Government gives land to landless peasants

The government has announced its plans to spend land on poor landless farmers. The recently formed National Land Policy Committee has decided in its first meeting to form three sub-panels to deal with land acquisition, selection of eligible farmers and assistance to farmers in cultivating the land.

The Ministry of the Interior has already drawn up a list of underprivileged farmers. That list also includes those who have been driven from their land. [I assume it refers to those who already owned land before it was granted protected area status.] The land will not be issued to individuals, but to cooperatives or other legal entities.

But despite this condition Bangkok Post little confidence in the initiative. In its editorial on Thursday, the newspaper called it "a noble idea," but a look into the past shows that previous programs (the first in 1943) have largely failed.

Over the past 20 years, XNUMX million rai has been redistributed, but most of the land has ended up in the hands of large landowners through resale.

The government would not land in so-called degraded (neglected, degraded) forests, but land that has illegally come into the hands of the large landowners, the newspaper quotes a coordinator of the Assembly of the Poor, a network of poor farmers. "This program should only go ahead when it is certain that the land will go to the right farmers."

Prime Minister Prayut is confident. In his weekly TV talk last night, he said the land is not given away, it remains the property of the state, and is only issued after audits show that the issuance is correct. "The government doesn't want the country to end up in the hands of the rich."

(Source: bangkok mail, Nov. 8, 2014)