REDD was originally seen as one of the great potential areas for solving climate change in a socially just manner. Instead of forests being seen merely as exploitable resources for big logging companies adept at avoiding scrutiny in developing countries, not to mention as an obstacle to the expansion of monocultural crop plantations, the survival of forests would be given a value that would make it more attractive for companies and/or local communities to leave the forests standing. The ‘carbon credits’ attributed to the forests could be sold to foreign governments or businesses needing to offset their own emissions. Given that emissions from deforestation account for approximately fifteen percent of global emissions, action to reduce these emissions has come to be seen as crucial to the success of a global deal.

However, since it was first introduced to the discussions REDD has raised concerns around the implementation and verification of any attempt to include forest carbon in a global carbon budget. Indigenous groups have raised concerns about the impact of commoditisation of their forests. It has also been suggested that REDD has lacked appropriate mechanisms to ensure local people are involved at all levels and that they see the benefits of carbon trading. Scientists have questioned whether it is reasonable to equate carbon emissions from industrial sources with the carbon that is stored and released from forests, not to mention the difficulty of measuring and verifying carbon stored in the world’s biologically diverse forests. A useful, if slightly one-eyed, blog to keep an eye on is REDD-Monitor.

While it was hoped that many of these concerns would be addressed in the REDD-plus negotiations leading up to Copenhagen the situation has, if anything, become more hotly contested.

The Indigenous Environment Network (IEN) which had a presence at the talks in Bangkok, catalogued a number of concerns with the REDD mechanism. IEN fears that a market in forest carbon will take ownership of forests away from local and indigenous people and hand it to large, foreign-owned companies. The ownership issue is particularly sensitive in countries with a long history of dispute over land use rights and struggles for recognition. A recent story has highlighted the sensitivity around such issues in Thailand.

IEN points out that there is no guarantee that REDD will “fully recognize the land tenure, customary and territorial rights of Indigenous Peoples”. They even suggest that if forest carbon is given a value, it may create incentives for governments to take control of indigenous areas and evict local people.

The movement for indigenous rights recently had a major win, with the establishment of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. IEN and others have suggested that elements of REDD could potentially contravene the UNDRIP, opening a can of worms for negotiators at the climate change talks. While the Declaration is just that, and is not binding, anything in REDD that is seen to set back progress on indigenous rights would not be a good look for a global climate change deal.

More specific to Thailand, the Bangkok Post quoted a member of the ‘Network of Indigenous People in Thailand’ during the talks:

Indigenous people had demanded that all countries uphold the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which recognises free prior and informed consent as a prerequisite for resettlement, projects affecting indigenous peoples’ territories and lands, or any other legislation which may affect them.

“These principles to safeguard our rights were somewhat watered down at the Bangkok talks,” said Mr Kittisak, a member of the Chiang Mai-based Iu Mien ethnic group, who was in Bangkok during the two-week talks to campaign for indigenous rights.

Further, IEN has highlighted that some of the potential downsides of the REDD mechanism may stem from its complexity, and the inability of local people to fully understand what they may be getting in to. For instance, they suggest that price volatility in the forest carbon market may also affect the security of local relationships with forests, especially if speculation is allowed. On the other hand, if local people do have ownership, and access to the benefits of carbon trading, will they be liable for damage caused to the forest? ie. by natural disasters.

While many local communities in southeast Asia are aware that such a scheme is coming, they can fall victim to people who may take advantage of the complexity of the scheme, as with the prominent case in PNG earlier this year: here, here and here.

The Wilderness Society, another NGO with a strong presence at the talks, credited the Australian delegation with leading the way in the discussion of a fair REDD-plus. However, they say that the biggest problem lies in REDD’s definition of forests. According to the Wilderness Society, “no clear distinction between natural forest and forest plantations under REDD at the moment, and this might create a major loophole for the private sector to benefit”.

REDD-Monitor pointed out that this may be compounded by a change made to the negotiating text during the talks, removing a proposed sentence which read as follows:

Protect biological diversity, including safeguards against the conversion of natural forests to forest plantations.

At the insistence of some negotiating countries this was reversed at the Barcelona talks, however the clause is yet to be agreed to.

