Residents of Saraphi district, Chiang Mai province have the highest rate of lung cancer in the country.
This article was developed into written format out of a podcast series of the same name.
Every year, for 2-3 months, Saraphi, Chiang Mai and the entire Northern region of Thailand, as well as large areas of Laos and Burma, suffocate under smoke. This annual climate apocalypse is a relatively new phenomenon, beginning around 20-30 years ago and seemingly increasing in intensity.
To contextualise the catastrophe, we can look at the Air Quality Index during the Canadian wildfires of 2023– which has a Wikipedia page. Air quality is measured by PPM, Parts Per Million, and translates to the Air Quality Index (AQI). AQI puts a number on the amount of unwanted/harmful particles in the air. Anything over 50 AQI is considered unhealthy. At its worst, the pollution affecting cities like Chicago and Minneapolis was measured at 256 and 228 AQI respectively, this lasted for around 2 days. Comparatively, a few years ago, the city of Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand, measured an index of over 300 AQI for 9 consecutive weeks. While the Canadian wildfires lasted a few days, the smog in Northern Southeast Asia is an annual catastrophe, for which there is no Wikipedia page.
The cause, in our opinion, is a conspiracy. This conspiracy is a product of decades-long interplay between state and capital, the birthing of mass agribusiness, monopolisation of markets, of coups, of massacres in the streets and of networks of dark finance and patronage. That we call the corn conspiracy.
In short, this toxic hell is caused by the burning of agricultural byproducts– that is to say, clearing fields of agricultural waste with fire in order to plant for the next season’s crops. The main offender is corn or maize, a truth which has been obfuscated behind a smokescreen by the powers that facilitated it.
The more research one reads into the topic, the more apparent the obfuscation becomes. Clear inaccuracies and contradictions in reporting appear time and time again. This is particularly egregious when one actually lives in the affected region. For example, in nearly every article we’ve seen, Northern Thai farmers burning sugarcane has been in part blamed for the smoke pollution in the region. However, we have never, nor has anyone we know, ever seen a sugarcane plantation in the region.
The annual climate catastrophe traces its origins back to Siam’s spell as a rice-bowl for the region under the thumb of the British Empire. They, and the successor empire of the United States, went on to develop Thailand’s lands and its bourgeois class to ensure this extractive arrangement continued. The tentacles of market relations would eventually reach into the hills, tear down the forests, sow the corn and set it alight. Today, when we look into the skies over the hills, we see a grey smog. Hiding behind that grey is a network of elite financiers, petite-bourgeoise intermediaries and military strongmen.
What We’re Talking About When We Talk About Smoke
From Kampangphet to KengTung, from Luang Prabang to Taunggyi, in late January the air starts to get a little hazy. Nothing too scary, but the mountains in the distance have a white fade between you and them. By late February the fade grows more intense, oftentimes it won’t have rained for over a month. The forest begins to dry out, dry leaves blanket the roadsides while the occasional wind whips up dust and debris. It’s then that you’ll likely see a few fields undergoing controlled burning, with balaclava-clad workers standing by. This practice used to be common in western countries where it was called clearing the stubble, the burning of the remaining stems and agricultural waste products post-harvest.
March is when it really begins to get bad. You start to lose sight of the mountains, the temperature rises to the high 38+ degrees. People start putting on masks. You begin to notice your scratchy throat and stinging eyes.
By April it’s hell. 40 degrees with smoke so thick you can look directly at the sun. On bad days there are no shadows. It’s a very eerie feeling to look at the weather app, which displays a yellow sun on a blue sky background, while outside the sky is nothing but grey.
Those who can afford them have air purifiers inside the home. Outside you quickly get used to the smell. Last year I went to Bangkok for a week during the smoke season, when I opened my suitcase, all of a sudden the room reeked of Northern smoke.
While the cloud envelops the whole region, the lived experience of smoke is a class-based phenomenon. For those on middle incomes, the air purifiers are essential, they cost around 3000b (75 Euros). However, more low-cost homes have little in the way of insulation, with many windows made from grates that can not permanently close, making air purifiers of little use.
While most middle-income workers stay inside at office jobs, those in the working class typically work outside all day everyday. The biggest sector for employment in the region is by far agriculture and agriculture related industries such as truck drivers, sellers of farming equipment, millers, etc… For these workers, there is little indoor shelter available from the smoke.
The class divide can be seen in masks. An effective N95 mask costs around 400b to be worn outside. Poorer people wear the near useless bluemasks selling for about 5b, while those working outside all day often don’t bother wearing anything at all and who can blame them. In the rural villages life is lived outdoors, both work and leisure. Farming, eating, often even sleeping outdoors or semi-outdoors.
The effects of the smoke are cumulative– it gets worse as it goes on. After a month you start getting migraines, nose bleeds, coughs… Last year a panda at Chiang Mai zoo was pictured with blood pouring from its nose. It died a few weeks later– though zoo authorities denied any correlation to the smoke.
As noted in the opening to this piece, Saraphi District has the highest rate of lung cancer in the country. That fact was reported by Thai media in 2023 with little additional information. What should have been noted, is that Saraphi is also one of the poorest districts in the greater Chiang Mai urban area and makes up the city’s industrial zone to the South East, home to migrant workers from the remote countryside as well as migrants from Burma.
As for the upper and upper middle classes they simply leave. Maybe they go to Bangkok, which is often where they’re from, or they go to the south or the coast, beach towns like Hua Hin or Phuket, certainly the vast bulk of foreigners do this. The rest stay behind in the quiet streets, No one goes out much, it can be oddly peaceful at times in the grey hell.
Latifundia or how did it get so bad?
To answer that question we want to explore a term; latifundia. The word latifundia comes from the Roman Empire, referring to the agricultural plantations on the empire’s periphery that were worked by slave labour, in order to provide a huge enough surplus to feed the rest of the empire. The plantations would seek to expand their lands and increase their slaveholding, with newly cropped fields and labour for a greater surplus. These latifundia were the proto-models of imperial governance and industrialised agriculture. Indeed, there is a direct link, as the Spanish and the Portuguese even used the word latifundios, to refer to their slave plantations in colonial Latin America.
Today, the word is used, typically by those in the third-worldist, global south context, to refer to places where intense industrialised agriculture takes place. The likes of the Brazilian cattle ranches, the Moroccan Fruit farms, the Kenyan tea plantations and of course, the Southeast Asian rice paddies.
