“This Land is our Land”: Local Thai Women’s Struggle for Land and Housing Rights in Post-Tsunami Thailand

By Edyta Materka.

Published by The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations

Format	Price
Article: Print	$US10.00
Article: Electronic	$US5.00

Why do women own less than 1% of the world’s property and 10% of the world’s income whilst working two-thirds of the world’s working hours and producing half of the world’s food? (United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, 2005). Land is capital, collateral, and women’s legal ownership of it is crucial to economic self-sufficiency as it increases their chances of acquiring loans and credit for private sustainability projects. Gender-neutral land codes promulgating the formalization of the female-dominated, informal economic sector and women’s legal qualification for land ownership sans spousal approval would potentially effectuate women’s manumission from economic fetters and traditionally-ascribed gender roles. Activists lobbying for women’s land and property rights in developing countries, however, are waging an uphill battle against the economic, political and social interests of governments, intergovernmental organizations, corporations, non-governmental organizations, et al.

Such contestation is demonstrated in this qualitative case-study composed of information collected throughout the course of my volunteership from June 2005 to August 2005 as a full-time construction worker and human buffer for a local land-rights resistance movement led against an intrusive Thai property developer at Hat Laem Pom, a tsunami-devastated beach-settlement in Khao Lak, Thailand. Thaksinomical economic policies proceeding the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis and Thailand’s signing of the ASEAN Free Trade Area Agreement (AFTA) have given leeway to corporate-friendly interpretations of Thailand’s flexible Bhumibol Adulyadej Rex. or Act Promulgating the Land Code B.E. 2497. This bed-fellowship has promulgated land grabs for the purposes of constructing luxurious tourist venues, attracting foreign direct investment and satiating corporate profit-hunger on tsunami-leveled strips of land along the Andaman beach coast previously inhabited by local Thai communities. Although women organizing against the construction of such projects in the public are transiently transcending their socially-constructed, gender-specific roles as mothers and wives in the private sphere, they are not recognized as independent land-owners under the Thai Land Code.

Keywords:	Land-Rights, Land-Use, Land Code, Gender Roles, Income-Generation, Post-Tsunami Thailand, Women’s Resistance, Human Right to Land

The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations, Volume 7, Issue 3, pp.27-36. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 1.590MB).

Edyta Materka

Student, Construction Worker, Tsunami Volunteer Center, Rutgers University, Trenton, New Jersey, USA

Proceeding the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edyta Materka's parents, who believed an education in the United States would save their children from bucolic village life, sold their strawberry plantations along with all of their material possessions and left Słupsk (German: Stolp), a port-city bordering the Baltic Sea along northwestern Poland. In 1993, Edyta, her two older siblings and her parents arrived at Newark International Airport in the United States. In the midst of social, cultural and geographic displacement, Edyta-now the daughter of a construction worker and cleaning lady-grew up "different" in central New Jersey. Feeling displaced, in 1998, she returned to Poland for two months and visited Auschwitz, Warszawa, Kraków, Gdańsk, Częstochowa, Toruń, Zakopane, and climbed the Tatry Mountains. She often dreams of climbing the large sand-dunes in Poland's quasi-desert in Czołpin again. After the tsunami-disaster that hit South-East Asia in December 2004, Edyta flew to Khao Lak, Thailand in June 2005 to volunteer as a full-time construction worker at Hat Laem Pom-a beach settlement along the Andaman Coast-for the duration of two months throughout which she also became a human buffer in a land-ownership dispute between the local villagers and a Thai private firm. Since then, she has become fascinated with gender and land-rights. Edyta has translated Polish land law and has been collecting on-the-ground research about land-rights disputes in Kenya, Mexico, China, as well as on the Thai-Burmese Border. At the age of 21, she has presented her work on land-rights at several international conferences in Amsterdam, China, and San Francisco and is currently working on a book project inspired by her favorite journalist: Ryszard Kapuściński. In 2004, Edyta enrolled into Rutgers University and is currently a prospective B.A. recipient in Women's & Gender Studies, Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies. She is currently a Grammatical and Technical Editor for Global Scholarly Publications in New York City. Edyta has stylistically edited essays written by Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a book by Ambassador Hafiz Pashayev of Azerbaijan to the United States, and speeches by Pope Benedict XVI, Kofi Annan, et al. She is 21 years old and wishes to pursue establishing transnational correlations of land-rights movements in the international sphere. She hopes to become a land-rights activist, lawyer, nomad and writer in developing countries. She owes all of her successes to her parents-Bogusława and Czesław Materka.

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