Finally, IEN points to the REDD-plus Framework Document itself which acknowledges the concerns that have been raised around REDD:

• REDD will lock-up forests by decoupling conservation from development
• Asymmetric power distribution will enable powerful REDD consortia to deprive communities of their legitimate land-development aspirations
• Hard-fought gains in forest management practices will be wasted
• Commercial REDD may erode culturally rooted not-for-profit conservation values

It seems, therefore, that groups like IEN have some serious issues of concern around the REDD negotiations. However, what opportunities might they be ignoring in the process?

Also based in Chiang Mai is a research group called Forest Restoration Research Unit (FORRU) at Chiang Mai University. FORRU is involved in a project with the World Agroforestry Centre, called ‘Making the Mekong connected’.

According to those involved, the project aims to “support the development of carbon and biodiversity assets in the multifunctional landscapes of the upper Mekong region. To this extent, there are several sites involved in the study, spread through Thailand, Yunnan province of China, Laos and (hopefully) Myanmar”.

From the project summary, the aim of the project is to:

Support enhanced and connected multifunctional landscape corridors with both positive livelihood and environmental benefits, managed by smallholder farmers through integrated management and financial mechanisms; and hence contribute to sustainable land-use policies and practices. The purpose is to identify and develop landscape corridors, stepping stones, and framework species within secondary vegetation and agricultural landscapes in the region. The proposed project seeks to build regional, national, and local capacities for improving livelihoods and landscapes with integrated conservation and development mechanisms.’ This is especially in respect to carbon and biodiversity offset options.

A second major project currently underway is research based: “FORRU is working with two PhD Students based in the biology department of Chiang Mai University who are investigating carbon sequestration in FORRU’s restored forests, and then comparing this to natural forests, an unplanted weedy control plot and plantation forests (pine and eucalypt). FORRU hopes that once the results from these students are published, they may be able to use the information in some sort of carbon trading scheme.”

While the Bangkok talks did see some concerning compromises on language in the negotiating document, there are some important points still included, for instance:

In accordance with relevant international agreements[, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,] and taking into account national circumstances and legislation, respect for the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples[, including their full prior and informed consent,] and members of local communities and promote the full and effective participation of all relevant stakeholders.

The hopes were that REDD-plus would take more consideration, than previous texts, of the needs of communities and to utilise the skills that many communities already have. There has been considerable discussion around the issue of “full prior and informed consent”, however it has yet to provide clarity as to how ‘FPIC’ will be followed through. It needs to be implemented skilfully, and past UNFCCC mitigation strategies such as the Clean Development Mechanism do not necessarily inspire confidence in this regard. An observer commented that REDD-plus should at the very least ensure that the situation does not go backwards, and that “implementation is going to have to have the right approach: a broad scale one size fits all approach is not going to work, and communities have to have a deciding say in what goes ahead and how.”

New Mandala readers looking for further information may find two reports on REDD (here and here) useful.

[This review appeared recently in Chiang Mai University's Sangkhomsat, 20 (2).]

Like many scholars who study contemporary rural society, Yos Santasombat is seeking to define a new type of peasantry. The challenge appears formidable, not the least because, as Yos argues on the first page of this book, “[m]odern industrialized agriculture and global market economies destroy peasant societies” (1). But, fortunately, the destruction is not complete and “peasant societies perpetuate traces of the peasantry’s complex identities and communities” (1). Flexible Peasants: Reconceputalizing the Third World’s Rural Types is a conceptually passionate and ethnographically engaged exploration of these persistent, flexible and counter-hegemonic traces. The book concentrates on northern Thailand—Nan and Chiang Mai in particular— where peasants in very different contexts are shaping new ways of coping with the challenges of modernity.

In his review of the extensive literature on the peasantry, Yos covers considerable conceptual ground: the persistent preoccupation with the peasantry as a primitive “other”; the evolutionary emphasis on transitions to civilisation and development; the relationship between peasant marketing and wider economic systems;  the impacts of colonial incorporation and capitalist expansion on rural society; debates between “moral economy” and “rational peasant” frameworks; and the role of the state in rural class formation.  Running through much of the discussion is the longstanding debate about the disappearance or persistence of the peasantry, a debate that can be traced back to the radically different views of peasant economy held by Lenin and Chayanov.  Yos’ position on this never-ending debate is subtle. As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that he shares, with Lenin and others, the view that commercialisation profoundly disrupts many of the underpinnings of peasant ecology, economy and society. But, drawing on the Chayanovian spirit of flexibility, he rejects the evolutionary view that modern peasants are destined to bifurcate into a class of capitalist farmers and a class of landless proletarians. Rather than worrying too much about whether one system of social and economic organisation will replace another, Yos is more interested in the “dynamics of articulation” between different systems in historically specific circumstances (26).