One key facet of the modern day latifundia is the vast surplus of agricultural byproducts created. That is to say, the regions create far more agricultural produce than can be consumed in the local economy, as of course, the produce is intended for export. The fact that this is export driven agriculture is essential for understanding its insatiable appetite for expansion. In more traditional sustainable farming communities only a small surplus was necessary to feed the local people, hence there was no need to drive expansion further.
Such a model may seem antiquated, but these kinds of localised economies still exist on a national scale in post-industrial countries. For example, the UK milk industry, which is heavily regulated by the state, produces just about the right amount of milk for the UK market, as such, there’s, relatively speaking, very little import or export of milk in the UK. It sounds strange, but the UK milk industry is a relatively sustainable domestic agricultural economy. While, economies like the UK’s, comprise a key part of the global imperial core– to where the agricultural surplus of the latifundias flows.
Having said that, latifundias are not simply poor areas that do farming. There are plenty of regions in the global south that would not meet the definition– such as Sierra Leone’s Fruit farms or grain fields in Chile. These economies are also plundered by the imperial core, but crucially, not for agricultural surplus, rather for other products, like Iron ore or Sweatshop garments. In these global south economies, agricultural products are generally self sustainable, like the milk industry in the UK. In short, it’s more economically productive to grow food for the workers in other industries within the domestic economy, than it is to use that economic capacity to create a massive surplus of food for export. There are even plenty of places in Europe that we could define as latifundia such as the grain fields of the flatlands in the east of Romania, or the greenhouses of southern Spain.
This definition of latifundia is by no means scientific, oftentimes it can be highly debatable. It’s a consequence of a series of political, economic and geographic circumstances that allow them to develop. Which we will examine in greater detail later in the piece.
Again then, it is in the latifundias, where the economic fixation on industrialised export driven agriculture creates a tremendous pressure for increasing surplus and hence expansion of fields. Finally, we find ourselves back in Northern Thailand, not in the paddy fields of the valley, but in the cleared forest corn plantations on the slopes of the upcountry hills.
Corn
We can not blame a commodity for the smoke per-se. It’s not the commodities fault. Neither can we blame those who produce or even consume that commodity. In order to find who’s to blame for the smoke-filled skies, we need to assess the system that insists the smoke comes from that commodity. Having said that, the commodity in question is, of course, corn, or maize (here we will be using the word corn to refer to both corn and maize).
Corn plants are tall, nearly two metres, tightly wrapped with layered leaves and stems, the kernels (the seeds) themselves are then attached to the cob. For corn the kernels are all you want, those yellow or sometimes white and purple seeds, as such, harvesting creates a huge amount of organic waste for the return on the usable product.
Despite the waste, it is a relatively non-labour intensive crop compared to say rice. Corn seeds can be sown in the weak red highland soil of the region. There they require little to no irrigation, the annual rainy season, followed by winter and dry season, provides the plant with the necessary conditions to produce a crop.
Harvesting too is relatively easy, the farmer waits for the dry season to wither the plants away, the stalks fall down, leaving the husks amongst the leaves, to be easily picked up and thrown in sacks by hand.
This is easier, speaking relatively of course, compared to rice or vegetables. Rice requires more monitoring, a more constant and stable water supply and more delicate harvesting labour. Rice is also at greater risk from parasites and pests, while vegetables are extremely tricky to grow on mass, again due to pests and any fluctuating climate contingency, say, too much sun or too much rain. Corn isn’t like that, corn is tough, hardy, it’s much better at taking care of itself.
Unlike fruits and vegetables, once harvested, corn can be dried and stored for lengthy periods of time. It can be easily weighed and checked for quality on mass. The harvested cornels stack up tightly, meaning it can also be easily shipped at low cost– requiring no refrigeration.
The dried kernels are highly versatile, they can be rehydrated as food for humans, they can be milled into flour, they can be turned into biofuels or starches and most commonly and most importantly, they can be used as animal feed.
In all these regards, corn is a wonder-crop. Particularly when put up against something as fickle as, say, tomatoes.
The only problem, for those of us in the hills, is the massive amount of waste material produced by the plant, the stems, the leaves and the husks. To plant the next year’s crop, farmers have to clear the corn fields of that waste, to do this there are only 3 options.
- Intensive labour application. Humans themselves, clearing the land by hand with machetes, hoes, and canvas bags stuffed with waste.
- Advanced machinery, such as combine harvesters and tractors with ploughs, so as to plough the waste material back into the soil.
- Fire. Burn the stubble.
Problem 1. Intense labour application. It would literally take an army of strong able bodied people to do such a job, a labour capacity simply does not exist in the villages.
Problem 2. Advanced machinery. The most advanced machinery you’ll find in the corn fields is likely a motorbike with a sidecar, and even those can’t always make it up the steep, narrow, dirty slopes most of the time, let alone a huge combine-harvester or plough.
Problem 3. Fire. Due to the geography of the region, the high mountain ridges, and the low valleys, the smoke from these fires has nowhere to go. During the dry season, there is neither wind nor rain to speak of, nothing to disperse it, until the rains begin again in late April.
Looking at corn farming it is clear to see that there is only one solution to clearing the waste, and that’s fire, and where there’s fire, there’s smoke.
Land Clearances
The North is a corn latifundia. So why here, why now, why corn and how did it come to be?
Post-WWII, Thailand’s economy was that of a big rice bowl and much of the rice land, the wet rice cultivation paddies. were incapable of expanding. As we established earlier, rice can be quite a delicate crop. Farmers need to have flat land with large amounts of irrigation– unless they’re capable of putting in the decades of labour that was able to construct those beautiful terraced fields famously seen in places like Sapa in Vietnam.
As such, the Thai agricultural economy had little space to expand. The forest was thick, often mountainous and the sole property of the monarchy, while the paddy fields were owned by the elite local landlords and the international trading market was not yet developed enough to ship commodities worldwide en masse, such as a pineapple grown in Thailand to the supermarket shelves of Paris.
During the social tensions of the supposed cold war, during the 1960s to 1980s, while the Thai communist insurgency and peasant movements were active, the state and capital worked hand in glove to facilitate clearances of forest land to open new spaces of cultivation and simultaneously new markets.
This was done so as to release the pressure valve of economic stagnation and social unrest in both urban and rural areas, whereby the monarchy, or the state, gave away parcels of forested land for clearance. For the landless peasant or the poor urban worker, if you’re offered free land to cultivate somewhere in the countryside, you’re absolutely going to take the deal rather than take the risk of joining an insurrection like that of the Communist Party or the Farmers Federation Thailand.
