protected watersheds andupper watercourses.

The response from some hill tribes was to formalliances with a number of non-governmentorganisations concerned with rural livelihoods,and also with academics from a number ofuniversities such as Chiang Mai University. Uplandfarmers also formed alliances, such as theNorthern Farmers’ Network, which becameincreasingly politically active.

A major part of the battleground betweenthe ‘dark green’ (exclusivist) conservationistsand the upland farmers and their ‘light green’supporters was the extended battle over theCommunity Forestry Bill. In 1992 a CommunityForestry Bill was proposed by the RFD primarily

to regulate participation in afforestation programs(Makarabhirom, 2000). This was followed in1993 by an ‘alternative’ Bill, prepared by membersof civil society and academics, to allow peopleliving in forest areas, including protected areas,to gain the right to use and manage the forestsin which they lived. For more than a decadeand a half, debate over the Bill has continued,with alternative versions being prepared, moreor less taking turns in being more or lessliberal in terms of community rights. A majorstalling point was the question as to whetherand how much communities with establishedconnection to Protected Areas would be able topractise community forestry in them.

Contextualising forest dependency in livelihood diversity and change

What emerges from this discussion is the ideathat the poverty of forest dwelling people at theagriculture/forest interface in Thailand is largelya product of processes of restricted access toresources through State regulation for supposedlyconservation purposes, and their marginalisationthrough the politics of ethnicity and exclusion.All this is largely framed in terms of environ-mental politics and discourse. Is this picture toosimple?

There is an increasing body of internationalliterature on the links between resources, con-servation and poverty, much of it focusing onforests. In this literature there are frequentassertions about causal connections betweenpoverty and environmental conditions. Fisher

et al

. (2005) point out that ‘contradictory asser-tions are all made frequently and often backedup with good evidence (at least for a particularcase)’ (p. 11). Two examples are the assertionthat ‘[p]overty leads to increased environmentaldegradation’ and the opposing assertion that‘[p]eople who are dependent on resources fortheir livelihoods are likely to protect them morecarefully’ (p. 11). Fisher

et al

. argue that in anyattempt to understand causal connections, itis necessary to identify and understand the‘specific factors that govern causes and effects’(p. 11), in other words the context.

One way of understanding poverty is asabsolute poverty, measured against a specifiedincome level such as a ‘poverty line’ of onedollar per day. Other definitions are moremulti-dimensional, such as the World Bank’sdefinition (2001) which takes into account suchqualitative factors as lack of assets, powerlessnessand vulnerability. The development of this

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concept of poverty was influenced by Sen’s(1999) view that poverty is ‘the deprivation ofbasic capabilities’ which are ‘the substantivefreedoms [an individual] enjoys to lead the kindof life he or she has reason to value’ (p. 87).This type of definition means that poverty isboth about the absence of income and theabsence of the capability to achieve securelivelihoods and make income.

In this approach, forest-dependent people arepoor, not just in terms of limited income andresources, but in terms of their limited capabilityto secure livelihoods, including the rights to useresources and the right to make decisions aboutlivelihoods and lifestyles.

In opposition to the discourse which blamespeople living at the agriculture/forest interfacein Thailand for deforestation, there is an alternativediscourse which links poverty with a lack ofaccess to forest, because of actual lack ofresources, physical exclusion from forest areas,or lack of rights to use forest products. InThailand some people have been physicallyremoved from forests, whereas others haverestricted access to resources. In terms of themulti-dimensional definition of poverty, theeffect of the protectionist policies in forests andthe limited alternatives available to uplandfarmers without access to agricultural land inthe lowlands, is increased impoverishment formany upland farmers on the resource periphery.

There is, not surprisingly, another counter-discourse. How valid is the idea of forestdependency anyhow? And, if forest dependencyis misunderstood, what sense does it make tostate that forest-dependent people are impover-ished by restricted access to forests? Byron andArnold (1997) have questioned the validity, or,at least, the broad applicability, of the concept offorest dependency. They argue that a distinctionmust be made between people who have nochoice but to depend on forests and those whouse forest resources by choice, and they stressthe need for forest dwellers to be disaggregatedin these terms. Clearly this is an importantdistinction and, as Byron and Arnold argue,different development options are relevantdepending on the particular relationship.