Yos argues that the contemporary forms of articulation involving the peasants of northern Thailand are characterised by adaptability and flexibility. He rejects romantic and essentialist notions of the peasantry and argues for an approach that recognises both “rural urban inter-penetration and dynamism of different rural types” (30-31). This general approach will be familiar to those with an interest in agrarian transitions, de-agrarianisation and the diversification of rural livelihood strategies. But the model of a “flexible peasantry” proposed by Yos is somewhat idiosyncratic and it needs to be understood in terms of the anthropological and advocacy work he and his colleagues have undertaken at Chiang Mai University. This important body of work, much of it also focussed on northern Thailand, has drawn attention to the importance of local knowledge, communal resource management, ethnic identify and the strategic mobilisation of tradition in pursuit of political empowerment. It is often motivated by an attempt to identify counter-hegemonic elements within rural communities that contest the intrusive power of the modern state and the capitalist market. There is a strong emphasis on empowerment through discourse and on the pursuit of rights. This is why, in Flexible Peasants, Yos argues that materialist understandings of the peasantry, which focus on land and agricultural livelihoods, give insufficient attention to new forms of identify built around symbolic struggles for basic rights. From this perspective, the flexibility of the northern Thai peasantry is primarily—but not exclusively, as I will discuss below—about their ability to creatively assert the importance of local ecological capability and to promote the relationship between cultural diversity and biological diversity: “The rice fields, paddy land and mountain slopes served as laboratories where local knowledge, practice, technology and germplasms have been continuously developed” (31). It is in these specific contexts of flexibility that, according to Yos, the persistent traces of the northern Thai peasantry cohere into three “contemporary identities”: “the forest conservationist, the indigenous person and the genetic manager” (2).

These contemporary forms of peasant identity are explored through a series of ethnographic case studies. The first concerns upland Lua cultivators in Nan province. Yos’ description of the Lua is passionately sympathetic and he places them firmly within the internationally familiar indigenous slot: they have strong communities characterised by exchange labour; village elders are important decision makers; socio-economic differentiation, wage labour and debt is minimal; swidden cultivation is practiced sustainably; fields and fallow are rich in biodiversity; sacred forests are protected; and, perhaps most charming of all, most of them are poor. This sustainable lifestyle is under threat from the Royal Forest Department which is imposing standardised systems of forest classification and implementing a conservationist framework that is blind to the ecological benefits of Lua agricultural practice. Forest regulations restrict the long fallow cycles that underpin local sustainability and Lua farmers are arrested for “illegally” clearing their own farm land. Yos writes that the Lua are “battered into place by more powerful outsiders’ fantasies based upon their labelling them as savages, wild, backward, illiterate, animist, etc., all centered within powerful discourses on development and progress” (63). But the Lua are resilient and they have responded to state oppression in various ways. They have joined protests against the declaration of the national park that would swallow up their land, and they avoid dealing with the Royal Forest Department, even passing up opportunities for employment. Most importantly, they have asserted their own “politics of place” (80), drawing on memories of northern Thailand’s ancient Lua kingdoms and making elaborate offerings to the local tutelary spirit to ritually assert their long-standing rights of residence and resource ownership. As indigenous conservationists the Lua are able to create a new “social space” in which they can “effectively challenge the state” (86).

Similar themes of local resilience and adaptability are pursued in the following two chapters. In Chiang Mai province, Karen leaders promote the ecological benefits of rotational shifting cultivation (rai mul wian) in order to challenge the common stereotype that upland farming results in forest destruction, soil erosion and water source degradation. By building up forms of “symbolic capital” the Karen can “struggle against hegemonic state discourses” (110) and by emphasising ethnicity they can create a “common fabric” (111) for a new identity that overcomes the sense of fragmentation brought about by modernity. In the lowlands of Nan province, farmers have become disillusioned with the economic fluctuations and ecological degradation of commercial monocropping which has been enthusiastically promoted by state agencies. Some are now reverting to more traditional forms of agriculture based on crop diversity and the cultivation of local rice varieties.