Thailand was once, at the time, described as America’s 51st state. A bulwark of anti-communism in the Southeast Asian sea of red. The American’s had poured massive manpower and resources into enforcing the Thai elite against its workers and peasantry. Developing an intricate gladio-esque network of anti-communist death squads, intelligence apparatuses, massive propaganda efforts, a powerful central state core in Bangkok and facilitating the opening of the economy to global capital.
In the 1970s, a well organised peasant movement emerged, The Farmers Federation of Thailand, while the group was national, its heartlands were in the North.
To quote Andrew Turton on the movement, writing in the Journal of Peasant studies he writes: Some were demands for immediate action, such as grants of land for the coming planting season, price regulation, reduction of farm rents, suspension of court cases involving farmers, release of those arrested for trespass, and help for flood victims. Others were longer term demands, such as those for land reform and permanent provision of land to the landless, and a solution to the problems of indebtedness and high interest rates. Some demands were more immediately political, such as the lifting of martial law in the outlying provinces.
This sudden upsurge in politicised peasant organising struck fear into the land-owning class and their crony enforcers within the military. The peasantry had long been seen as a vulnerable target to “communist subversion”.
It was during this organising that the deathsquads were activated and an assassination campaign against the peasants was waged. Many of these deathsquads had been directly and indirectly formed by The US state. Most notably by Bill Donovan, founding father to the CIA and post-WWII ambassador to Thailand at the time.
At the height of the assassination campaign, between March and August 1975, twenty-one leaders of the Farmers Federation Thailand were killed, the majority of them in the Northern region. It’s unclear exactly how many assassinations can be attributed to the campaign overall, but the immediate effect was the decapitation of the Farmers Federation, this was concluded with the Massacre at Thammasat University in 1976, with a death toll well into the 100s. The message to peasants and anyone else politically organising against the repressive state and capitalist class was chillingly clear.
Following the assassination campaign and the defeat of the Communist Party Thailand insurgency in 1983, the peasants effectively lost all bargaining power. They were to be left at the mercy of the landlord class and the extractive markets.
This, crushing of peasant power, alongwith the simultaneous blossoming of green revolution, which facilitated access to fertilisers, new farming technologies and complex international trade networks meant that farmers were able to plant new types of crops for market in the freshly cleared forest land.
To read from Larry Lohmans; Land, Power and Forest Colonization in Thailand (1993):
Patron-client networks, together with farmers’ desires for advancement, agricultural extension, malaria eradication programmes and other factors, have articulated with the new export economy to induce more farmers into forests. Since the 1960s, merchants, millers, traders in forest products, timber companies, speculators and strongmen have encouraged and financed a large proportion of the settlers who have cleared forests in the Eastern, Central, lower North, and Northeast regions which are then planted to maize, sugar cane, cassava, rubber and eucalyptus. These new rural patrons have provided marketing, seeds and credit at monthly interest rates of 5% or more (mainstream sources of credit are often not available) to buy food or hire labour or tractors.
Here Lohman is saying that these patronage networks were what facilitated the expansion of agricultural lands into the forest. These patrons are named as, to quote again: merchants, millers, traders in forest products, timber companies, speculators and strongmen. In short, the capitalist class and their cronies.
Continuing on in the piece:
Production and legal and market hazards are in large part passed on to individual growers, who have to turn over their output to agribusiness in exchange for costly inputs. As in other patronage-mediated systems, further clearance of land often follows, whether to clear debts or to provide more income in a cash economy.
Such factors have been combined with land deprivation to draw ever more settlers into the forest. This deprivation can be ascribed to roughly four causes related to the patterns of economic development promoted by the Thai state and its international benefactors.
The first is economic differentiation, the accumulation of land and other resources in the hands of a minority, and the migration of the deprived seeking new access to them. This pressure is then subject to positive feedback from environmental degradation resulting from the cultivation of migrant-cleared upland forests, and from cultural change undermining previous protective attitudes toward local land and forest.
Thirdly, outright seizure or enclosure of land by elites for ‘economically productive’ purposes such as logging or plantations forces still more peasants into forest colonization. Finally, rising land prices and speculation make it difficult even for those smallholders who have kept control of their fields to resist pressures to sell and move on elsewhere.
What we can see here is that same latifundian pressure that we articulated earlier. This is the pressure which necessitates the mass expansion of agricultural land and pushing that expansion to the absolute limit. Lohmann describes how the pressure on peasants from creditors, buyers, and local elites, forces them into clearing more forest for more crop space, with ever increasing debt forever chasing them.
Lohmann also touched on developing consumer markets where he writes: “provide more income in a cash economy.” This is an increasingly present factor today as new essential technologies and products come to market. For example, Wifi or a monthly phone bill costing around 600-1000b per month– which is undoubtedly an essential cost nowadays. That’s around an extra 12,000b per year per household, when a typical monthly income in poor rural areas is also about 12,000– a 10% increase in cost that literally didn’t exist before. It is at this point that smoke pollution in the Northern region begins to emerge.
As Lohmann’s paper was published in 93, we’ll have to take over the narrative. In 1997 the Tom Yum Gung market crash devastated the regional economy, particularly Thailand’s. Resulting in a mass movement of people out of urban areas and back to their rural hometowns.
In 2001 Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai party was elected, in large part thanks to their base, of the rural poor and lower middle classes. Thai Rak Thai built a vast welfare state network, provided masses of rural development and alleviated the poverty of millions from the rural poor. There was an economic boom. People bought trucks, tractors, built new houses, opened new businesses, and so on and so forth.
Just 5 years after the election however, there was a military coup against Thai Rak Thai, leading to over a decade of political instability– throwing the economy in and out of economic crises. All of those investments made by rural people bottomed out, pushing them deep into debt– this is an extremely common family narrative across rural Thailand.
The economic effects of these crises were, of course, felt most profoundly by the rural poor. Household debt skyrocketed, from 40% of GDP at the time of the coup, to 90% in 2021. To re quote Larry Lohmann:
Production and legal and market hazards are in large part passed on to individual growers, who have to turn over their output to agribusiness in exchange for costly inputs. As in other patronage-mediated systems, further clearance of land often follows, whether to clear debts or to provide more income in a cash economy.
This is the agribusiness practice of the big capitalists not owning the land, indeed not wanting to own the land. Rather, it’s in their interest for the peasants to own the land and hence bear any risks from the fluctuating market that makes land ownership and farming so precarious– such as bad harvests. As such, what we see in the first two decades in the 2000s, is a massive increase in household debt, which pushes farmers into further land clearance and field creation.
