The reality of what the warming alarmists and environmentalists refer to as the “polluter pays principal” and the new post Rio+20 scam of “loss and damage” has been played out in Thailand since 2006. The Thai government has computed a formula where already financially poor farmers are being fined crippling amounts of money for causing global warming, the fines are not only for the current generation of farmers, but also for the environmental impact their ancestors caused by cutting down trees and farming the land hundreds of years ago.
Small farmers in the Baan Pra village of Thailand’s southern Trang province have been living in anxiety ever since they were slapped with stiff fines by the government in 2006 and ordered to vacate their ancestral lands for ‘contributing to global warming’.
Last month, the villagers, after suffering bankruptcy and loss of land, appealed in an administrative court, pleading against a controversial formula used by the department of national park, wildlife and plant conservation under the environment ministry to compute the fines and evict them.
Baan Pra’s ordeal is not an isolated. Thousands of smallholders with farmlands abutting national forests have been in distress ever since the environment ministry began enforcing the 1992 National Environmental Quality Act five years ago.
Thai farmers are being fined huge sums of money for causing global warming by farming their ancestral land.
So far 2000 farmers have been fined for causing “destruction, loss or damage to natural resources owned by the state”, the law allows the Government to penalise farmers who farm in areas around national forests.
“Being charged for causing global warming and fined sums of money they never dreamt of owning were a big shock to the villagers,” said Boon Saejung, LRN coordinator in Baantad mountain area which covers four southern provinces including Trang.
According to Boon, farmers in the area have survived for generations on produce from their ancestral lands, long before government proclaimed them as national parks. Most of them own plots no bigger than 15 rais (24,000 sq m). With the new laws being enforced many have been dispossessed of their lands.
Exactly what the Thai governments motives really are have yet to be seen, though history shows us clearly that methods like these are used when vested interests want the land cleared of the people who get in the way of the get rich schemes, in much the same way that the “Highland Clearances” were used during the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain.
Critics of the formula question why small-scale farmers are being singled out for punishment on environmental damage charges, using the global warming formula.
“Neither small farmers nor their communities are the main contributors to global warming. They are now facing unjust measures and there is a need to find a solution to this,” Boon said.
The Thai Government has enacted a law that demonstrates exactly what to expect from the environmentalists and their polluters pays principal, a Green zealot with an erroneous formula for calculating retrospectively the environmental damage caused by your grandparents.