The fourth case study chapter proves the most challenging for the approach to flexibility that Yos has constructed. It is the result of a series of re-studies of northern Thai villages that had been previously described, since the 1950s, by Western and Thai anthropologists. All are lowland villages and most of them lie in the agricultural heartland of the Chiang Mai valley. A lengthy appendix contains invaluable village summaries and in the chapter itself Yos examines the main dimensions of transformation. The changes are unsurprising:  subsistence production has declined in importance; cash crops and fruit orchards are much more common; exchange labour still exists but wage labour is the preferred form of recruitment; many village households have people working in off-farm occupations; and village land has been sold to outsiders.  Overall, the market exerts a strong influence and economic calculations are more individualistic, based on profit and loss. Here, a new type of flexibility comes to the fore. These farmers do not appear to be drawing, in any substantial numbers, on contemporary identities that emphasise forests, ethnicity, indigeneity or biodiversity. Their flexibility seems to be much more mundane: “peasant-workers, agricultural wage-laborer, urban peasants, transmigrant peasants, petty-producers and peddlers etc” (140). Yos is clearly open to these alternative forms of peasant identity and this is reflected, for example, in his emphasis on rural-urban penetration, new strategies of livelihood adaptation and the emergence of different “sub-classes” of peasants. But he seems much more ambivalent about this explicitly modernist array of identities than he does about the more traditionalist adaptations of the Lua, the Karen and the bio-diverse rice farmers in Nan:

Throughout the past 40-year period Thai peasants have been coerced into increasing dependence on external political, economic, technological and cultural forces. We are witnessing the emergence of marginal peasants who are flexible, diverse and self-contradictory in identities and social roles. It’s like being both peasants and labourers at the same time – acting as wage labor in the agricultural sector, being urban peasants, international laborers, small-scale traders, hawkers, etc. The Thai peasantry is being caught in the state of “peripheric capitalism” that now propels them into a path of change not dissimilar to that experienced by the peasantry in Western Europe. Far from being idle receptors of capitalist penetration, however, the peasants are fighting back in various forms under varying socio-political conditions and contexts. (141)

So, it seems that forms of flexibility based on wage labour and market engagement are the result of coercion and external pressure. This type of flexibility gives rise to identities that are marginal and contradictory and seemingly unsustainable. Identity that is authentic and autonomous arises out of “fighting back” – it is a product of resistance. But how the peasants in northern Thailand’s rural heartlands are fighting back is not made clear. The reader is left with a sense of a modern peasantry with an incomplete identity; partial peasants stuck between the forest and the capitalist market.

Flexible Peasants is successful in mapping out what might be called a niche identity. In the highly diverse social, economic and spatial landscapes of northern Thailand there should always be a place for individuals and communities who chose to pursue alternative livelihood paths. As the rural economy develops and diversifies even further, the potential for these alternative niches to flourish will increase. More rural people, like Chusak, the bio-diverse farmer described in chapter 4, will be able to invest their earnings from wage labour into eco-enterprise. Moral and financial support for such initiatives will be guaranteed because they are consistent with middle class and urban desires for a particular style of “traditional” rural livelihood. Since the military coup of September 2006, images of local sufficiency and moderation have been used in an attempt to dampen rural aspirations for economic and political inclusion. Ironically, this anti-democratic promotion of local sufficiency may give the communities that Yos describes some more room to manoeuvre in pursuing their alternative economic visions. Other encouragement may come from international forest-protection initiatives aimed at mitigating climate change. Local communities who can successfully position themselves as forest conservationists may be able to capture a small share of the global carbon market. There are some fascinating paths of alternative rural development opening up, and Yos’ re-conceptualisation of the peasantry in terms of “forest conservationist, indigenous person and genetic manager” has contributed a lot to our understanding of directions that are being pursued in northern Thailand.

