Every time I think I’ve seen the craziest thing yet about global warming mania…along comes something else. From the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific blog, comes this bizarre story from Thailand that shows what lengths a government will go to to slap a global warming fine on farmers.
Humans cutting down forest land to farm is nothing new. However, charging rural farmers for causing global warming is. A controversial formula is quantifying the damage villagers have to pay for their small scale farming. Now, the villagers are taking a stand against what they know is wrong.
PHETCHABUN – Early one Thursday morning, a gun was pointed at Ms. Kwanla Saikhumtung, a 34-year-old mother, because she was farming.
The man who pointed the gun was one of ten armed officers from Phu Pha Daeng, the local wildlife sanctuary in Lomsak district. After observing the villagers for three days, the officers finally informed Ms. Kwanla and twelve fellow villagers from Huay Kontha that they were trespassing on wildlife sanctuary land. They demanded that the villagers come to the police station to talk with them.
They refused. The villager that hired them paid taxes on the plot, leading the villagers to believe they had a right to work the land, and they worried about finishing their work.
The officers quickly became annoyed. One threatened to shoot any villager that resisted the officers’ orders.
“Are you really going to shoot? I’m here to harvest the corn, and you want to shoot us?” Ms. Kwanla shouted. She then bravely grabbed the barrel of the gun, pressed it to her chest, and said, “If you’re going to shoot, shoot.”
The officer lowered his gun. That night, the officers marched the reluctant villagers through the community and drove them to the police station.
This incident was the beginning of a seven-year-long legal battle, pitting Ms. Kwanla against the Thai government. She and the other twelve villagers — the youngest only sixteen at the time — were first charged with trespassing.
The real shock, however, came when they were slapped with a 470,000 baht fine for contributing to global warming under the charge of causing environmental damage.
As the landowner was paying taxes on the plot of land in question, he had the right to grow crops on it. Since Ms. Kwanla and the other villagers had been hired to harvest his corn, it had seemed that they were not breaking the law by being there. However, unknown to the landholder, his plot overlapped with the wildlife sanctuary land.
The Royal Forestry Department (RFD) fined the villagers for cutting down trees and farming, drawing from the 1992 National Environmental Quality Act which forbids “destruction, loss, or damage to natural resources owned by the State.” Their fine was determined according to a formula used to calculate environmental damage. The formula measures the increase in temperature caused by cutting down trees. Any increase in the land temperature shows ‘global warming’. In essence, cutting down trees to farm corn leads to global warming.
The Huay Kontha villagers have a running joke, “Because we pick the corn, the world gets hotter.”
The charges that Ms. Kwanla and the other villagers face shed light on an emerging trend in Thailand. Land dispute issues are becoming increasingly common. According to Pramote Pholpinyo, coordinator of the Northeast Land Reform Network (LRN), there are currently 35-40 “global warming” cases against villagers in Thailand, with charges amounting to almost 33 million baht.
Full story at the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific blog
===========================================
h/t to WUWT reader “brokenyogi“
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Richard Tyndal: …on a fast shrinking resource.
Land prohibited from being used by the people who need it is not a resource.
the flooding in Thailand last year was alarming by any definition of the word, it’s a good idea that they are stopping the deforestation that has no doubt contributed to this massive problem
Do the eco loons who promulgate the AGW alarmism scam ever look at these events and think – ‘oh dear, unintended consequences’.
Or do they think ‘yesssss, there’s no limit to how we can control the population’.
Richard Tyndall says:
June 30, 2012 at 1:51 am
‘…given how much of the tropical forests have been destroyed and what that has meant for wildlife I don’t think it is unreasonable for the authorities to try and punish those who continue to encrouch on a fast shrinking resource.’
Food is a somewhat valuable resource also.
more liberal wackiness:
Genghis Khan hailed as environmentalist for ‘scrubbing’ humanity’s carbon footprint: http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=255473#ixzz1DBJ8hyDG
Scientists claim global warming destroyed Rome: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=252957
Rome fell because of what?: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=255573
Dinosaur flatulence may have led to global warming: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/dinosaur-flatulence-may-led-global-warming-154336900.html
powermongers have always been at war with farmers. Any excuse to attack them is used
Read the comments at the site of the original article. Some people really do Not give a damn about the lives of the poor.
(this may show more than once, as I am having connection troubles.)
i agree with Richard Tyndall above. The reasoning “contributing to global warming” is pretty silly. The fact that local farmers are stopped cutting forests in nature reserves is a necessary act. That these policeman carry guns is given the amount of highly armed poachers around also nothing to be surprised about.
Why would the government even sell the land if it was part of a wildlife sanctuary?
Not an “Australian” Patrick a WATERMELON and proof that brain death is not fatal.Climate Change is Natural and CO2 is life.
“Kelvin Vaughan says:
June 30, 2012 at 3:10 am”
I disagree. A British BILLION was a MILLION MILLION however, the accepted international standard for BILLION is 1000 MILLION. No confusion there, for me at least.
“Richard Tyndall says:
June 30, 2012 at 1:51 am”
Seriously, any relation?