Angelsen and Wunder (2003) refer to the ideaof a poverty trap. They point out that there is apositive link between ‘rural poverty and NTFP[non timber forest product] dependence’ (p. 21),citing a paper by Neumann and Hirsch (2000)which suggests that the poorest people are mostdependent on NTFPs. Angelsen and Wunder

then point out that this can be understood in twoways. People may be forest dependent becausethey are poor and therefore have no other realalternatives, either in the short or long term. Inthis case the poverty is ‘exogenous’ and forestscan be seen as a ‘safety net’, to limit the effectsof extreme poverty. On the other hand, peoplemay be poor because they are forest dependent,relying on low-value forest products for income.In this case the poverty is ‘endogenous’ andforests can be a ‘poverty trap’.

In many ways this distinction is useful.However, it can also be somewhat circular. Poorpeople resident in forests in the forest peripheryin Thailand often depend on forests becausethey have no other real alternatives (except ascheap migrant industrial labour). But, just asthey are forest dependent because poor, they arealso poor because they are forest dependent.They have no choice but to depend on low-valueproducts. The distinction between dependentbecause poor and poor because dependent makesno real sense unless people can voluntarilychoose to be forest dependent. Either way itcomes back to the possibility of choice (orempowerment and capability).

One problem with the Angelsen and Wunderdistinction is that it largely ignores the institu-tional ‘structures and processes’ that can transferpotential assets into real ones with outcomes interms of livelihoods. (Chambers and Conway(1992) refer to these as ‘transforming structuresand processes’.) In other words it ignores thepossibility that poor forest-dependent peoplemay remain poor because they are unable, forpolitical or institutional reasons (such as tenure),to capture the benefits of valuable forest resources.

This is a point supported by Dove’s (1993)argument that forest dwellers remain poor becausethey only have access to low-value products.The argument is that any forest product that isvaluable is expropriated by those with politicalpower and access to political power.

The community forestry movement in Thailandattempts to address the need for rights to live inthe forest and to use forest products as a pre-requisite for improved livelihoods. In doing so,advocates stress the conservation-friendlypractices of the upland ethnic groups, especiallythe Karen. While this is clearly an importantstep, some authors claim that it is a limited, ifnot flawed, strategy. Walker (2004) argues thatnon-government organisations and others advo-cating community forestry exaggerate forestdependency and the emphasis placed on sustainable



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forest management by forest dwellers in thepolicy debate, misrepresenting the nature oflivelihoods by over-emphasising the importanceof forests and failing to recognise the importanceof agriculture. He refers to this process as‘arborealisation’. He points out that most ruralpeople are concerned more with agriculture thanwith forests and that the emphasis of thecommunity forestry movement on forests hasbeen, to an extent, counter-productive. Significantly,the Community Forestry Bill (under active con-sideration at the time he was writing) did notprovide for agriculture in Protected Areas,despite the importance of agriculture to liveli-hoods in such areas. This is an important pointand it does seem clear that ‘forest dependency’,generally (not just in Thailand), has beencouched in narrow terms as dependence onforest products (mainly NTFPs) rather thandependency on availability of lands in oradjacent to forests for agriculture. Even thediscussions by Byron and Arnold (1997) andAngelsen and Wunder (2001), while critical ofthe notion of forest dependency, seem to assumethat it is necessarily about dependence on NTFPs.

Given the undisputed fact that upland peoplesin much of Southeast Asia have been excludedfrom rights to forest land on the basis that itbelongs to the State, the emphasis of communityforestry advocates on rights to forests makessome sense, even if it is based on a distortednotion of livelihood systems. Li (2002),referring to community-based natural resourcemanagement more broadly in Southeast Asia,refers to ‘strategic simplifications’ as a means ofattracting support for efforts advocating communityrights to resources. She argues that attempts to‘anchor legal rights in specific identities or setsof practices’ is a ‘problematic basis for justice’.On the contrary she argues the need to look forways to ‘secure for uplanders the benefits of afuller citizenship’ (p. 278). In this view, rightsare not dependent on demonstrating that tradi-tional practices are sustainable or environmentfriendly, but rather are based on broader rightsof citizens.

Is it possible that, by focusing on the rhetoricof the capacity of upland peoples to conserveforests, by framing them as ‘forest people’, thatis, by trying to operate a counter discourse withinthe conservationist framework, community forestryis actually creating a potential ‘rhetorical trap’,perhaps even a ‘rhetorical poverty trap’, tyingpeople into a commitment to preserve trees andforests, without really addressing issues which

are more central to poverty reduction, such assecure rights to forest land for agriculture?Walker (2004) suggests there may be a need fora ‘broader package of advocacy’ and that ‘uplandcash cropping could be portrayed as one importantcomponent of the development of Thailand’sagricultural sector’ (p. 323).

