Thailand penalizes peasants, not real climate offenders
A recent decision by a Thai appellate court against 14 residents of Ban Sapwai, a village in the northeastern province of Chaiyaphum, proves again that peasant women are bearing the brunt of false climate-change solutions. Instead of committing to the goal of mitigating climate change by phasing out fossil-fuel industries, the Thai government has chosen to go after an easy target – the poor and the landless.
The 14 cassava-growing peasants, nine of them women, were found guilty by a lower court in 2018 of encroaching on a national park after forestry authorities filed complaints against the villagers for refusing to leave land belonging to Sai Thong National Park. They were given prison sentences ranging from five months to 1.5 years. This happened as a dedicated provincial task force was being set up to look into the forced evictions. The villagers together with the Isaan Land Reform Network, a member of a national land-rights movement called the People’s Movement for a Just Society (P-Move), had lobbied the Thai government to set up the task force.
Suluck Lamubol