Last few days before Australian climate madness takes effect
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/
And this is not at gunpoint ?
“And of course, it will do NOTHING for the climate.”
I am disturbed that the readers of this blog — normally reasonable thinkers — are somehow supporting these folks who are turning a nature preserve into farmland and mocking the government who is trying to stop them. Let’s read a little deeper, folks, and not be so Pavlovian whenever the word “global warming” appears.
“agwnonsense says:
June 30, 2012 at 5:49 am”
Say what?
The landowner should have known that part of his land was a nature preserve. The poor farmer probably doesn’t know. Is the boundary well marked? Lot’s of unknowns in this story.
‘As the landowner was paying taxes on the plot of land in question, he had the right to grow crops on it’
Sorry, madman2001, there seems to be a Disagreement as to who owns the land, don’t you think?
How else can they impose global warming laws but at gunpoint?
The land existed and was owned
A law was passed and some of the land became part of a nature reserve
So was the owner compensated. Did the Land Office verify the boundaries. Was the owner informed. Reeks of arbitrary line drawing by incompetents yet again ( African national boundaries)
The owner rents out the land to farmers. He gets rent, they get land to farm and feed themselves.
Police then take guns to the farmers but not the and owner? Why ?
Same pattern we see around the world. Money talks.Corruption pays. Lack of work, the Land Office, gets rewarded.
The poor pay.
Sad to see the anti farmer comments, nobody sees fit to explain to them or compensate them
There is a danger that some of these third world-wildlife sanctuaries may become analogous to the Norman ‘royal forests.’ (Google ‘Norman Yoke’) Reigning monarchs should beware; Robin Hood has many descendents. They still consider Sherwood Forest their own….
For those who are knowledgeable of local conditions, please hold your giggles:
1. Why was the land registrar not fired for double registering land?
2. Why was the tax collector not fired for collecting tax on tax exempt land?
3. Why was the title company insurance policy not activated?
4. Why were the surveyors performance bonds not revoked when they failed to identify the correct, non-overlapping boundaries?
5. Why were the border postings on the edge of the preserve taken down?
In a functioning system there are multiple layers of protection that should have stopped this situation long before the police walked out into the fields and started pointing weapons. Thailand’s system broke down and failed its people long before that day when the police came.
This is a very good blog which I read regularly and appreciate for its ability to balance the often alarmist agw agenda being pushed by the main stream media.
However this post is an example of wuwt using the same sensationalist tactics which it so often critisizes
Unecissary, à mistake and does much to damage the reputation of wuwt in my opinion
[REPLY: The mast-head reads …and news, which this is. I would also like you to take a look at the site policy page. You have commented here as “Paul”, “Paul Sheraton”, “Airforce1”, “strawbale” and now “strawbale23”. Please pick one screen name and stick with it. -REP]
[SNIP: You are right. It is off-topic. -REP]
Richard Tyndall says:
June 30, 2012 at 1:51 am
My first impression is that there is a ‘spin’ being put on this story to make it seem far mroe extreme than it really is and paint the Thai authorities as being unreasonable when all they are doing is trying to protect their nature reserves.
The story seems to indicate the farmland was illegally cut out of protected forests and whatever silly ‘warming’ reason they might tack on the end, given how much of the tropical forests have been destroyed and what that has meant for wildlife I don’t think it is unreasonable for the authorities to try and punish those who continue to encrouch on a fast shrinking resource.
================================================================
Richard, the “protection” of the forests were most likely retroactively applied. It’s a sick game which gets played. Through arm twisting and bribery and blackmail, some NGOs and some governmental entities convince underdeveloped nations to cordon off huge tracts of land as “wildlife refuges”. Often, the people inhabiting the land are simply displaced, or killed, if they move to slow. Here’s an example…..http://suyts.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/systematic-war-on-the-poor/
These atrocities are brought to you by: Clean Development Mechanism, the Nature Conservancy and the African Wildlife Foundation, New Forest Company (via Kyoto protocol), Department for International Development, and many others.
It’s like the Khmer Rouge all over again: All the original Cambodian mulberry trees, that the silk worms feed on, were cut down by the Khmer Rouge, which labelled them a “non-productive crop” and claimed that wearers of silk were proponents of a bourgeois, Westernised consumer base “festering” in Cambodian cities.
These people have to be stopped. The insanity to prevent people from making a living the old hard way is beyond all reason. Green IS the new RED.
Steve C says:
June 30, 2012 at 12:14 am
That is just marvelous, Steve C. So by retired Professor of Psychology Bob Altemeyer’s definition, any person “who has a high degree of willingness to submit to authorities he perceives as established and legitimate, who adheres to societal conventions and norms, and who is hostile and punitive in his attitudes towards people who don’t adhere to them.”
cannot be a left-winger.
In other words, Bob Altemeyer defines leftism as pure and innocent and the right wing as evil.
Excuse me while I puke. BTW I got the definition from the leftist bible so don’t accuse me of distorting the NPOV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Wing_Authoritarianism
Did he get some kind of George Orwell award for his redefinition of words?