The Fire Still Burns: Reflections from the NGO "New Generation" Conference

Below are the collected notes and reflections from the NGO “New Generation” Conference, from November 29 to December 2. Our group of 30 young activists and organizers - brought together by the Thai Volunteer Service – spent four days together learning, exchanging and debating about our sustainable community development work throughout Thailand. Groups including Highland People Taskforce, Assembly of the Poor, NET Foundation, La Via Campesina Youth, Community Forest Network, Sustainable Agriculture Foundation, Surindra Rajapat University and several others. We met with urban communities, Lablae and Nong Pam and a rural community, managing a community forest, named Puu Khaam.

Lablae community: situated on a hillside next to the Ubon train station and the PTT oil company’s storage area. For more than 10 years, it has fought for clean water, improvement of community infrastructure and land take-over by PTT.

“Poverty and the Community Rights are the same issue” – P Jamnong

While bureaucrats and government officers give excuses for doing nothing, does the community organizer’s work lead to sustainability? To what extent does sustainability come from within the community? Managing community resources (a form of resistance to the oil corporation, PTT) also represents the values of the community’s culture and attention paid to not destroy their natural surroundings – namely, a tributary of the Mun River just at the base of Lablae community. Independently recycling the city’s waste is also a form of resistance, one that has gained the attention of Ubon’s local government: they are now trying to implement their own recycling programs.

Creating a network of urban communities - one that focuses not just on issues, but recognizes the problems are only one part of the network - has opened individual communities to exchange, brought collaboration with the public and generated new relationships. Yet the network still uses this open approach to help generate knowledge for individuals and help them be confident in that knowledge. This allows them to move forward with campaigning to develop their community rights’ demands and policy ideas. Yet an important question was raised: how do these processes get applied to other issues in other areas (environmental ones in rural areas, for example)? Where are the connections?

P Jamnong on the role of NGOs in the community: “we need to be clear about who we are and what we do when we enter into a community.” Regarding issues: “we can’t just put our finger on it and say: yeah, this is it! No, we need to think about what has come before - the history - to really know the issue and be able to work on it.”

Changes occur on a small-scale, but they aren’t happening because of their small size – it’s because of the structural changes that preceded them: build a railway to export goods, and after industrializing the agriculture system and forcing everyone into the market – surplus production for corporate profit. This process gives value to the lands owned by railroad companies and other companies that begin looking for land to use for storage. This process is also represented in a glocal rural-urban migration and relocation to the last possible places – the spaces between roads, the railway, roofs, etc. There are 3,000 communities considered at risk due to expanding migration and destruction of previous communities.

Foreign investment in border provinces and ADB-financed roads connect economic refugees from Cambodia to Khon Kaen. Lablae community is a small, powerful example of the resistance to the changing political, economic and trans-national landscape of SE Asia, the movements of industrialized commerce and the pathways/railways of economic growth.

Nong Pam community: lead by a group of women living in the Nong Sa slum community, they independently built homes on unoccupied land, resisting pressure from local government and the landowners. They now seek to develop a truly “alternative community.”

“Poverty empowers us [women] to speak out” – the Heng Mae (“Mother Power”) group, who lead the new community, are using their woman-ness to make changes for their homes and to develop the community. Reminds me of Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST).

Villagers need a way to access human rights: create a school, a way to educate about rights (more than just laws). For example, community welfare needs to be more than just donating a baht a day to the community bank, villagers need resource support.

The land of the Nong Pam community was originally owned by a wealthy family from Southern Thailand that made no use of it (apparently they were considering turning it into a “Fishing Park”) and in response, the community members feel justified in their original “occupation” of the land. It isn’t a case of using state land and needing their permission, the community simply wanted to make the land their own.

Money from the state used to be viewed as a gift to be proud of - to be satisfied with - but these villagers have realized the consequences of this thinking: debt (especially in post-Thaksin times). The people who haven’t left the old slum community (Nong Sa) and haven’t joined them, they haven’t changed their way of thinking: “they still believe they’ll receive 1 million baht.” In turn, Nong Pam community members can’t talk to them about joining in their movement, but they can still talk about land issues in a broader context - "Politicians want to keep things the way they are and slum community members remain oppressed by class."

After the struggle for their land, it is essential to have the next generation remain on the land and their children seem encouraged to stay – but if they leave, they need to find the right kind of people to come and join them. Their intention to develop an alternative community is defined by community ownership, self-reliance, preservation of culture and local knowledge, and participation/discussion about community issues.

Puu Khaam community: a 200 year-old village, of a nine-part community forest network. Yet working together in the network is a process that involves financial and organizational obstacles. They’ve never had a budget, but instead work from their desire to base efforts in the community culture. They’ve learned a lot from other groups (including the network in Surin), but want to make their “solution” their own and then connect it to other groups in resistance – Udorn, Khon Kaen and Sakhorn. (Left, massages for Yaai Lit, "I Not Can Stop Love You")


The “Green Isaan” Project brought Eucalyptus to the region by the late 1980s (after significant deforestation during the early years of Thailand’s Green Revolution). Rubber was originally promoted to help and develop, but after initially high investment per tree and the years of waiting, it has only generated debt. Cassava is increasingly planted, despite its impacts on the forest and volatile prices, which means new debt and the search for employment in cities. Villagers have recognized how monocropping is essentially government policy, though it generates profits for others through planting these cash crops.

Sustainability: the involvement of the next generation, creating a real system for managing the forest and raising the level of appreciation for the community’s local culture and knowledge. The community forest really needs to be owned by all of the people in the village. Resource management is in the villagers’ hearts, and the idea is to make all members of the group a committee member, a president. The importance of a community forest is that it is a concrete basis, which allows villagers to not take advantage of others, strengthens self-reliance through supporting natural systems and it is a force against the crises in society. “If the forest is perfect, our stomachs must be filled”: food and energy are a burden and an issue villagers live with everyday – the forest can’t be preserved while the fields go to waste.

“The community forest is like a supermarket: it isn’t just trees, it’s all the living things on the land and those who use the forest are those who really need to” and in a later exchange, “we don’t say that cutting trees isn’t allowed - this may lead to other impacts – but management needs to be in our hearts.”

The gathering ended with a final discussion among each region attending (north, northeast, central/south). We raised the questions: how will we use what we’ve learned? What’s the next move? The “new generation” is in this work for real, but there’s no real network between areas and our work continues to be under-funded, so young NGOs are unable to pursue their ideas. We need to start going outside of local works’ focus, especially in connecting with university students interested in becoming NGOs. A first step: creating an e-mail group to coordinate work, called "prajanyim" @ Google Groups (named after the smiling moon above us, during our nights in Puu Khaam).

One of our friends from northern Thailand got a text message that read: "The moon and stars are smiling for us, even now the world is so messy, but last night we saw a little happiness become true : )." As the moon smiled down on our new generation of NGOs, the People Power Party (PPP), the Machima Thipatai party and the Chart Thai party were found guilty of vote buying and dissolved, their party leaders banned from politics for five years (And, the PAD protests finally ended!).