Poverty in Thailand

Thai children © Kris Herbst / Changemakers.net

Thanks to the strong performance of its economy during much of the 1990s, Thailand has already achieved most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The percentage of the population living below the national poverty line (based on the cost of essential food and non-food items) has been reduced from 27.2% in 1990 to 8.5% in 2007. With almost universal literacy and primary education enrolment, the country is now concentrating on improvement of access to secondary education.

Thailand has therefore set a range of more demanding targets, dubbed "MDG plus". These goals include the aim to reduce poverty to 4% by 2009 looks unlikely to be achieved, although there are hopes that poor farmers will benefit from higher food prices. Conscious of the widening divisions of wealth between rich and poor, and between rural and urban communities, Thailand has produced regional MDG Reports for three provinces, a rare example of the potential of decentralised policymaking based on MDGs.

Karenni refugees in Thailand © Ng Yuina

As the national MDG progress report notes, people in the hills of the north and in the three Muslim majority provinces in the south bordering Malaysia tend to be marginalised. Also, Thailand lags in MDG 3 (gender equality) due to the exceptionally low number of women in politics and in government employment. At the household level as well the traditional status of women in Thai culture is being exposed by evidence that domestic and sexual violence is far more common than previously assumed.

A most unusual feature of the generally positive progress towards the MDGs has been the influence of King Bhumibol, the world's longest reigning monarch, through his advocacy of a sufficiency economy. Drawing on Buddhist philosophy, the concept seeks to overcome the downside of globalisation through priority for sufficiency of human needs rather than inequality and excess. The Thai King is held in high regard among his people. While his authority is informal, he has traditionally played a stabilising role in Thai politics. His practical contribution to his people over 60 years was internationally recognized in 2006 by a UNDP human development award.

Health and HIV /AIDS in Thailand

Thailand has also done unexpectedly well to achieve near universal access to safe water and sanitation due to well-financed government programs. Health indicators have improved accordingly with rates of child and maternal mortality edging down towards those experienced in richer countries.

The quality of health services partly explains Thailand's high profile success in the fight against HIV/AIDS. By 1991 the heterosexual outbreak of AIDS in Thailand had become a national crisis. However, the prime minister at the time, Anand Panyarachun, assumed personal responsibility and instructed all cabinet ministers to develop AIDS plans for their sectors. By 1996, the AIDS budget amounted to US$90 million. A mass media campaign promoted condom use and the government relaxed its intolerance of the brothel industry and favoured enforcement of the use of condoms. Senator Mechai Viravaidya, nicknamed Mr Condom, established the Population and Community Development Association (PDA), which implemented a system of educational networking and condom distribution to the rural population.

Thailand has brought down the adult HIV prevalence rate from a peak of over 4% to 0.84%, with new annual infections falling by a factor of ten. Of 546,000 people living with HIV towards the end of 2007, over 133,000 now receive anti-retroviral drugs, about 85% of the total in need, a proportion achieved by only two other developing countries. This success towards universal access to treatment and care is possible in part because Thailand has been prepared to exploit concessions in patent laws laid down by the World Trade Organisation enabling generic alternatives to be produced domestically.

Apart from the acknowledged risk of complacency, the blemish on this record is Thailand’s neglect of other high risk groups, especially injecting drug users (IDUs), men having sex with men and migrant workers. Antipathy towards IDUs especially has led to their exclusion from prevention and treatment programmes and prevalence within that group remains over 30%. Migrant numbers may be as high as two million and Thailand cannot aspire to the global goal of universal access by 2010 until it protects these marginalized groups.
Climate Change in Thailand

Pak Mool Dam © Peter Charlesworth © People & the Planet

The potential impact of climate change in Thailand has attracted relatively little debate. For example, the Mekong River basin is central to the country’s agriculture and fisheries production but will be susceptible to changing rainfall patterns as well as the melting Himalayan glaciers. The worst floods in 100 years were experienced in the Mekong region in 2008. Dengue fever is an increasing problem, though it is so far attributed more to urban population growth than rising temperatures.

The global food crisis has thrust Thailand into the limelight as the world’s largest exporter of rice. Given that the crop is already grown at the limits of its potential yield, the prospect of climate change is a deepening concern. Bangkok itself is on the front line against the threat of rising sea levels – each year the City sinks by several centimetres whilst the adjacent coastline retreats by 5-20 metres. The risk of storm surges also rises with temperature. The tsunami tragedy of 2004 demonstrated how the clearance of about half of Thailand’s natural protection of mangrove forests along the coastline has removed a crucial defence against the ocean.
Politics in Thailand

Make Trade Fair, Thailand © Oxfam America

Neglect of the impacts of climate change is just one example of the failure of Thailand’s dysfunctional politicians to meet the expectations of their citizens. Of even greater immediacy, the global financial crisis presents problems for the Thai economy which weak leadership and a tottering government are in no condition to address.

For better or worse, strong government was a feature of the administrations of Thaksin Shinawatra following the overwhelming victories of his populist Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party in elections in 2000 and again in 2005. A platform that emphasised redistribution of wealth won unswerving popularity amongst the rural poor, overwhelming suspicions that Thaksin's true priority lay in enriching the interests of his family and close associates. However, criticism surrounding the $1.9 billion, tax-exempt sale of Shin Corporation, a telecoms giant owned by the prime minister's family, greatly diminished Thaksin's authority and prompted the army to revive Thailand's history of military coups, with the tacit support of the King and urban business elites.