However, Flexible Peasants is less successful in re-conceptualising the transformations in mainstream rural society. The scale of transformation emerges clearly in the book. The survey data demonstrates, for example, the importance of wage labour even in the poorest and most remote communities. The economic flexibility of the peasantry is on display. But how this economic flexibility informs contemporary identities is much less clear. I think there are two related reasons for this ambiguity and lack of clarity. First, as I have noted, there is a tendency to tie authentic peasant identity too closely to resistance. As a result identities are selectively described in anti-hegemonic terms. Second, there is a reluctance to acknowledge, except in passing (140-141, 169), the enormous benefits that modernisation has bought to the rural population in Thailand. Yos writes that economic trends over the past four decades have resulted in “little to no improvement in peasant incomes” (116). But in the early 1960s, 96 percent of rural households fell below the poverty line; by 2002 the figure had plummeted to 12.6 percent. In 1960 almost 15 percent of children in Thailand died before they reached the age of 5; in 2007 less than 1 percent died. And in 1960, life expectancy in Thailand was 55; in 2007 it was 71. Much of this improvement in quality of life can be attributed to the provision of infrastructure, the expansion of government services and the proliferation of more productive economic pursuits in the market economy. This has encouraged the formation of new forms of peasant identity based on the desire for more complete integration into administrative and commercial systems, not resistance to them. This rural sentiment for inclusion is what Thaksin Shinawatra tapped into so successfully in his populist electoral campaigns. A political party promoting indigeneity, forest conservation and genetic diversity may attract some niche support but it would pose no electoral threat at all to a Thaksin-esque campaign for local economic development and resource mobilisation.

… from Phil Hirsch’s review:

There is much that is exciting and refreshing in this book. Any analysis that takes sacred cows of environmental knowledge by the horns, for example the notion that trees somehow create (rather than consume) water, is to be welcomed. The inadvertent marginalisation of the very same groups that many NGOs are seeking to empower is a similarly poignant message. The more inclusive, open and openminded approach to the creation, employment and questioning of environmental knowledge that is recommended in the closing chapter is similarly to be applauded, although the very same forces that are the subject of much of the book’s critique clearly need to be overcome in ways that the analysis leaves largely unaddressed. …

At a more fundamental level, the authors’ demonising of environmental narratives raises questions regarding the target of critique. From their work elsewhere, both the authors could be expected to be among the first to recognise such narratives to be an integral, and normal, element of society-environment relations. At a quasi-functional level, moreover, such narratives are a crucial part of building coalitions for collective action to address real problems. Where the narratives become a problem in themselves is when they take phoney science and victimise innocent groups who are marked out as culprits. Clearly this use of narratives is what the authors have in mind as their own main target, but the exposition in the book tends to dwell on narrative per se as the evil to be expunged from environmental science, politics and policy.

… from Oliver Pye’s review:

The book is full of detailed case studies and draws on a large amount of research to uncover the complex reality of environmental change in the North. By examining different but interrelated issues, the authors carefully dissect a narrative that simplifies them into one “environmental crisis.” The interdisciplinary approach, using knowledge from natural sciences in a creative way informed by social sciences as well as a combination of empirical studies with a more abstract level of analysis makes this a thoughtful work. A key theme of the book is a view of upland farmers as rational human beings who make informed decisions about how they manage their land and who have a right to grow crops and a right to development.

In order to back up their own “narrative” of the existence of one converging and false narrative of environmental crisis, however, Forsyth and Walker often overstate their case. In their discussion of the climatic effects of forests, for example, they neglect the effects of evapotranspiration on local and regional climate. In the chapter on agrochemicals they talk of a “backlash against agrochemicals” (181), which is a grossly exaggerated warning given the hitherto niche existence of organic farming. Rather naively, they claim that “agrochemicals have played a role in supporting vulnerable livelihoods, encouraging the transition away from opium production, and reducing pressures to clear forested areas for cultivation” (182). Later, however, they reveal that thousands of upland farmers have been seriously poisoned by agrochemical use. In general, the authors seem to have a bias against environmentalists, as shown by their attack on James D. Fahn’s book, A Land on Fire: The Environmental Consequences of the Southeast Asian Boom (Basic Books, 2003).