Sticking these numbers beside that of corn production (between 2002-2022) corn planting for animal feed increased from 620 thousand rai to 2.4 million rai, an increase of around 400%, while simultaneously household debt increased by 200% over the same period.
To circle back then, the anti-communist policies of the cold war, of clearing land for intense agricultural use so as to ease the internal socio-political and economic pressures, are directly responsible for starting and maintaining the policies and agricultural practices that facilitated this toxic latifundia.
It’s a confluence of factors that facilitated this smoke, something akin to a river, with different streams joining and increasing the water pressure along the way. So far we’ve examined just a few of these streams. It takes just a confluence of two to make a river and there are more streams to uncover, streams which feed into this conspiracy.
The land clearances of the cold war, the opening up of the forest frontier for settlers, was absolutely a conspiracy. One orchestrated by the state, capital and the American empire– as we detailed further in our series on counterinsurgency where we examined the role of American intelligence, state planners and academic institutions in instituting these policies behind closed doors. The purpose of this was to ensure the continued extractionist imperial policies of the west towards what was then called the third world. Thailand was in a very literal sense, de-communised and primed to become the modern plantation, the latifundia that it is today. It was, without question, and by definition a conspiracy. This is part one of the corn conspiracy.
Sugarcane
Earlier in this piece, we mentioned how almost all English language media pins the cause of the smoke not on corn but on sugarcane burning, while those of us who live in the affected region have never once seen a sugarcane field here before.
April 14, 2024
The right to breathe: severe air pollution, the unseen culprit – The Nation Thailand.
Reason given for the cause of smog: Sugarcane.
March 6, 2024 – Thailand: 10 million sought treatment for pollution-related illnesses in 2023 – BBC.
Reason given for the cause of smog: sugarcane and rice burning.
March 30, 2023 – Thailand’s extreme air pollution – BBC.
Reason given for the cause of smog: Sugarcane and rice burning
January 15 2024 – Is Thailand’s ‘Clean Air Act’ enough to end pollution? – DW
Reason given for the cause of smog: Sugarcane burning in Northern Thailand and corn burning in Burma and Laos.
March 8 2023 – Chiang Mai to hand out face masks as dust from fires hits hazardous levels – The Guardian.
Reason given for the cause of smog: General crop burning, no mention of corn.
March 27 2023 – Air pollution chokes Thailand as campaigners call for stricter laws – The Guardian
Reason given for the cause of smog: Sugarcane
March 20 2024 – Thailand Mulls Ban on Corn Imports From Neighbors to Tackle Smog – Bloomberg.
Reason given for the cause of smog: Corn burning in Burma and Laos, while blames sugarcane burning in Thailand.
April 5, 2023 – Smoke from forest fires blankets Northern Thailand in thick pollution – CNN Blames forest fires and quote “slash and burn farming”.
December 7. 2023 – Filtering through efforts for cleaner air – Bangkok Post –
Reason given for the cause of smog: Solely blames sugarcane farming
April 6, 2023 – The Connection Between Burning Season In Thailand and Poverty – The Borgen Project
Reason given for the cause of smog: “Slash and Burn farming” and sugarcane.
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Something a little odd is going on here. All of these respected news outlets can’t seem to get their stories straight. These pieces have not been selectively curated, rather they are the first articles outlets that come up in a Google search. They also all seem to contradict our assertion that corn is causing the smoke.
To take a sample of, what is assumingly, the region’s best journalism, we can more closely examine an article from a Thai reporter, funded by a Scandinavian NGO on sugarcane burning:
Burning Dilemma: Sugarcane farmers struggle in Thailand’s green vision Southeast Asia Globe by Wanpen Pajai, produced as part of the Stockholm Environment Institute (Asia) media grant for environmental reporting.
“
A sugarcane field is burnt to wilt away the tops and leaves, leaving only the charred sugarcane stalk for ease of cutting and transportation to factories. But as the sugar production starts churning and the fields are burned from December to February each year, the air quality worsens significantly as Northern Thailand enters its annual ‘burning season’.
“
The piece clearly frames the issue as air quality burning worsening due to sugarcane burning in Northern Thailand. Continuing:
“
Garn, a sugarcane harvester in Northeast Thailand’s Udonthani province, near the Laos border, is just one of many farmers that still uses this burning method during harvesting season.
“
This is more than a little odd, given that Udonthani is not in the Northern region, rather it’s in the Isaan/ Northeastern region. This may seem an odd quibble, but Isaan and the North are completely distinct both geographically and agriculturally. Isaan and Udonthani in particular are known for their endless flat horizons of agricultural land, while the North is defined by steep forested mountains. Udonthani is around 500 Kilometres away from the nearest Northern province. More importantly, the annual smog does not affect the Northeast provinces like Udonthani as it does provinces in the North. At the time of writing, in the past month (April), Udonthani had 4 days where the AQI was over 150, comparatively in Chiang Rai during the same period there have been 20 days over 150 and five days over 200.
In short, Udonthani and this particular sugarcane field is not in Northern Thailand. In fact, if we search the rest of the article for the word North, it only comes up with Northeastern– meaning Isaan. Strange then, given that this article specifically identifies and frames the problem as Northern Thailand’s burning season. Overall the article is quite good for a general understanding of how sugarcane production works, however, it is bizarrely initially framed in a highly misleading manner.
While researching this topic it drove us to near insanity, being repeatedly told over and over again by these respected outlets and environmental NGOs that sugarcane fires in the North cause the annual smoke.
First we asked other friends who live in the region, no, they’ve never seen sugarcane in the North. Then we asked farmers that we know, no they’ve never seen sugarcane in the North. Finally we asked the Northern Peasants Federation:
“Do you know anyone growing sugarcane in the North?”
They replied:
“In the North, there are cornfields, no sugarcane.”
One message from a farmer we contacted in Fang, a district in Northern Chiang Mai, told us: “In Chiang Mai we never grow sugarcane. Everyone knows the smoke is from corn burning which also causes forest fires”.
Sugarcane farming is one of those industries often found on the naughty list of bad crops, like palm oil. It devastates eco-systems, it’s almost always harvested with hyper-exploited labour and it’s often burnt causing smoke pollution. From our research, sugarcane does seem to emit more pollution than any other crop in Thailand. However, ultimately, it’s not grown in the North and there is no evidence, nor anyone suggesting, that the smoke from sugarcane burning somehow migrates to the North. In fact, if you look at the sugarcane growing regions, they have far better air quality than the North, particularly during the smog season.
