JCauto

Yes, terrible to have a bunch of happy, hungry, chilled-out tourists minding their own business, spending money and having fun. Better to have Russians, the return of mass Chinese no-dollar tourism or something else that I'm missing?

LOLOLOL! You must REALLY be new here! Have you ever heard of an "inactive post"?

New here?

Terrible camera work. Good on the refs for letting them go. Should have been able to have a better looking set of ring girls. Poor standup and grappling by the fighters, low level promotion.

Quick! Commission a NIDA Poll!

That is incorrect. There are statistically significant and properly designed polls that eliminate or severely reduce bias if conducted properly. Then there is NIDA, the type of pollster whom those in power say "give me a poll with these results" and they tend to oblige.

Did someone who actually studied statistics sneak into NIDA and accidentally conduct a real poll? They'll be sacked in the morning once the Great Leader looks into his NIDA mirror to ask "who is the fairest of them all?" and hears "Paetongtarn Shinawatr" in return.

Okay, this is a much smaller issue, one that has a barely discernable impact on the smoke and haze as a whole (there's no comparison in the amount of biomass being burned in a swidden field versus some leaves in a back yard or temple), however one that is much more annoying to you since it is happening nearby so you gain the full sensory experience. Perhaps this is an opportunity for you to learn and understand? Take some Thai lessons and start conversing with your neighbours, see if you can figure out why it is that they don't do what seems such a simple thing for your local village environment. Start a demo project and build composters and a home garden and invite the local kids to join you in growing vegetables. Participate in your local community and get to know the people here. Maybe you can start the change that you want to see! ...or just whine incessantly in an expatriate forum about what a bunch of savages the local people are and how they ought to be held to higher standards.

I don't hold people to standards, I don't work for the ISO nor am I a government environmental officer or something like that. I work in rural development and forest conservation in Laos so I deal with the reality of life that the people who live there face. This reality includes grinding poverty and subsistence farming. There are zero viable alternatives for those people to suddenly adopt permaculture, something that takes many years of labour and investment that they simply don't have so can't even consider as a possibility. They also can't take big risks in growing for the market with long-term products that might gain them better prices because of the time it takes before it can be sold. It's a complex issue that you appear to believe one can solve by simply informing people that they must do (A), (B) or (C) or else they will be replaced by people who will with some kind of police state to enforce this upon millions of citizens (albeit second class ones). This is absurd and awful - you cannot dispose of people because they make your air quality poor for a few months. You have money and so can come to Thailand and enjoy your retirement. You actually don't have more rights than these people whom you are so ready to dispose of, you have less. Shut up and accept that you have a bit of smoke in the dry season or move to some other expatriate haven where you can whine about the natives. Check your privilege.

Thailand is a much more developed economy than the others in the region, so by now many of the highland people have joined the market economy so you see them bringing food to market. You don't seem to realize that much of the burning is occurring in Laos, Myanmar and Southern China and the smoke is carried by the wind into Thailand. Their situation is much different, they are much poorer. Were you a Marxist Economist in your previous life before you came to Thailand? You seem obsessed by the idea of moving people around like they're commodities to be pushed to the correct location for the optimal means of production. These are indigenous people who live in these places and have for hundreds of years. You can't "replace" them, what do you think that means in a practical manner? Trucking people by force into camps? Selling their land to more responsible companies or farmers and forcing them into the cities? These are people, they have rights. You can't simply decide that their existence is bothersome so they have to leave.

Those "forest fires" you see are not forest fires for the most part, they're people's fields being burned in the uplands. They are not burning uncontrolled for weeks unless exacerbated by some other factors. Those places aren't forest because it's a lot of work to grow upland crops in forested land. They grow upland crops instead in degraded land that USED to be forest but is now part of that family's rotational land. Swidden Agriculture varies from 4 to as much as 15 year rotations depending on the land, land pressure, the culture of the farmers and whether they practice individual family farming or communal farming. The field preparation involves clearing and piling up the vegetation, then burning it in a series of controlled burns. This is obviously a huge amount of work if it is forest instead of scattered trees, shrubbery, bamboo and other vegetation. Farmers don't have the means, equipment or strength to deal with larger trees. This is how logging leads to land clearing. The Loggers go in and build access roads to the forest, take out the big trees and then many of the remaining ones are cleared out in the subsequent phases of logging by small-scale operators. At that point the land is ideal for upland swidden agriculture since the farmers have road access and new land that has been conveniently cleared for them already.

