ENVIRONMENT: Climate Change Hits Thai Farmers

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK , Dec 9 2005 (IPS) - Prolonged droughts pushed Piyaphum Kanchanacharoen, from being a dairy farmer in north-eastern Thailand to joining the ranks of environmental activists, raging against the impact of climate change.

Farmers are among the first groups affected by changing weather patterns, says the 40-year-old Piyaphum, who comes from a part of Thailand where 480,000 hectares of farmland have been hit by drought this year.

”This year, my cattle only had one-and-a-half month of grazing in the fields. That was around June,” he said in an IPS interview. ”Normally, cattle graze for nine to 10 months a year in the same fields.”

He, like other dairy farmers in his community, was left with little choice but to buy grass from neighbouring provinces to feed their cows.

Extra expenses and mounting costs, linked to the drought, have resulted in dairy farmers in Piyaphum’s community finding themselves saddled with debts worth nearly 80 million baht (two million U.S. dollars).

Piyaphum’s losing battle is a case in point that the global environmental lobby Greenpeace International highlighted as it launched a fresh round of warnings, this week, about the danger that lies ahead for Asian countries due to climate change.

”We cannot blame any single extreme weather event for climate change, but what we can say is that these extreme weather events have been steadily increasing in intensity and frequency in the past few years,” Jean-Francois Fauconnier, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace said. ”It is an indication of what is going to happen in the future with climate change.”

These comments followed a report launched here, on Tuesday, by Greenpeace about the manner in which many Asian countries are being ravaged by extreme and erratic weather patterns believed to be due to the greenhouse gases being emitted into the environment by industrial activity.

”Every year, for the past 20 years, an average of over 400 million people have been exposed to floods in Asia,” states the report, ‘Burning Our Future,’ launched in Bangkok on Dec.1. ”Between 1987 and 1997, 44 percent of all flood disasters worldwide affected Asia, claiming 228,000 lives (93 percent of all flood-related deaths worldwide) and resulting in economic losses of around 136 billion US dollars.”

Thailand itself was ”caught in the grip of a catastrophic drought impacting 63 of the country’s 76 provinces” in the 2004-2005 period, according to the Greenpeace report. This affected an estimated 9.2 million Thai people and destroyed 809,000 hectares of farmland.

”The Thai drought catastrophe has cost as much as 193.2 million US dollars in damages,” the Greenpeace report said.

Such an economic downturn for Thai farmers was predicted by the World Bank in April, when it announced that the impact of a widespread drought in the rice growing provinces could result in this South-east Asian country producing its lowest harvest since 1999.

Thailand, the world’s leading rice exporter, would also register a drop in the amount it ships out from the 10.1 million tonnes it sent to overseas markets last year to 8.5 million tonnes in 2005, stated the Bank.

In Nakhon Ratchasima, the province where Piyaphum lives, corn, rice and cassava farmers have been hit by losses to the tune of 500 million baht (12.5 million U.S. dollars) due to the drought.

It is a reality that brings into relief the link between climate change and poverty, since about 60 percent of Thailand’s 64 million people are farmers who also have the lowest incomes in the country-earning an average monthly income of 2,500 baht (62.50 U.S. dollars), according to government reports.

”The impact of global warming is being felt most by the world’s poorest people, as many of our case studies make clear, ” states Greenpeace in another study that examines human development and climate change. ”Food production, water supplies, public health and people’s livelihoods are all being damaged and undermined.”

”Thai farmers are living in fear and uncertainty because they don’t know how to respond to the severe droughts and floods,’’ Day Cha Siripatra, director of Khow Kwan Foundation, a non-governmental organisation championing farmers’ rights and promoting alternative technology, told IPS. ”These changes in the weather are new to them and they know they cannot blame anyone.”