To give an indication of where sugarcane is grown, the major Sugarcane mills in Thailand are in Suphanburi, Singburi, Chaiyaphum, Khon Kaen, Kalasin, Loei and Amnat Charoen. All of these provinces are in either the Isaan or Central regions. The closest mill to the North is found in Loei province. Regardless, any actual farmer or agricultural worker knows sugarcane is not grown in the North.
Sugarcane burning is a very real problem and throughout the year likely accounts for more agricultural smoke emissions than corn. That burning however, is far more spread out, both geographically and spread throughout the year, meaning the smoke doesn’t have that ubiquitous blanketing effect that corn burning does in the North.
The sugarcane industry in Thailand is run, almost exclusively, by Mitr Phol Group which is the world’s fifth largest sugar producer, and the largest producer in Asia, including China. The head of the company, Isara Vongkusolkit, is ranked as the 24th richest man in Thailand. This is big agribusiness. Mitr Phol however, does not seem to have any investments in corn. What remains is the uneasiness that the BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Bloomberg and associates have got their research completely wrong.
Other Myths
Rice
There were three more recurring culprits from that earlier article list. The first is rice field burning. Nearly half of the articles above blamed paddy burning alongside sugarcane. This myth is a lot easier to dispel. Rice exports have always been the bedrock of the Thai agricultural economy. By looking at exports, we can get a clear sense of how much rice is grown, and how much growing is increasing or decreasing. From the Thai rice exporters association:
In 2002, Thailand exported 7,000,000 (7mil) metric tons of rice.
In 2022, Thailand exported 7,600,000 (7.6mil) metric tons of rice.
Evidently, rice production has remained almost stagnant for 2 decades as there is no movement to expand paddy lands, as 1) There’s not enough suitable land and 2) The market is already saturated and at capacity.
Farmers do burn rice fields, everyone has seen it happen, but to the actual argument that rice paddy burning causes the annual smoke… The smoke is a phenomenon we’ve seen appear in the past 20-30 years. That would require some major increase in rice production to account for the increased output of smoke. In short, nothing has changed with rice production in the period, making it impossible that rice burning can be the cause of this phenomenon that started and intensified within the past 20 years, while between 2002-2022, corn planting for animal feed increased from 620 thousand rai to 2.4 million rai, an increase of around 400%.
Slash and Burn
The next myth to address is “slash and burn”, which was mentioned numerous times in the articles. This one is more of a pedantic issue we have, because what the writers think they are talking about when they use the term “slash and burn”, is in fact not “slash and burn”. What they are referring to is burning the stubble. “Slash and burn” farming itself is actually one of the better agricultural practices found in the region, despite the awful name given to it by the colonial administrators of the past century.
The so-called “slash and burn” method, better known by the term swidden farming, is a mixture of small-scale natural farming techniques, where fields are created through controlled fires in forested areas. The fire, rather than ruining the land, as the former-colonists saw it, helped to fertilise the soil, crops would then be planted and rotated over various seasons. For example, one season a swidden farmer may plant corn, in another beans, and so on. After a few seasons, the farmer fallows the fields, meaning they are left alone without tilling the soil, so as to recover organic matter. Another technique during this fallow period is to plant cover crops like clover or hemp, to refill the nitrogen levels in the soil, increasing soil recovery time.
Swidden practice can be spread over a large region, with communities migrating every few years or few decades, leaving the old area to regenerate, a kind of long-term rotational semi-nomadism. This system can also be adapted to include growing timber, after a few rotations of crops, teak trees or other hardwoods can be planted in and amongst the cropland, co-existing with it. This timber growing practice was typically used by indigenous communities to produce materials for their homes or for trade.
Another key benefit of the swidden system is its flexibility. If there is a sudden population increase in the village, say the addition of 3 or 4 more families, extra land can quickly be utilised into the system. The same goes for decreases in productive necessity, as these fields can rapidly be reabsorbed back into the forest– anyone who’s lived on the edge of a tropical forest before will know exactly how fast that reabsorption can be.
This way of life was practised for centuries in the teak-rich hills of Burma and Siam, as well as mountainous regions of India, Nepal, China, Laos and Vietnam. However, it quickly became a key target for eradication by colonial administrators. Unlike the agricultural enclosures of England, swidden produced very little surplus for the market, while produce from hunting and gathering was almost entirely non taxable. Furthermore, swidden communities practices of semi-nomadism made them extremely difficult subjects to govern and absorb into productive labour relationships.
Apparently, this colonialist misconception is still held today by most journalists. Seemingly, in the aforementioned articles, what the writers are referring to is not “slash and burn” but burning the stubble. The reason we take issue on this is that misusing the term “slash and burn” specifically targets indigenous shifting cultivators, who, rather than destroying the environment and the forest, actually have been the only ones living harmoniously with it for the past few centuries. As such, when ignorant and lazy writers use the word slash and burn, those shifting cultivators catch strays.
Hunting and Forest Fires
This is also the case when forest fires are blamed. There are two serious causes for forest fires in the region, one is the fire from corn fields escaping into the surrounding forest, something which no doubt happens en masse. The other cause, and more commonly found to take the blame in Thai language media, is hunting.
One typical hunting technique is for a band of hunters to split into two. One makes a line of fire, which scares animals into fleeing downwind, into a certain direction, where they can be predated by the other group of hunters. Dry season too, is a particularly good time to practise this, as much of the foliage from the jungle has fallen away, allowing for greater lines of sight and an easier hunt.
How much of the smoke, in terms of quantity, actually comes from forest fires caused by hunting however is again relatively negligible compared to corn. We have to remember trends and the time in which the smoke emerged: Again the smoke started 20-30 years ago, and again, over that 20 years corn planting increased by 400%, and it seems completely infeasible that hunting would increase at such a rate too.
On Cross Border Smoke
Cross Border Smoke is the most common argument to hold some weight. It typically goes something along the lines of: Corn growing in Burma and Laos is responsible for smoke which crosses into Thailand. Usually the proponent of this thesis concedes that there is some corn growing in Thailand, but they wildly downplay the Thai role in the smoke and massively exaggerate that of Burma and Laos.
This is exemplified in a piece ironically titled The Tangled Problem of Sugarcane from Think Global Health. The article refers mostly to sugarcane with the same misinformed framing that all the others do. There is however, a section on corn titled Cutting Corners with Corn:
“
In maize production, too, contract farmers frequently circumvent government bans on agricultural burning to meet production targets set by private agribusinesses. This constitutes a form of slow violence as it jeopardizes the health of contract farmers while reinforcing unequal power relations to their long-term detriment as a short-term strategy to avoid indebtedness. Smallholder farmers with limited access to agricultural lands have also become increasingly indebted to large agribusinesses since 2012 due to falling global commodity prices, combined with fluctuating yields and reduced government subsidies. Consequently, they are under continual pressure to produce high-yielding crops to repay debts instead of investing in sustainable technologies and mechanized methods of clearing land that do not rely on the use of fire.