Walker (2004) has argued that too much focuson trees shifts attention away from recognitionof the more important issue of agriculture. Rigg(2005) goes further, arguing that agricultureitself is becoming less linked with livelihoods inmuch of Southeast Asia (including Thailand).Livelihoods are becoming ‘pluriactive’, withpeople involved in a diversity of activities includingnon-farm work. Reduced average farm sizes havenot simply resulted in a ‘squeeze on livelihoods’but, instead, there has been ‘a general rise inhousehold standards of living for rural house-holds ... in the context of a declining landresource’ (p. 177). In other words, people havelivelihoods, not specifically forest livelihoods oragricultural livelihoods.

These are important points, with considerablerelevance to the question of rural poverty.Neither view necessarily implies that forests (inthe case of Walker) or agriculture (in the case ofRigg) are unimportant, but rather that theirimportance to poverty needs to be understood inthe context of rapid changes to agriculture andthe rural economy. Some of the crucial elementsof agricultural change include rapidly changingcrop types, diversification of agriculture-basedlivelihoods, concentration of de facto landholdingin agricultural land reform areas, and anincreased role for agri-business, including thevertical integration of agriculture and the growthof contract farming. All this is accompanied byrapid migration to cities, often associated withremittances to agricultural families.

Agrarian change at the forest-agricultureinterface mediates the connection between forestsand poverty in regionally quite specific ways.One example is the changing nature of shiftingcultivation in the uplands of northern Thailand.Shifting cultivation is no longer subsistencebased, or based on traditional cash crops such asopium. Upland-based ethnic minority cultivatorsincreasingly respond to urban and even interna-tional markets for products such as cool climatevegetables and flowers.

Another regionally specific example ofagrarian change with implications for povertyand forest condition at the resource periphery isthe agriculture/forest fringe in western Thailand.

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In relatively recently consolidated frontier areas,we now see the rapid mechanisation of agriculture,concomitant concentration of holdings for cashcropping as people lease out smallholdings forsugar and other broadacre crops, and an increasingreliance on remittances from non-local urbanoccupations. These areas are adjacent to theWestern Forest Complex, where forest is strictlyoff-limits under the protection of wildlifesanctuary legislation.

The situation described is very much thepicture painted by Rigg, but the key issue tohighlight here is what such changes mean forthe forest-poverty question. We suggest that oneof the most important implications is that anyframing of forests as either a safety net or apoverty trap misses the point that forests are partof much more diverse livelihood systems.

The agrarian transition needs to be understoodas a normal process, part of a continuing processof change, rather than as something abnormal.In this perspective, those involved in ‘modern’agricultural practices should not be seen aslosing their cultural identity and associated rights.It might make more sense to advocate rights interms of ‘natural rights’ or ‘human rights’,rather than asserting rights to forest basedprimarily on the continuation of traditionalpractices. Basing assertions of rights on Walker’s‘broader package of advocacy’ is a strategywhich might help to avoid getting into the typeof rhetorical trap we mentioned earlier.

Extending poverty and forest/agriculture issues beyond Thailand’s borders

To what extent are these relationships andchanging agrarian relations associated withpoverty and agriculture-forest interactionsspecific to Thailand? Clearly much depends oncontext, but there are also interactions thatpermeate and transcend borders. It is instructiveto extend the analysis briefly to Thailand’sregional neighbours. There are three main waysin which the resource periphery in the widerMekong region can be considered.

First, Lao PDR, Cambodia and Myanmar haveincreasingly taken on a role as Thailand’sresource periphery, in the area of forestry aswell as other resource sectors. Following the1989 logging ban, Thailand moved quickly tosource timber from neighbouring countries.Coinciding with the regional détente under thebanner ‘from battlefields to marketplace’, Thaiinvestors re-established forestry operations inLaos that had been nationalised after 1975, did

deals with the Burmese military and establishedconnections with the Khmer Rouge – all associatedwith significant expansion of logging undermainly poorly regulated conditions and withsignificant resultant deforestation. More recently,the expansion of plantations, in Laos in particu-lar, has extended this peripheral role in theregional resource economy. It is notable thateco-political constraints on logging and fast-growing tree plantations in Thailand have beenas much a part of the shift across borders as hasthe scarcity of forest resources within Thailand.

Second, there are cognate issues in neigh-bouring countries as they have moved towardoutward-orientated marketised production.Tenurial regimes in the formerly socialisteconomies have become more individualisedand land has become commodified, albeit to amuch lesser degree than in Thailand. Thong-manivong and Fujita (2006) argue that shifts tothe market economy in Laos will lead toincreased demand for privatisation of land.They also mention demand for leasing of landfor rubber plantation. It is a moot point whetherthis will lead to further disempowerment ofpoorer farmers.