… from Pinkaew Laungaramsri’s review:

The thesis put forward by the book is undoubtedly thought provoking. Its critique of environmental knowledge is a must read for scholars, policy makers, and NGOs who are involved in environmental issues. However, the book is not without problems. Framing environmental politics only through lenses of ‘narratives’ has certain limitations. As environmental narratives are by no means produced in a vacuum but developed out of the specificity of cultural politics and historical context, it is this particularity that the book pays little attention to. The authors’ critique of NGOs and scholar activists as being non-critical of the dichotomy between forest and agriculture, antithetical to upland commercialisation, and perpetuating the Edenic narrative of pristine forest is overstated. While works cited to support this critique are outdated, recent research and publications by NGOs and social scientists relating to issues of dynamics of right and access to agricultural land and changing forms of farming in the uplands are unfortunately missed out from this book. Fixed description and division of the so-called ‘people-oriented’ versus conservationist positions also obscures complex and diverse strands of thinking that might not necessary fit the two sets of ideological camps defined by the authors.

These are the sort of thoughtful and critically engaged reviews that add much to the pleasure of academic writing.

To my mind some of the most compelling research conducted recently on food security and rural poverty in rural Laos, comes from Jutta Krahn’s research and the World Food Program’s 2007 study… The main conclusions from the WFP work are worth consideration.

The research suggests that the current model of promoting foreign direct investment into resource megaprojects in Laos, has not, to date, resulted in a broad-based improvement in food security or nutrition in the countryside.

It seems to me that instead of demanding more details on the options and alternatives to hydropower megaprojects (there are many good options and local initiatives), the onus should rather be upon the proponents of hydropower megaprojects, to provide legally enforceable guarantees, based on detailed, nationally and independently reviewed plans, studies, impact assessments, and baseline research, that their projects— which will inevitably undermine wild fishery stocks— will yet produce overall improvements in local nutrition, food security, incomes, and development options for immediately affected communities, while also providing solutions to the broader problems with child malnourishment and underdevelopment in rural and upland areas.

Given the track record in Laos and the Mekong region, with uncompensated and unmitigated socio-ecological externalities from large-scale hydropower development, including Nam Theun II, I would argue that the weight of existing evidence still favours the hydropower skeptics.

These are important points. Food security is, unquestionably, a high priority and threats to food security need to be taken very seriously in assessing the social and environmental impacts of projects. Here is a very short extract from the long and exceptionally detailed World Food Programme report that Keith refers to:

Although no single indicator can easily identify the food insecure, food insecure households can be described as farmers with low engagement in fishing and hunting or unskilled labourers. They practise upland farming on small plots of land in fragile areas with steep slopes. Often, they do not possess kitchen gardens. They are mostly asset poor, low-formally educated, illiterate and from non-Lao-Tai ethnic groups. They live in villages with little or no key infrastructure, and suffer from bad sanitary conditions. (page 94)

To me, this suggests that while food insecurity can certainly be compounded by inappropriate projects or programmes, its fundamental cause lies is unproductive agriculture in highly resource constrained environments (of course, resource constraints can be socially created as much as they are demographically driven).

This reminded me of a graph often referred to by one of my colleagues when I was involved in AusAID’s review of the Nam Theun 2 dam (click the graph for a larger version).

The graph plots GDP per-capita against the percentage of GDP derived from agriculture. The pattern is stark: the poorest countries (in terms of GDP per-capita) are those that derive higher proportions of their GDP from agricultural activity. Note the position of Laos. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that pattern was repeated within Laos, with poverty and food insecurity most marked in provinces where the local economy is most dependent on agricultural production.

A standard development position would be that poverty and food insecurity is best addressed by facilitating the movement of people and resources out of low productivity agricultural pursuits and into other forms of economic activity. Laos is moving in this direction – according to the World Bank the percentage of GDP derived from agriculture was 61 percent in 1990 and 42 percent in 2007. Over a similar period the rate of poverty is reported to have declined from 45 percent to 33 percent.

So, for me, the key big picture question is this: does large-scale infrastructure investment facilitate this transition in a way that fairly balances positive and negative impacts? Is Keith right to argue that “the weight of existing evidence still favours the hydropower skeptics”?

A. Daeng (Farmer)               B. Ja (Farmer)               C. Surayud (Privy Councillor)

This might help.

The field research for this book was conducted in 2001-2003. A few years earlier the Lao government stopped issuing export permits for wood resin, although wood resin from Cambodia was still being exported to Thailand via Laos. The argument of the Lao government at the time was that wood resin harvesting was damaging the forests, and that the destructive practice should be discontinued. Unfortunately, however, once there was no longer a market for wood resin, many villagers decided to cut their resin trees down to sell the wood. So, the export ban did not have the effect of protecting the trees, as was seemingly expected. Moreover, logging companies also took advantage of the situation to convince villagers to allow them to cut down their resin trees.

