Thailand’s Haze Bandits

The challenges of living under this “transboundary haze,” to refer to it by the prevailing term of art, are something that I experienced first-hand during the two years that I lived in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, from 2018 until 2020. Spread out at the foot of the hill of Doi Suthep, and ringed by verdant paddy fields, the city is one of the most charming in the lower Mekong region, with fantastic food and a fascinating history of cultural intercourse, commanding easy access to the country’s upland provinces.

But during the annual “smoky season” – roughly from February to April, though frequently extending beyond – Chiang Mai was a veritable health hazard. At these times, the city would shoot to the top of the list of the cities with the worst air pollution in the world, not infrequently registering “hazardous” levels of PM2.5 concentration. The sky would take on a dull, blue-gray hue that darkened the sun to a yellow glare. The air would carry the scent of burning.

Air quality monitors and air purifiers became a part of daily life, at least for those fortunate enough to be able to afford them, and the use of uncomfortable N95 respirator masks was common among the city’s population long before the advent of COVID-19. (As it turns out, Chiang Mai was the first city outside China to register a confirmed case of the virus, in February 2020, at the very time when many people were already beginning to don masks to protect against that year’s “smoky season.”)

The pollution does not just affect Chiang Mai: A quick look at the region’s air quality map would typically show unhealthy concentrations of PM2.5 pollutants across much of mainland Southeast Asia, particularly in the rugged upland regions of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar.

As I experienced them, the short-term effects of exposure to high levels of PM2.5 pollution included a sore throat, stinging eyes, and headaches. Over the longer term the effects of exposure are more dire. Dr. Rangsarit Kanchanawanit from the Faculty of Medicine at Chiang Mai University told the Bangkok Post recently that frequent exposure to high levels of air pollution increased the risks of lung cancer, heart disease, and stroke, and shortened people's lifespan by up to five years. In April of this year, about 1,700 people in Chiang Mai brought a lawsuit against then-Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha and two state agencies for failing to tackle the seasonal smog problem.

Despite its likely health and economic impacts, Southeast Asia’s air pollution problem has received relatively little media attention. Last month, however, Greenpeace Southeast Asia released a report shedding fresh light on one of the primary causes: the rapid expansion of maize cultivation for the production of animal feed. Based on a satellite analysis of land-use changes in Myanmar’s Shan State, eight of Thailand’s northern provinces, and seven provinces of northern Laos, the report identified a massive conversion of forest to corn plantations over the past decade.

According to the report, more than 11.8 million rai (1.88 million hectares) of forested area in the northern regions of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos has been converted to maize cultivation since 2015.

Northern Laos saw the most forest encroachment, with about 5.7 million rai converted to maize farms since 2015. In Myanmar’s Shan State, 3.1 million rai of forest was destroyed, while northern Thailand saw 2.9 million rai cleared to make way for corn production. Between 2021 and mid-2023 alone, the report stated, 1 million rai of the region’s forest was lost to maize farming – as Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported, an area more than twice the size of New York City.

“Our study shows that the maize industry continues to play a key role in destroying forests in the Mekong subregion,” Tara Buakamsri, the country director for Greenpeace Thailand, told RFA last month. “It is also primarily responsible for the toxic air pollution that has become an annual affair.”

The reason for the pollution is simple: Many of the region’s maize farmers use fire to burn the “stubble” of each year’s crop. As contract farmers who are employed by agribusiness giants and forced to operate on very narrow margins, this is the easiest and most cost effective way for them to clear fields before the subsequent planting season.

According to a research paper published last month in the journal Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, maize cultivation began to expand rapidly in northern Thailand in the 1980s, in line with the sudden growth of the country’s commercial animal feed industry. Since then, peasant farmers in the region, some belonging to highland minority groups, “have been compelled to abandon traditional swidden [rotational] agricultural practices and move into chemical- and credit-intensive monocropping of maize.”

Because Thailand’s annual domestic maize production has failed to meet the growing demand of the country’s animal feed industry, now one of the world’s largest, the country began to import maize from neighboring countries. This stimulated the expansion of similar monocropping practices into rural parts of Myanmar and Laos. This has in turn worsened the transboundary haze and compounded the difficulties in controlling it – especially given the limited writ of the central state in remote parts of these countries.

All told, the lower Mekong region’s transnational pollution problem may well be among the most visible manifestation of Thailand’s, and the region’s, deeply unequal political economy. As the authors of the above paper pointed out, the outcome has been bad for virtually everyone except for the country’s animal feed industry.

“We observe heavily indebted and disempowered farmers with weak land tenure, severe soil erosion, constantly engaged in land conflicts with the state, virtually forced to encroach upon forests, and blamed by society for widespread air pollution at a regional level,” the article stated. “The corporate players are the winners in this system, whereas farmers and the environment are losers.”

Among the greatest beneficiaries of this situation have been Thai agricultural giants like Betagro and Charoen Pokphand Foods (CP Foods), part of the tentacular CP Group, powerful companies with close connections to the highest levels of politics. In addition to producing animal feed for export, these firms also use it in the production of poultry, pork, and other meats, of which Thailand is also an increasingly prominent exporter. (Much of this, too, is produced under exploitative contract farming arrangements.)

The political prominence of these corporate interests makes any direct action by the Thai government hard to imagine. 

In 2017, the five lower Mekong countries – Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam – adopted the Chiang Rai Plan of Action, which sets out steps for the region to address transboundary pollution and has led to sporadic diplomatic engagements in the years since. While the plan set the five nations a target of reducing the number of “hotspots” – areas with fires according to satellite data – by 30 percent by 2023, and 40 percent by 2025, the situation continues to worsen. Greenpeace data showed that the number of observed hotspots actually increased slightly between 2020 and 2023, from 161,728 to 162,218.

In April, Prayut, then Thailand’s prime minister, held a meeting with Lao Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone and Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the chief of Myanmar’s military government, aimed at addressing the haze problem. In a statement, Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that the three leaders “discussed constructive and concrete approaches to tackle this common problem.”

At the meeting, Prayut proposed a “CLEAR Sky Strategy” with five points cutely corresponding to the five letters of the word “clear.” Heavy on generalities, the strategy, like most regional initiatives to address air pollution, skirted around the central question of who benefits from the continued pollution of the region’s air.

The plan’s most substantial point pledged “efforts to exchange information and experience, as well as the legal undertakings by each country to control and contain sources of transboundary haze pollution.” But based on past precedent, it is unlikely to confront the powerful corporate interests that incentivize agricultural burn-off, without which the region’s air pollution problem is likely to persist, if not worsen.