Similarly, the influence of ‘eco-governmentality’(Goldman, 2004) has seen a demarcation ofconservation-inspired resource boundaries atvarious levels. Deepening of market interactionsin agriculture has compounded demographicpressures on the periphery as the resource baseis incorporated into national and regionalcommodity economies. A key policy question isthe extent to which there is simply a teleologicalinevitability that the extent and nature ofpoverty-related issues at the agriculture-forestboundary in neighbouring countries will followthe Thai pattern in ten, twenty or thirty years’time, or whether the social and ecologicalproblems experienced in Thailand can in factprovide helpful lessons.

Third, Thailand’s experience has had aninfluence on the development direction andpolicy environment of neighbouring countriesin such areas as roads, community forests, landtitling and decentralisation. Trunk and ruralfeeder road construction has been rapidly linkingparts of the country and accessing previouslyremote rural areas in Laos in ways similar to theexperience of northeastern Thailand during the1970s and 1980s – physical linkage is seen as a

sine qua non

for development. Programs thatentrenched property rights in Thailand, notablythe World Bank and Australian government-



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funded land titling program, have now beenextended to Laos, and a somewhat similarprogram is being carried out in Cambodia.Decentralisation of resource and land manage-ment has also taken hold as a key governancereform in these countries. Further, communityforestry has been incorporated into the policyprocess, although the meaning of communityforestry varies markedly from one context toanother (Hirsch, 1998).

In reference to the changes in Laos, especiallyin terms of increased commercialisation ofagricultural production, Thongmanivong andFujita (2006) argue that land allocations underthe Land and Forest Allocation Policy will needto be renegotiated if the Participatory LandAllocation process is to ‘meet the actual needsof the local communities’ (p. 244). This is animportant point, which has wider resonance. Asin Thailand, the Lao policy seems to have beenframed in terms of an emphasis on subsistencelivelihoods. The approach was intended as ameans to plan land use, at a community level, ina way that is holistic (allowing for a variety ofland uses in forest lands surrounding a village)and equitable. The problem is that the contextwithin which land is used has changed, evenbefore the national program of ParticipatoryLand Allocation has been completed. Thesolution to this is renegotiation and, we suggest,to build in a process of negotiation into all landuse decisions rather than to try to apply ‘onesize fits all’ solutions.

Conclusions and implications for policy

In this paper we have tried to show, based on adiscussion of literature primarily on Thailand,that the connections between agriculture andforest land and between forests and poverty arefar more complex than the dominant competingdiscourses might suggest. The simplification ofthese complexities has led to policies and policyadvocacy that are, at best, unhelpful.

As a result of discourses that frame forestissues in terms of threats to biodiversity dueto misuse by ‘forest-dependent people’, forestpolicies have been dominated by an approachbased on the need to prevent exploitativeuse of forests, especially by excluding peoplefrom forest areas. This has clearly hadnegative effects on peoples’ livelihoods and hascontributed to their impoverishment in termsof limiting their capabilities, especially byrestricting their rights to resources andlivelihoods.

On the other hand, advocates of the interestsof ‘forest-dependent’ communities have acceptedthe environmentalist framing of the issue andresponded by stressing the environmentalcredentials of forest peoples. This has involveddownplaying the value of important economicactivities such as agriculture and perhaps over-emphasising subsistence livelihoods. While thismay have been a ‘strategic simplification’ inLi’s terms, it seems to have limited the optionsfor broader claims related to rights and citizenship.As we have suggested, it may be a ‘rhetoricaltrap’, potentially achieving short term goals atthe risk of entrenching limitations on livelihoodoptions.

We would suggest that the policy implicationsare not recommendations about the best policyoptions, but rather point toward the need for adynamic and flexible policy process thataccommodates complexity, uncertainty andchange. Walker’s challenge to the overemphasison forests in the community forestry movementdoes not imply that advocacy of rights to forestland and resources is unnecessary, but ratherthat advocacy should embrace a broader rangeof activities. Rigg’s argument that livelihoodsand poverty are being de-linked from agriculture(and, by extension, forests) does not imply thatattempts to improve agricultural production andforest access are no longer necessary. Instead itimplies that other strategies should also beconsidered. It is clear that the interactions aredynamic and solutions will not be permanent.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe authors acknowledge the support of the research program‘Challenge of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia’,funded by the Social Science and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada.

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