In any case, through reviewing the literature, it became clear that some researchers believed that wood resin tree tapping was destructive, while others thought it was sustainable. It seemed appropriate to investigate wood resin tapping in detail. What I found was that in my field site wood resin trees were not dying as a result of being tapped. I also found that without exception, all the researchers who investigated wood resin tapping superficially–whether in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia or elsewhere–came to the conclusion that it was destructive to the trees. This appears to be based mainly on the visual effect of seeing big black burnt holes in the trunks of resin trees. It’s a bit like the negative impression many people have when they first see a burnt swidden fields. However, the reality associated with swidden agriculture are frequently much more complicated. I also found that all the researchers who investigated wood resin tapping in detail, regardless of which country, came to the conclusion that while it certainly is possible to kill a tree through resin tapping, the reality is that this rarely happens, and that despite the ugly black holes in the side of the tree trunks, the trees are very hardy and almost never succumb to tapping damage.

Unfortunately, the 2009 book is a bit expensive. It is, however, available through Amazon.com The publisher can also be contacted here.   

The following photos (from the book) show the tapping process as performed by one of the Brao tappers I worked with during my research. The fires are necessary to stimulate resin production, but tappers lose production if they over-burn. Therefore, they tend to only allow fires to burn about 30 seconds before putting them out. Then they wait between a few days and a week for the resin to seep into the wedge shaped holes in the trunks. The resin is then taken from the tap holes and the holes are burnt again. The full details can be found in the book.

The Jordanians may have the glamour, but Thailand’s royals come up trumps on matters green. The environmental blog Grist has a list of the 10 greenest royals. My favourite, Charles, tops the list. He is an endangered species in his own right and deserves the highest recognition.

But run your eye down the list (gentlemen, move on past Jordan please) and you will find that Thailand has two of the greenest members of the world’s royal elite.

There may be some shock and disappointment that the king and the queen (As the King is the water, I shall be the forest – Queen Sirikit) do not themselves feature (I am sure they would round out the green dozen). But given that generational change is in the air it is only appropriate that Princess Chulabhorn Walailak and Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn take the honours (in positions 6 and 9 respectively).

Chulabhorn has been honoured for, among other things, “studying the health risks that air pollution poses to traffic police in Bangkok” (motorcades?). Sirindhorn earns ninth spot for helping with “preserving the biodiversity of plant life”. She is pictured showing how plant ecosystems and daily attire can be practically combined.

I have seen some mean-spirited talk by the internet chattering classes about the so-so environmental credentials of these hi-so mo-so royals (I stole that line), but that sort of sarcasm should be treated with the contempt it deserves.

It’s hard not sympathise with a campaign like this, and there is certainly a strong need for greatly improved social and environmental management of major infrastructure development in Laos. I encourage New Mandala readers who want to add their name to contact Ian.

But I am a little uncomfortable about a couple of things. First, the “independent scientific paper” referred to in the letter appears to be a self-published report by Ian himself. Given the rather technical nature of the fisheries issues involved, a peer reviewed paper would add much more strength to the campaign.

Second, the letter concludes by calling for approaches that would “prioritize alternative options for meeting Laos’ development needs, options that would in fact increase people’s food security and decrease poverty.” I would like to see a little more detail on what those options might be.

[UPDATE 21 August 2009. See the comments below. This is a draft text. Ian Baird has advised NM that the final signed text will be released on 26 August.]

[UPDATE 2 27 August 2009. Here is a copy of the final signed letter.]

OPEN LETTER To Interested Persons:

We the undersigned scientists, fisheries specialists, nutritionists and development workers, are writing to express our concern about plans to construct the Don Sahong Dam across the Hou Sahong channel in the Khone Falls area of Khong District, Champasak Province, southern Laos. We believe the project will have grave consequences for regional fisheries and the food security and livelihood of millions of people in the Mekong River Basin.

