When I was in the border town of Mae Sot in Tak province over the weekend, the sky was not only cloudy and grey, the air was also dangerous to breathe.
The annual haze problem is back. Not only in Mae Sot, but the whole mountainous North, as smoke billows endlessly from the burning of corn and sugar cane plantations to meet the insatiable demands of the agro-industry.
“I’ve not seen a blue sky here for months now,” said a local resident, heaving a deep sigh. “The corn is for the feed factories. The sugar cane is for the biofuel plants. They say people need food and clean energy. But we the locals end up with dirty air to breathe. But who cares about our health, our deaths?”
He should worry. While the feed and biofuel industries argue they are feeding the world and providing non-fossil energy, the rapid expansion of corn and sugar cane plantations has taken a heavy toll on the environment and people’s health.
Last month, the World Health Organisation released a shocking report about air pollution's health hazards. In 2012, around seven million people died as a result of exposure to air pollution. That is one in eight of total global deaths, thus making air pollution the world’s largest single environmental health risk.
Among the diseases caused by air pollution are heart disease, strokes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, and acute lower respiratory infections in children. The problems are most severe in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific regions.
In the past decade, the North has been increasingly suffocated by the smog from open burning and deforestation, which also causes other environmental disasters such as flash floods, mud slides and protracted droughts.
As forested areas in Thailand are diminishing, the agro-industry is crossing the border to expand corn and sugar cane plantations inside Myanmar. But the smog knows no boundaries and more open burning has subsequently intensified the dangerous haze in the northern provinces.
In Myanmar, meanwhile, the poor villagers not only lose their health, but also their land and livelihoods as the plantation investors take over their ancestral lands by force.
“Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star” is a famous quote many environmentalists are fond of using to explain the butterfly effect. It is in line with the Buddhist teachings that all things are interrelated. What should we do then when city people’s easy access to food and non-fossil fuel has wrought huge environmental and health damages, not only to people in the rural areas but also the world as a whole through worsening global warming.
The Sal Forest, a research group for business sustainability, recently teamed up with the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) in proposing a set of solutions to tame the environmentally destructive plantations in the North.
Their study of corn plantations in mountainous Nan province has revealed that more than 60% of the plantation expansion came from forest clearing. The haze follows. The vast destruction of environmentally sensitive water-catchment areas also entails rapid soil erosion, mud slides and flash floods. The heavy use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides has also contaminated water downstream while exposing the farmers to severe health hazards. Similar things are happening throughout the northern region.
Vulnerable to price fluctuations, these farmers are highly dependent on two agro-giants — CP and Betagro — to buy their produce and determine their prices. Given this power, these two big buyers can intervene by making farm sustainability a prerequisite in their business transactions, recommended the researchers.
For example, there should be prohibitions against forest clearing for farmland or the use of farm chemicals near waterways.
The Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Co-operatives is another player which can convince farmers to stop forest encroachment by making the legality of the land and locations of the plantation part of the loan conditions — if it realises the importance of environmental sustainability, that is.
Since CP and Betagro agro-giants are also in the food industry, may I suggest that we, the consumers, use our buying power to effect change as well?
If we make it clear to these agro-giants that we will only support the products that support sustainable farming, they will listen. Let’s hit them where it hurts — their pockets — to save the environment.
Sanitsuda Ekachai is editorial pages editor, Bangkok Post.