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. 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. Since then, peasant farmers in the region, some belonging to highland minority groups, “have been compelled to abandon traditional swidden 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. 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.