Gamekeepers and poachers

A prank that was popular when Murder on the Orient Express was put on general release was to scrawl upon posters advertising Agatha Christie’s whodunnit: "They all did it". If a film entitled Devastation in Thailand’s Forests was ever to be made, the prank would be quite unnecessary because universal guilt is a forgone conclusion.

The dismal assessment that every state agency with the most vague of connections to the Salween forests has been involved in one way or another in the rape of the environment was made by the head of the House Agriculture Committee. During an inspection of the war zone, the panel learned that guilt lay with senior figures in the army, police, and forestry, customs and local administration departments. The cast, as ever, would start with the extras, those paid a pittance to go into the forests with their saws and their elephants and confidence derived from the knowledge that they enjoy the protection of influential figures in business, politics and in the civil and military establishments. These are the landless farmers who have little to lose and a less than profound understanding of the damage they are doing the nation.

The influential figures directing operations have a deeper understanding of the damage they are doing but prefer to look at matters from a different perspective. They view trees, correctly, as an increasingly scarce natural resource and timber as a diminishing commodity that will fetch ever higher prices. Even those blind with ambition can see clearly how hardwood trees that are older than Bangkok can bring them the power, usually political, to absolve themselves of their atrocious crime. It matters little to them that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of farmers cannot scratch a living on land rendered arid and barren by wanton deforestation. It is a perverse reality in this country that many of those who have suffered directly from deforestation are used as political pawns by the very architects of their penury.

Before too long, the rainy season will be upon us and with it will come yet another reminder that deforestation causes soil erosion that leads to flash floods that kill people and ordinary flooding that causes significant and lasting economic damage. El Nino being capricious in nature, there is no way of telling what we are in for this year. But we can be certain the consequences of the greed of loggers will be visited upon us all in the form of flooding, higher prices or further economic difficulty.

The seriousness of forest devastation has still not been accepted in public life here. It is both a perversion and wicked abuse of the environment and it is an economic crime that, in our present state, borders on treason. And we have senior figures in organs of the state identified by the panel protesting that they know nothing - except that they and their friends are blameless.

The deputy director of the forestry department receives a five-million-baht windfall and knows nothing of its origin and neglects to report a bribery attempt to the authorities. The Mae Hong Son governor says he has been powerless to halt the logging. The army chief says the army has nothing to do with the logging. No one knows anything and yet the devastation continues.

Only when logging is seen for what it is - an economic crime and robbery of future generations - will our forests stand a remote chance of survival. And by the time the authorities are stirred into action, the chances are that ever greater areas of the country will be laid to waste and their inhabitants uprooted and dispossessed.