Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-22T07:02:10.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Monk, the Hmong, the Forest, the Cabbage, Fire and Water: Incongruities in Northern Thailand Opium Replacement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Ronald D. Renard
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Farmers in the Hmong village of Pa Kluai have replaced outlawed opium production with production of cabbages for urban markets. But because cabbage, unlike opium, requires the use of irrigation and pesticides, Thai farmers living downstream from Pa Kluai blame the Hmong for deforesting hills and polluting streams. Unsuccessful attempts to resolve the conflict between Hmong villagers and their lowland neighbors illustrate conflicts over what it means to be Thai, pointing to problems with the so-called three pillars of modern Thai society: race, religion, and king. Not only do the Hmong have different customs from Thai villagers but as swidden farmers who fell and farm upland forests, they come into conflict with Royal Forestry Department plans to preserve forests in watersheds. A Buddhist monk, dismayed by deforestation, has joined Thai villagers in protesting the cabbage-growing Hmong. And the king, who has tried to win the loyalty of highland groups, proposed that opium fields not be destroyed until viable replacement crops were available. So far, efforts to resolve the conflict by relocating the Hmong has failed, due to lack of a suitable alternative site.

Type
Part III: Land & the Natural Environment
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Law & Society in Southeast Asia , 1994 , pp. 657 - 664
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Few topics arouse more contention than the impact of shifting cultivation on forests. Many authorities now agree, however, that if there is ample room for swidden agriculture and if allowance is made for ten or more years to pass before a particular portion of the forest is cultivated again, soil quality need not be seriously reduced. See Zinke et al. (1978) for the results of a study to the west of Chiang Mai. Villages inhabited by the tribal group studied by Zinke et al. have been in certain sites for over 400 years. They surely were engaging in the same agricultural practices earlier.

2 As early as the reign of King Vajiravudh, some Muslim leaders gave the king the title Protector of Islam. See Yoneo Ishii's essay in this volume.

3 The Thammayut sect has maintained a close relationship with Thai royalty. The current king, for example, when he became a monk, was ordained at Wat Bowonniwet, the same monastery at which Prince Mongkut was the abbot in the previous century. A former abbot of this monastery is now the Supreme Patriarch. All persons holding this position since the inception of the Thammayut sect, except one, have been Thammayut monks.

4 The anthropologist William Geddes (1978), who studied Mae Tho in the 1950s and 1960s, called the village “Meto.”