For generations, the Maniq have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers across the forests of southern Thailand, moving with the seasons, building light, temporary shelters and drawing food, medicine and meaning from the land. Today, that same forest has been redesignated as conservation zones where private ownership is banned, meaning the land that has effectively been theirs for centuries is suddenly classified as state territory that they may at best “use,” not own. The result is that the Maniq are recast from custodians of an ecosystem into tolerated squatters inside a legal boundary someone else drew.

The Tyranny of "Equal" Laws

Chalerm Phummai, director of the Thai Wildlife Conservation Office, recently delivered a statement that chills the blood with its blandness: "Everybody must live by the law equally."

It is a punchy declarative, designed to sound fair. But in the fine print of justice, applying the same law to unequal circumstances is not equality—it is injustice. When the law forbids collecting forest resources, hunting, or "encroaching" in a conservation zone, it effectively criminalizes the Maniq’s breakfast, their shelter, and their heritage.

The state offers a concession: a 20-year usage permit. The Indigenous are being asked to lease their own ancestral birthright from a government that arrived centuries after they did. It reduces owners to temporary occupants, tenants on a two-decade timer.

The Myth of the "Savage" Destroyer

The logic of the eviction rests on the premise that human activity in the forest is inherently destructive. But let’s look at the carbon ledger.

Between 2001 and 2024, the forests of Phatthalung became a net carbon source, bleeding 250 ktCO₂e/year into the atmosphere. Was this caused by the Maniq gathering tubers or building temporary bamboo huts that decompose in a season?

No. The data tells the real story. The 1.5 MtCO₂e/year emissions stem from urbanization, the relentless creep of rubber plantations, and paddy fields. The "civilized" economy is stripping the land. Yet, the regulatory hammer falls harshly on the nomads. The Maniq are being scapegoated for an environmental crisis driven by the very industrial society they are being forced to join.

The Beggar or the Farmer?

The Maniq are not frozen in time; they are pragmatic. Parents are sending children to school. Leaders are asking for land to transition to agrarian living, recognizing that their nomadic range is shrinking. They are asking to participate in the economy.

Instead, the conservation restrictions trap them in limbo. Denied the right to hunt and gather, yet denied the land ownership required to farm, they are pushed to the margins. In Satun province, we already see the grim result: hunter-gatherers reduced to begging on roadsides.

The Take

The classification of Maniq land as a "Conservation Zone" without ownership rights is a failure of imagination and a triumph of legal rigidity. It is performative environmentalism that punishes the innocent to distract from the industrial guilty.

Until the law acknowledges that human rights and forest health are not mutually exclusive, the Thai government isn't protecting the wild. They are simply gentrifying it.