According to an independent scientific paper recently released, the Don Sahong project would block migrations of many important fish species that move up and down the Mekong River past the Khone Falls at various times of the year. Through fieldwork and a review of the available scientific literature, the paper reveals that many fish species migrate very long distances through the Hou Sahong Channel to upstream areas, where they form an important part of the diet of local people. The paper concludes that through blocking the migration of these fish, there is a “high risk that the dam could cause serious impacts to fisheries both far upstream and downstream from the Khone Falls, in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Viet Nam, thus jeopardising the livelihoods of large numbers of people.”

According to the paper, the mitigation measures proposed in the project’s draft environmental impact assessment are unlikely to be effective. There is no known fish pass that could cope with the unique biological requirements of all the fish species that migrate past the Khone Falls each year. The proposal to widen the Hou Sadam is also likely to be ineffective because it would require major engineering works that would be extremely costly.

The paper concludes that fisheries losses in the region, and especially in Laos and Cambodia, could negatively impact the nutritional status of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people dependent on these fisheries, thus affecting the health of a large number of people. Figures indicate that in Stung Treng Province of Cambodia, almost 45% of children under five years old are underweight. As Cambodians depend on fisheries for the majority of their protein needs, losing a large quantity of wild-caught fish due to the Don Sahong Dam would further exacerbate the situation.

In Laos, recent research by the World Food Programme (WFP) has found that Laos’ rural population is experiencing serious nutritional problems, with 50% of all children being chronically malnourished. The Lao people are particularly lacking in meat, fish and edible oils, the exact food types that are threatened by the dam. If the dam causes even a 10% reduction in fisheries in central and southern Laos, the areas expected to be most seriously impacted by the Don Sahong Dam, this could have a serious impact on the nutritional status of people already living at the margins of food security.

For these reasons, we are concerned that the Don Sahong Dam would cause more problems than it would bring benefits to the Lao people, or other peoples in the region. If the dam goes forward, the corresponding drop in nutritional status for Lao and Cambodian citizens could result in setbacks in government and international donor efforts to alleviate poverty and meet various health-related United Nations Millennium Development goals. It could also negatively affect the nutritional status of people in Thailand and Viet Nam. This is a risk that we simply do not believe is worth taking.

We urge you to reconsider the development of the Don Sahong Dam and to prioritize alternative options for meeting Laos’ development needs, options that would in fact increase people’s food security and decrease poverty, rather than causing the opposite effect.

The cub born to giant pandas Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui of the Chiang Mai Zoo in Thailand’s northern province of Chiang Mai, which are on loan from China, has been officially named “Lin Bing” on Monday…Lin Bing in Chinese means “a forest of ice,” while in the Chinese pronunciation the word bing is very similar to the name of Chiang Mai’s major river — “Ping River”…On Feb. 18, 2009, Lin Hui was impregnated with artificial insemination after all efforts to arouse male Chuang Chuang’s interest in mating had failed.

- Extracted from “New-born giant panda in N Thailand named’Lin Bing’“, Xinhua, 10 August 2009.  Previous New Mandala coverage of related issues is available here and here.

On the bus to Kampot a man told me that part of the construction site had collapsed due to the poor weather that had been occurring throughout the past week. Apparently it had been on the news. “Damn” I thought, an opportunity for a swim at the base of the dam wall was looking slim.

Flowing alongside Kampot is the Kamchay tributary to the Mekong. Further North is the Bokor National Park which will be largely flooded as a result of the Kamchay dam’s reservoir. Sinohydro, the company that built the phenomenally large Three Gorges Dam is responsible for the construction of the Kamchay project. It’s one of several large dams that Chinese state owned energy companies are constructing along the lower reaches of the Mekong in Cambodia and Laos.

“Onward” I said to a young chap on a scooter at 5am and soon we were going across the newly constructed bridge arching over the Kamchay and along the long, newly constructed road to the entrance of the dam site. Passing the barbed wire and moat encircling the ominous Sinohydro administration building, which would have fulfilled the deepest fantasies of masochistic NGO activists, we eventually arrived at a lowered boom gate prohibiting us from going further. The unkempt Khmer guard at the boom gate became animated and sternly gestured that we turn around.

Along the way back to Kampot I took some photos of the powerful current the dam is meant to take advantage of. Nearby there were farmers beginning to plow their paddies. Standing on the eroding river bank, there wasn’t much preventing me from falling in and going for that swim.

I wonder what sort of conversation the farmers along the Kamchay and the farmers who recently died at the Xiaowan dam in Yunnan could have had.