The head of the army, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, took control in September 2006, while Thaksin attended a UN summit, by replacing all government institutions with martial law. The Constitutional Court dissolved the TRT party, banned over 100 of its leaders from politics for 5 years and froze Thaksin’s multi-billion dollar assets. A 25-person committee, selected by the military's Council for National Security (CNS), drafted a new Constitution designed to weaken the power of future governments in relation to the military and judiciary but which was passed by a referendum of dubious legitimacy held in August 2007.

The military honoured the promise to hold fresh elections in December 2007 but efforts to justify the coup through proof that Thaksin was guilty of massive fraud and to banish his political influence have failed. The case against Thaksin could not be brought until after the election and he was eventually convicted and sentenced on a minor charge – before which he fled to the UK, with little difficulty, to seek asylum. Meanwhile the People Power Party (PPP) formed to replace the TRT was returned to power by Thaksin’s loyal rural constituency and Samak Sunderavej became head of a coalition government. Attempts through the courts to dissolve the PPP on grounds of vote-buying and allegations that the party is a proxy for the discredited Thaksin were refused.

Unable to achieve power through the ballot box or at the Supreme Court, the opposition People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) has plumbed greater depths with a constitutional proposal that votes of the rural “uneducated” provinces should carry less weight than the urban vote. Meanwhile the party’s largely middle class Bangkok supporters took to the streets in June 2008. Enjoying overt training by the army and a hint of support from the monarchy, these PAD activists occupied Government House, humiliating ministers and officials by blockading normal business.

Violence resulting from the police response was the most serious in Bangkok for 16 years and led to the declaration of a state of emergency. For its part, the PPP missed an opportunity for reconciliation in September 2008 by appointing Thaksin’s brother-in-law, Somchai Wongsawat, as the replacement prime minister for Sunderavej who was ordered to resign for presenting cookery TV programmes. These intractable divisions in Thai politics remain defined by individuals rather than substantive policy differences.
Conflict in Thailand

Treatment as second-class citizens by Buddhist-dominated governments may be a source of the conflict involving Muslim separatists in the southernmost Muslim provinces. The region is less prosperous than the rest of Thailand and has more cultural affinity with Malaysia - indeed the status of the province of Pattani has always been unsettled and a separatist group known as Mujahadeen Islam Pattani may have become more active, amongst others. Speculation also centres on Islamic fundamentalism, perhaps provoked by the fact that Thailand has allied itself with the United States over the "war on terror".

Thaksin declared martial law in the region in January 2004, giving the government authority to censor the media and detain individuals suspected of insurgent activities. The continuing recruitment of village militias to work alongside the regular army has not been conducive to moves towards ethnic reconciliation. All sides have been guilty of human rights violations and the insurgency has evolved into a disturbing pattern of attacks on government schools and hospitals.

Despite periodic gestures of ceasefire and negotiation, little progress has been made on solid ideas for a political settlement since a 2006 National Reconciliation Commission was brushed aside by Thaksin. Since 2004 the violence has claimed more than 3000 lives.
Human Rights in Thailand

The severity with which Thaksin's government enforced the state of emergency in the south attracted the attention of human rights organizations, concerned about the scale of the killings and the lack of independent reports permitted from the region. The same concern applied to that government's war on drugs launched in February 2003. The measures led to the extra-judicial killing of nearly 2500 drug offenders. A committee set up in 2007 to consider prosecutions for these killings concluded that there was no evidence. Police and security forces continue to enjoy a culture of impunity, indeed the Act on the Maintenance of National Security passed by the military government on its last day in office extends yet more powers to the army in response to undefined threats to national security.

Tham Hin refugee camp on the Burmese-Thai border © International Rescue Committee

Thailand's poor human rights image is not helped by its history of intimacy with Burma's military government, which preserves billions of dollars of trade and investment to the benefit of both countries. Burma’s appalling treatment of its Karen and Karenni ethnic minorities has led to a significant flow of refugees across the border where their reception has fallen below international standards. Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and, since 2007, the government has refused permission for the UN Refugee Agency to conduct registration formalities despite being unable to provide an adequate service itself.

Of the two million migrants in Thailand, as many as 200,000 may be eligible for refugee status but are instead treated as illegal migrants, living in fear of deportation at any time. Over 140,000 refugees who have obtained registration are permanently confined to nine camps near the border, with limited rights to education and jobs. Since 2005 the UN Refugee Agency has been implementing one of the world's largest resettlement programmes, potentially involving new lives for nearly 60,000 refugees by 2009, the majority settling in the US.
Information and Media in Thailand

Thailand, harnessing globalization © MAG / Changemakers.net

Thai citizens face strong content-based restrictions on the websites they are allowed to access, including international sites such as YouTube. Successive governments, whether military or elected, have been obsessive about criticism, rushing through legislation such as the Computer Offences Act.

Mainstream media in Thailand already exercises a level of self-censorship concerning royalty, which is legally protected from criticism, as well as the military. The government and military own and operate most of the television networks and have taken increasing measures to control content in recent years, particularly in the southern regions covered by the state of emergency. Thailand's position in the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders has dropped sharply since 2004.


Kavitha Nallathambi has obtained her MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics following an undergraduate degree from Emory University in International Studies and Journalism. Kavitha has interned for CNN Headline News and COXNet and has worked for The Carter Center in Atlanta, USA. She is currently working at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, USA as project manager for the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS

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