Little interest in reporting about the poor

Thai farmers' efforts to raise public awareness for land reforms have gone largely ignored by the media

Bangkok Post
Friday, March 13, 2009

By Vassana Chinvarakorn

His question was simple, but it made us feel utterly awful.

Last Friday night, as my friend and I dropped by at a protest camp next to Government House, we met farmer Boon Sae Joong from Trang.

The 50-something man was so eager to ask how we journalists viewed the public's response to their mission.

Boon has joined over 800 villagers who are members of the Network for National Land Reform, to urge the Abhisit cabinet to tackle the problems of the landless farmers and slum residents in a more effective manner.

I looked at my friend. After a pause, she felt compelled to say the truth: "Er, we haven't seen that much about you folks in the mainstream media."

Under the pale neon light, I glimpsed a flicker of Mr Boon's disappointment in his eyes.

The southerner's friends still maintained their upbeat outlook, though.

One woman pointed to a nearby pile of papayas and bananas, brought by the protesters as their food supply.

A couple of newspapers had recently printed photos of the fruits, with captions describing them as being dumped by angry farmers who wanted the government to shore up the market prices for the produce.

"At least that one made the news," she laughed, acknowledging the media's misrepresentation of their plight with a wry sense of humour.

One paradox of modern journalism is that in the current proliferation of news outlets, we have less and less news space for the poor.

Over the past week, Mr Boon and his peers have tried several "creative" campaigns to draw the public's attention -- all to no avail.

They have released a score of tortoises, a symbolic gesture to urge the powers-that-be to be more expedient towards the people's problems.

Some from the North have organised the traditional ritual of paying respect to the Earth Goddess, which incidentally is the symbol of Mr Abhisit's Democrat party.

On Wednesday, in the wake of a crucial meeting between the prime minister and the villagers, about 200 farmers volunteered to do the dern krab (walking and prostrating every few steps) march from Government House to Parliament. Trailing behind the peaceful march under a scorching sun were a few farmers dressed in the striped uniform of prisoners. In their hands were framed pictures of past leaders who have died, mostly of unnatural causes, leaving unfinished their crusade to seek justice.

The number, cited Prayong Doklamyai of the Northern Farmers' Network, has now reached about 50.

At the end of the day, most of the activities went unreported. Mr Prayong admitted he could not understand the consistent negligence by the media.

He offered, however, one good piece of news, at least for now: the Abhisit cabinet had responded favourably to the villagers' demands.

There will be six sub-committees chaired by various ministries to look into issues that revolve around the need to implement genuine land reform.

We'll have to wait and see if this is just another time-buying tactic, or a sincere effort by our Oxford-educated prime minister. His colleague, Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij once raised a similar subject upon assuming office, but that has since dissolved in the sea of publicly-funded freebie programmes churned out by the cabinet.

Can we trust the media to keep an eye on this important issue? Or is the awfully skewed distribution of land in this country -- with 90% of arable land being held by less than 10% of the population -- something already considered a given?

I recall reading a front-page interview with a businesswoman who confided that it took her "three full years" after graduation from an overseas university to complete a database of her family's land bank. She even offered a few amusing anecdotes, where some brokers had offered a few lucrative plots which she discovered later had already been bought by her kin.

This is perhaps what the media is interested in, but we'd better not let farmer Boon know that.

Vasana Chinvarakorn is a senior writer for Outlook, Bangkok Post.

Date Posted: 3/13/2009