At the transnational scale, Thailand’s Northern and Northeastern provinces in particular suffer from the impacts of transboundary haze from agricultural burning in neighboring countries, especially the burning of maize. A Bangkok-based environmental science professor estimated that the majority of maize-burning hot spots “are located outside Thailand, about 70 percent. They are all in our neighboring countries.”
All maize-producing countries in mainland Southeast Asia, including Thailand, have sought to accelerate national production in recent years to meet growing regional demand, especially from China, which uses maize to feed livestock for meat consumption. Thai agribusiness conglomerates that profit from this boom in maize exports have been protected from liability by successive Thai governments. For example, maize became the main cash crop in Myanmar due to industrial maize contract farming schemes promoted by Charoen Pokphand (CP), Thailand’s largest private company, to supply China’s chicken-feed market..
“
We finally get 3 paragraphs on corn however, again, the framing is completely off and throws away the point of the whole article. Putting that aside, according to this article and according to one unnamed “Bangkok based professor”, “70% of burning spots come from outside of Thailand.”
Following the hyperlinks and citations it is not revealed who this professor is, though it does mention that they are from National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA), founded and funded by the Thai state along with the Ford and Rockefeller foundation– and we’ll get into the sus’ness of the academy a little later. More prescient to this quote however is that supposed 70%, which seems wildly dubious and seems to paint Thailand as nothing but a victim of her badly behaved neighbours. Nonetheless this 70% number, and the accompanying narrative on smoke being a cross border phenomenon, is regurgitated with little to no investigation.
Hotspots
So as to try and understand how the cross-border smoke narrative came to be, we have to look at hotspots. In 2023 Greenpeace published a study in which they looked at satellite imagery of cropped land for corn and corn burning hotspots. Their conclusion also squarely pointed the finger at Northern Thailand, although it highlighted vast cropped corn land areas in the surrounding border region.
The term burning hotspots is an interesting one, we see it a lot in the greenpeace report. They describe hotspots as such:
In this study, satellite images– using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) equipment from NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellite and VIIRS system satellite– have detected hotspots, burn scars in maize farming areas located in Mekong sub-region which also includes Upper Northern Thailand, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and the Shan State of Myanmar. The images reveal a correlation between the increase in industrial maize plantation and transboundary haze pollution- a grave threat to local communities.
Unfortunately, they give us no further information on the methodology of how a hotspot is identified and defined.
Hotspots are the hot term in the Thai media for blaming the smoke on Laos and Burma, like in that earlier 70% quote. Greenpeace had, not as dramatic, but similar findings, wherein they identified the majority of hotspots coming from outside of Thailand. We are, however, sceptical that there is such a direct correlation between hotspots and smoke levels.
To begin, we looked at the smoke levels in these high hotspot regions. Monitoring stations in Shan State Burma, Southern Yunnan (around Jinghong) in China and in Laos, (around Luang Prabang) all consistently register equal or lower Parts Per Million smoke numbers than stations in Northern Thai throughout the smog season yet have significantly more registered localised hotspots.
For example at the time of writing, on the live HotSpot map, Northern Laos is covered in hotspots, while Northern Thailand has virtually none. Yet Chiang Mai has a higher AQI reading (more smoke) than Luang Prabang. Generally throughout the season the two cities keep equal pace with one another, despite Luang Prabang being surrounded by these supposed hotspots. Oddly, throughout the season, live hotspots on the map seem to be almost confined by the Laos border.
What it looks like, is that there is no direct correlation between hotspot numbers and smoke levels on a localised level. Again this data would have us believe that the smoke is, again, somehow migrating solely into Northern Thailand’s borders. Earlier we said where there’s fire there’s smoke, well there doesn’t seem to be that much smoke coming from these supposed fires. In short, there appears to be an error in correlating hotspots and smoke on the part of the satellite researchers. The reason for which we can only speculate, but speculate we shall.
One possibility is that these hotspots are often described as “potential burning sights’ which seemingly means that the conditions are right for burning, but does it necessarily mean they are burning there? Unfortunately, there is not enough clarity in the report to answer that.
Some reports also describe hotspots simply as fires, detectable from satellites. If this is the case it’s possible that these hotspots may be being misattributed to swidden or “slash and burn” farming– the good kind. Slash and burn or swidden agriculture is certainly practised far more in the border areas of Laos and Shan State, Burma than it is on the Thai side. As such, the satellites may be observing numerous well controlled swidden fires, which as we noted before, are harmless and historically beneficial for forest life when practised correctly. This then, could account for the lack of intense smog pollution in those localised regions where hotspot numbers are extremely high but smoke levels relatively moderate.
Furthermore, it is also important to look at the amount of land and labour dedicated to farming in the regions. Accurate information on farmed land in this cross-border region is hard to find. However, we can make some assessments based on the population sizes of these rural areas. The Northern Thai region where corn is grown (including the provinces of Kamphaeng Phet, Phetchabun Loie and Takk) is around 9.3 million. The neighbouring corn-growing regions of Burma (Shan State, Kayin State and some of Kachin) have a population of around 3 million (though much of that farmed land is really quite far from the Thai border). In the same regions of Laos around there’s around 1 million people in the border provinces and in China only around 1.5 million as the highland becomes exceedingly non-arable further North of Xishuangbanna. Just in terms of labour power then, the population of Northern Thailand is around double that of all the other regions combined.
The huge drop off in population density suggests that there isn’t anywhere near the labour force to carry out as large of an agricultural operation as there is in Thailand. These other 3 regions are also far less agriculturally developed and, as we have noted, the smoke only significantly developed in this region around 20 years ago, which was the outcome of a complex confluence of economic and political contexts unique to Thailand’s latifundia.
Furthermore corn exports in this surrounding region actually almost solely go into Thailand according to the same Greenpeace report.
“Thailand’s food manufacturing and livestock market consists of big businesses led by Charoen Pokphand Group (CP), Betagro, Saha Farm, Cargill, Thai food Group, GFPT, and Laemthong Potchana. All of the listed businesses contribute to the connected supply chains in agricultural fields, forage plant production to food processing. Consequently, these business groups wield power over the economy, just as the government has power over maize pricing. Aside from dominating the market share, all the companies mentioned own a combined 90 percent of chicken meat production (Petchseechoung, 2017). [3] It is almost certain that almost all of the chicken meat and eggs available in Thai market comes from the industry, unless the consumer directly purchases it from independent small farmers.