You propose "replacing" the farmers? Where will they go? What will they do? Is this forced resettlement to put them in camps and such? You can live with completely destroying the lives and cultures of millions of poor people because you can't stand the air pollution for a couple of months in the dry season?

So you believe that a viable practice to reduce burning is for people to pick up leaf waste from their yards that have basically ended up there because of falling from the trees in the forest and being blown by the wind, and then walk back up into the forest with great bags of leaf waste and dump it back onto the forest floor? I...don't even know where to start. You have such a lack of understanding of the issue I might better talk to a tree and request it to not drop its leaves for fear of inconveniencing the older White gentleman living nearby.

Of course it would crash food production and the people would starve. This is how they eat, it's subsistence agriculture meaning agriculture for production of enough food, medicines and the like to keep the family alive. To completely change the agricultural production system would take decades and a heck of a lot of external assistance and based on results of these efforts in numerous places to date they would be almost totally ineffective. Nobody has really succeeded in getting wholesale change to take place in these remote and poor upland communities and it's not been for lack of trying, budget, technology or any other factor. This is what I have been trying to explain. It seems so easy! But it's practically impossible. As to "being held hostage", those people who are burning were there long before anyone else in the region, so they're the indigenous who have had their land repeatedly stolen from them as they were pushed further and further away as development by lowlanders happened. These same lowlanders then take over the government of the land where these people have lived and farmed for thousands of years and try to ban these practices without providing any alternative livelihoods for the people while simultaneously selling off their land to corporations for plantation establishment and making their traditional practices "illegal". They then try to promote economic measures like tourism to bring people like yourself to the region where they'll spend money and fill the coffers of those same lowlanders who own all the tourism infrastructure and have by now dispossessed the highlanders from their more picturesque locations which they then take ownership of. The foreign expatriates who have by now found a discount retirement location then show up on fora like this, whine about the air quality and propose additional draconian measures to make the life of the poor even worse for their own minor convenience.

Yes, nobody ever managed to achieve change from going up against the authorities and being disruptive. You achieve change by meekly doing what you're told, accepting the status quo given you by the A-maat and wait for Karma to take its course. Shouldn't be more than a couple hundred years more before that'll do the trick.

I certainly agree with your last sentence, but it's going to take some time if it ever happens to fight uphill against the entrenched corporate interests who are perfectly fine to watch the world burn in the name of maximizing shareholder value while building their doomsday bunkers. As to the previous ones, recall my point that these are subsistence agriculturalists, not market farmers. They grow quite a diverse range of different food, herbs and medicinal plants on their plots including their staple, upland rice, and alternative sources of carbs such as tubers. They seldom are involved in the market economy other than low-level trading of Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) and the like, so have traditionally had no dealings with the larger corporations, only itinerant rural traders. We are seeing now where Chinese businesses (in the North) and commodities traders (particularly cassava in the South) are heavily influencing cropping decisions so that farmers will now grow those crops on contract or lease their land to the businesses. However, they will seldom stop growing their own subsistence crops so will add those to the overall land use. This is how plantation companies and private sector pressurize land use and cause larger areas to be burned on an annual basis in Laos.

I believe they're accepting foreign nationals who wish to join in the battle, and aren't particularly picky. Here's your chance Billy Big <deleted>! Off the the Russian Front with you!