A major portion of the market belongs to the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP). Even though they hold only 30 percent of the domestic market, the CP Group is the largest feed manufacturer in the world (according to the report by Market Research, 2019). [4] About 42 percent of the company’s revenue in 2017 was generated from animal feed sales amounting to 229,539 million Baht.
Stricter maize purchasing policy is one of the factors influencing big businesses to invest in neighboring countries to compensate for the loss from the production in Thailand.
The expansion of production areas to neighboring countries is another tactic used by the livestock industry to meet the demand for meat and animal feed in the global market. A report by Oxfam5 reveals information regarding the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) and its investment in the Shan State of Myanmar under the name “Myanmar CP Livestock Co., Ltd.” [5] In 2012, the company invested in maize and rice production, including maize processing costing USD550 million. About 80 percent of the production rate goes to exporting.“
In short, there are cross border corn burning issues. Yet, it’s all linked back to the same Thai big agribusiness industry. We see it necessary to make this point because as mentioned earlier, a pervasive attitude in Thailand is to blame the smoke on, typically, Burma and at times Laos and China rather than accept Thailand’s leading role in the catastrophe. This attitude is wildly common in the public discourse, the media and, as reflected in the earlier 70% figure, in the academy. This attitude is entirely made possible by the narrative of cross border smoke.
To recap, judging by measuring data from air-quality stations, labour capacity and satellite analysis, the burning area in the Burma, Laos and China regions is largely geographically dispersed compared to Northern Thailand. As such, the blanket of smoke itself is less intense in those regions. We are yet again supposed to believe that the smoke somehow migrates to Northern Thailand.
What this cross border argument does, even with reporting like Greenpeaces, is when improperly framed, abdicates the responsibility of Thailand for its own role in the pollution. A role which it is the largest contributor to– out of all the parties involved. We can see that, while there is corn burning going on in the surrounding region, it is still largely the responsibility of one particular Bangkok agribusiness company, Charoen Pokphand (CP).
CP
CP is a highly litigious company, so we have to be a little careful about what we publish here. Earlier we alluded to issues in the academy with reporting on smoke pollution. From what we can tell, this is the reason why so many journalists blame the non-existent smoke from sugarcane burning– they read sketchy reports and regurgitate them without ever talking to any local farmers. It seems that journalists would rather trust supposedly neutral qualified academics than farmers. Something is telling these journalists that sugarcane and rice are to blame rather than corn.
On a completely unrelated note. If you had visited Chiang Mai University’s most recent Agricultural fair, you would have seen a large grouping of tents representing different farmers groups and different industries, such as a tent with sunflowers, maybe one with orchids, all of them rather small, just marquees really, with a few people under them showing off their products. You would, of course, have already spotted the behemoth, the CP tent. Four walls, air conditioning, TVs, a stage, catering… Well that’s just a funny, unrelated story about Chiang Mai University and their relationship with CP.
On another unrelated note, if you were to try Googling (in Thai language) CP and the names of major agricultural universities in Thailand, such as Kasetsart and Maejo etc, you’ll find yourself inundated with scholarship opportunities, paid partnerships, research grants, and so on. This isn’t just CP, but all of the major agribusinesses operating in the kingdom… Just another funny unrelated note, that might be interesting to those who wish to contextualise the relationship between agribusiness and the academic institutions that journalists rely on for their research.
Conspiracy
While researching this we spoke to a colleague who is a Cambridge University graduate economist. He said that sometimes seismic events are happening just below us, but we are unable to see them… During the land clearance and counterinsurgency policies that were taking place behind closed doors in the last century people weren’t able to see it for what it was, you can’t see the forest through the trees. With the benefit of hindsight however, it’s clear to see the conspiracy of the past century, perhaps this corn conspiracy is something very similar
We are of the belief that this conspiracy is very much automated, we are not suggesting that there are necessarily elites sitting behind closed doors plotting the whole thing out. Rather, let’s say for example, a student gets a university scholarship from a big agribusiness firm, they then go on to work at that firm, while plenty of their classmates stay in the research department of the university. Then, when the university is researching pollution caused by corn, they perhaps lean on their old friends to dim down the report, to make sure to blame cross border smoke, or sugarcane, slash and burn and so on. Or perhaps they even commission the study themselves in order to further lean on the researchers. Then, finally, lazy ignorant journalists read the report uncritically and propagate these inaccuracies further. We are not suggesting that at any point anyone has necessarily thought, or said, “we need to blame sugarcane over corn”. Rather it is a system weighted so heavily towards extractionist latifundian market economics, that the process of creating and maintaining this conspiracy is essentially automated.
Farmers
These hills, when you can see them, are astonishingly beautiful. Some of the villages could be pulled out of a Studio Ghibli film. Dinky little wooden houses with grandmas napping under them, glimmering paddies with lazy buffalo roaming around, children fishing on tiny bridges over bubbling streams. Sometimes it’s unbelievably idyllic.
Oftentimes it can be hard to reconcile places like this with the poverty that surrounds them. This idyllic setting can allow a revisionist idealism to enter in. Yes the people are poor, but look how beautiful it is. Look how happy they seem. This is dangerous thinking.
There are many pernicious elements about life in the rural North, above all however, that of debt. As we touched upon earlier, familial debt is the driver of this latifundia. It’s the mechanism that turns farmers into serfs, tethered to the land, like in the time of the Saktina feudal era.
In Ghosts of the Red Soil, we wrote: Following the coup against Thaksin there was an economic vacuum, as his policies were rolled back. A recession set in, though it was predominantly felt in the semi-periphery areas that his coalition had invested in so heavily. The small time debts of families ballooned when they were unable to make repayments. Many had no choice than to turn to semi-illegal loan sharks. What was once a debt of around 50,000 baht in 2006 is now in the hundreds of thousands, a noose tied around the necks of the working class, though they can’t pull away the stool, as the debt will be passed onto the next generation. Many of the decaying homes that were built on credit during Thaksin’s golden era, are now far less valuable than the debt that they’ve incurred, 21st century indentured servitude in full effect. Household debt skyrocketed, from 40% of GDP at the time of the coup, to 90% in 2021.
For most families, the responsibility falls on the next generation. There’s no chance that parents, who took out the loans, could raise the capital to pay it back. The children of the Thaksin era, now reach the age where they can sell their labour and can inherit the noose.
It is debt that forces more forest to be cleared, more corn to be planted, and more waste to be burnt. It is the engine behind the latifundia and the propellant behind the smoke. Again, Saraphi District in Chiang Mai, has the highest rate of lung cancer in the country.
The smog issue is not just an issue of toxic smoke for everyone who lives in the North. It’s an explicitly class based issue, which becomes all the more pernicious the further down the class ladder you descend.
What can be done?
This year, 2024, was supposed to be the worst year on record, being an El Nino year with an unbelievable heatwave. The temperature at the time of writing in Chiang Mai is 44 degrees. There has also been very little rain over the winter, further drying out the farmland.
The North was geared up for the worst smoke ever, yet it didn’t come. It was, of course, still bad, but it’s nowhere near as bad as predicted, and far better than the previous year.
In 2023 Chiang Rai had 20 days where the AQI was over 200, in 2024 there have only been 2. At the beginning of the season in February of 2023, Chiang Rai had 8 days where the AQI was over 150, in 2024 there were none. So what changed?
In August 2024, Phue Thai, Thaksin Shinawatra’s old party was reelected into government after a 10 year absence following the last military coup of 2014. We have a lot of critiques of this new generation of Phue Thai. However, historically, they have been able to work pure economic magic for the rural poor, as we saw under Thaksin’s tenure. The question of whether they still have that capacity is still not answered, however, we can take a look at some of their policies and consider what impact it may have on rural poverty, and in particular rural debt.
The government has managed to bring down the total amount of informal debts by 670 million baht in just two months, solving 102,000 out of 140,000 cases reported to authorities as part of the push to reduce the household debt burden. According to Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who is also finance minister, the progress is the result of extensive cooperation by all agencies tasked with solving the nation’s debt problems, including the Interior, Finance, Justice, Education, and Agriculture and Cooperatives ministries, along with several government-linked financial institutions. He said 102,000 of more than 140,000 appeals for help received by the government since the initiative was launched on Nov 28 last year have been successfully resolved, bringing down the total amount of debt being handled by the government initiative by 670 million baht. As of Dec 1, the initiative was handling about 9.8 billion baht in debt, which Mr Srettha pledged to clear up before his tenure as PM ends.
Not mentioned in that article is Srettha’s repeated attempts to cut interest rates, while the Bank of Thailand fights back against it. Just for those who may not know, interest rates are how much interest there is on debts. So, for example, if the interest rate is 10% annually, that’s how much your debt is going up. So if the interest rate is cut, to say 5%, your debt is increasing at a far slower rate.
A further taste of Phue Thai’s economic policies:
More than 9,000 rai of army-owned land will be redistributed as a New Year gift to landless farmers.
Time Magazine, April 2024:
Everything to Know About Thailand’s $14 Billion Digital Wallet Cash Handout The program, which gives 10,000 baht ($275) each to 50 million Thais via a digital wallet in the fourth quarter, was finalized by a committee led by Srettha this week.
These are national policies aiming to alleviate the burden on indebted farmers, doubtless these policies in some part will have an indirect impact of the smoke, but what of on the ground schemes? Much of the policies aimed directly at tackling the smoke revolve around the Phue Thai governor of Chiang Mai province Nirat Pongsitthaworn and the programs led by him during the short period between the election and the smoke season. The policies in Chiang Mai have been laid out this year as something of a trial program which will then extend to the rest of the Northern region.
To select from quotes from Thai PBS Policy Watch, Get to know the ‘Chiang Mai Model‘:
The central focus of the ‘Chiang Mai Model’ is that it allows various sectors in the area to participate in tackling the issue autonomously. Rather than waiting for the central government or outside people to give orders to the area.
It has set up a ‘war room’ to monitor the situation reflexively from the bottom up.
The concept of tackling fires has been changed from the previous Zero Burning police to one focused on Fire Management.
This is part of a quota system, which seeks to react to burning rates in different areas, permitting burning in certain places at certain times when appropriate.
Clearly the stubble (the crop waste) will also be tackled without fire, by financing machinery and the costs of gasoline. As well as establishing committees on transporting the waste, factories process it and forest land working groups.
In late 2023, before the smoke season began, the governor posted pictures on social media, showing literally an army of people going up the fields and clearing the land manually. Earlier we wrote that there are two possible ways to clear a field, one is with fire and the other would require an army… Well, in some places at least, this year, they got an army.
Insert pictures
All of the governing agencies involved have stressed that these policies are aimed at solving the problem in the short term, while long term it will require a deeper response. Again, whether Phue Thai still have the magic economic touch that they did in the Thaksin era is yet to be seen, they’ve only been in power for around 9 months at the time of writing, and have inherited a disastrous state of affairs. But, it’s important to look at the data. Again, in 2023 Chiang Rai had 20 days where the AQI was over 200, in 2024 there were only 2.
The current iteration of Phue Thai is far from perfect and it’s also the worst form of Phue Thai that could be, it’s certainly a long way from socialism. However, as with sugarcane, rice and corn, we have to look at trends, evidence, numbers, we have to talk to farmers and then we have to call it as we see it.
The Latifundia Revisited
We didn’t want to end this piece on too much of a positive note as the air outside the window is still grey, it’s 40 degrees with supposedly clear skies, yet the sun is hardly visible.
To summarise what we’ve seen during this investigation: At the end of WWII Thailand was a rice basket and the bulkhead for western imperialist anti-communist in Asia. The imperial powers developed the state’s bourgeois class and exterminated any revolutionary movements within its peasant and worker population. They opened up the country’s forests for settlers, pushing them into clearing the woodlands to produce more and more agricultural surplus for the market. Once any hope of revolution had been snuffed out by the 1980s, the bourgeois class ensnared them in debt, forcing yet more clearances.
The uplifting policies of the reformer, Thaksin Shinawatra were kiboshed by military coup. Pushing peasants even deeper into debt, forcing them into a hyper exploitative serf like relationship with the new mass-agribusinesses housed in Bangkok, creating a latifundia in the periphery of the state.
There, in that latifundia, the wonder-crop corn flourished, easily sowed, grown and harvested, corn production expanded 400% following the ousting of Thaksin and the imprisonment of the poor under debted bondage.
Mass agribusiness held the hands of the peasants as they set the waste product in the field aflame year after year. Billowing smoke into the hills, where it is trapped by the high mountain ridges, poisoning those very same peasants until the rainy season can relieve their suffering, or better yet, someday, a far more substantial change.