It's known as "swidden", or more colloquially "slash and burn", a system of rotational agriculture where you cut down the vegetation, burn it in a series of controlled fires to reduce it to ash and open the land for cropping, plant a number of different crops on the land (dibble sticks and seeds usually) then rotate to another plot in the next year to do the same. By having several plots, farmers can leave the old land fallow for several years so vegetation re-establishes and fertility can recover before it is the time for the plot to be burned again. They have put a lot of effort into changing this system in Thailand and have probably succeeded for the most part with a combination of carrot, stick and the overall development of the economy to where there are numerous viable job alternatives for the people. Pity about the loss of their culture, but can't have everything! When there were major fires in CM in the more recent past, it was generally tied to CP Group commodities production on the same lands that had previously been rotational agriculture until this was stopped. Incentives to grow corn for animal feed in particular were the major cause for the burning up to a few years ago as I recall. This was not a secret. If we examine the Lao situation (the one I know best), we can see that the burning has always been an issue but that there's a general sentiment that it's increasing over time. This is supported by land use data, and the growth well exceeds the rate of population growth. Therefore we can conclude that it is commodities production via plantations that is both putting pressure on the rural people and therefore reducing their fallow periods so forcing them to burn more land to produce the same amount of food, and paying rural people as labour to burn the fields the plantation companies are leasing for the company's production. So, similar to Thailand, when one looks to "why?" the burning is increasing, the answer is "big bidness". I find your proposed rural development methodology of "holding them to higher standards" an interesting one. So you take the poorest and least educated parts of the populace who are marginalized within the country due to language and cultural differences, you assign them high standards to meet in order for them to be allowed to grow enough food to subsist (their basic objective) and that somehow assists in resolving this problem? Or you forbid them from burning but without providing some alternative means that they might otherwise grow enough food to survive? I fail to see how this is going to solve the problem. Having millions of starving people whom you need to subjugate and feed to prevent them from growing their traditional crops will be quite a challenge for the Government of Lao PDR and the other countries like Myanmar, Vietnam and China where these people live. They've been pretty good at the subjugation and marginalization part, but can't seem to find a way to keep them fed without them burning the place for three months every dry season.

It is practically a law that whenever someone wishes to pontificate about other people's lack of education and ignorance, they will inevitably include a spelling or grammatical error. You are to be commended for both "inherit ignorance" (I believe you meant 'inherent') and "there actions" (interestingly, you managed to get the proper form of "their" correct in the last sentence). So tidy up that language for a start and then let's hear you give your list of how to fix Thailand overnight when you can't even write in your own language.

See? It's just SO DAMN EASY! I reckon a genius like yourself could probably sort it in a couple of months, no? It's all of us lazy bludgers in the development aid game who have been wandering around upland Southeast Asia aimlessly for decades that just haven't got the slightest idea about how to solve this despite our language skills, advanced degrees, experience and advanced technological tools. We've been just passing time waiting for some retired fellows like yourself to show up and let us know which way the wind blows because it's all Greek to us! Stop wasting time prattling with a useless waster like myself who's clearly been scamming a living for the last 35 years or so in the development aid game trying to find a way to improve these intractable complex issues and go out and fix it like you said. Piece of cake!

Yeah, and you and your family with their large farm, machinery, well-trained staff, International-standard education, farm inputs, consulting companies, GMO seeds etc. are pretty much the same as a subsistence Hmong family with 6 kids scraping a living off of their 1-2 hectare plot with 30 degree slope several kilometers from the nearest road and 50cc Chinese motorcycle.

Oh really? So you, like me, work in upland Northern Laos? How is it that you don't know about the upland rotational agriculture practiced by these and the millions of other indigenous farmers (non-Thai, -Lao, -Han, -Burmese, -Viet) in the region require burning? Have you some miracles in your pocket to allow them to somehow scrape an existence out of the steep and poor soils they live on without practicing their traditional agriculture? It seems so easy when you come from abroad and sit in your A/C home to pontificate about the lives of the people in a place you recently rocked up to but have hardly any knowledge about. Perhaps you might volunteer time or funds to work with local NGOs who could provide you with the experience to understand what's really going on.

Do we really have to go through this ritual every year? Step one, blame the neighbors for doing what they do every single year in order to survive. Step two, blame the farmers in Thailand for having to survive by doing the same. Step three, downplay the inevitable discovery that CP Group and other agro-industry giants were actually driving the burning through commodities cropping for their animal feed and other food production. Step four, make sure nothing changes, rinse and repeat next year!

Thanks for referencing an article that completely refutes your attempts to stir up resentment against AOC. You should really try reading things you search for, sometimes the headlines can be misleading. LOL.

Pretty much any dish in Thai cuisine has a corresponding version in Khmer cuisine. They developed in parallel, probably with a lot more influence on the Khmer side during the earlier historical periods when they were predominant. But having lived for long periods in both countries, and having hosted numerous Thai friends' wives at our house for Khmer cuisine, I feel that the closeness of the two cuisines is the single largest indicator that the Thai and Khmer cultures are the closest in the region, as opposed to the Thai and the Lao. Lao food is very different to Thai and Khmer food, they just have similar languages.