A Lesson the Fishers Taught Me: Who Controls the Resources? Who Defines Development?
Foodthink Says
I. Storm Surge: National Parks and a Small Island
All the fishers in this village are Muslim; their ancestors migrated here from Malaysia, and some can still speak Malay. The 17 families whose homes were destroyed by the storm have nowhere to live and still stay with relatives.
“There’s nowhere these people can rebuild their houses.” Nok said. He is the head of Save Andaman Network (SAN), an NGO in Trang Province. His full name is Phakphum Vithantirawat. Everyone calls him P’ Nok (in Thai, the prefix P’ before a name shows respect for an elder).
The reason is somewhat absurd: this stretch of coast belongs to a national park, and the managing authority only allows villagers to rebuild on their original plots—anywhere else is off limits. But after a disaster like this, the villagers are too frightened to build in such a sensitive, vulnerable area.
To make matters worse, the storm raised tidal levels and severely eroded the coastline, stripping away a layer of beach and bringing the village closer to the sea. With climate change, the likelihood of storms of this intensity could well increase further. Building here again would be a never-ending struggle against the elements.
But the villagers have no alternative. This is not an isolated case—when a piece of land is designated a “national park” in the name of conservation, the people who have lived there for generations often find themselves losing the very resources—land, game, timber—that sustain their lives. This script is being played out in many countries.
A core question here is: “Who owns the resources? Who has the power to set the rules?” This is also the point that struck me most on this trip. One could say that almost everything we encountered prompted reflection on this question.
But the villagers have not given up. The reason we came to this place is to see several rows of bamboo poles set between the ruins and the sea. These poles both dissipate wave energy and trap sand. The government originally planned to build a concrete seawall, but locals felt a concrete wall would only reflect waves back higher and trap water behind it with no way to drain. In the end, they chose bamboo.
Government workers used high-pressure water jets to bore holes in the sand, then drove the bamboo poles a metre deep. And so they created what, to us outsiders, is quite a sight: row after row of bamboo stretching into the distance across a barren beach. The method looks crude, but it works. In practice, it traps seventy to eighty centimetres of sand a year—a kind of improvised land reclamation. And so humanity, so small and slow, asks the sea for land, one inch at a time.
To consolidate the hard-won sand, villagers have also planted mangrove saplings at the base of the poles. They are said to take three to four years to grow to size. They like to plant several together, because that way the saplings “grow up with friends and don’t feel lonely.” There is a scientific basis for this: in areas exposed to wind and waves, planting two or three saplings close together allows the young stems to intertwine, reducing the risk of them toppling over.
“Look, that’s a brand-new island!” The village head who was showing us around pointed to a small patch of land not far out, barely visible on the water. It had once been nothing but a shallow sandbar, visible only at low tide. From a nothing—a bare shoal—it had grown into a surprisingly small island in just seven years. (Perhaps that storm swept the sand away from here, deposited it over there, and hastened the island’s rise—who can say?) Coconut palms have taken root on it, and fishers nearby can already catch crabs there.
Where once there was a seagrass bed, bamboo poles and homemade ingenuity have reclaimed land from the sea; and in the shallow waters, an island has risen. The turning of seas into fields can take mere years. In that moment, I felt we humans were remarkably like ants.
II. The Vanishing Seagrass and the Dugong
“Walk over,” he said.
I was stunned, only then realising just how shallow the water was. We hiked our trousers above the knee and waded in barefoot; the water barely reached our knees. The sand underfoot was fine and soft, like treading on mud.
Up close, I realised that what I had taken for something resembling an algal bloom—those “floating objects”—was in fact seagrass growing in the sand, and the area was essentially a beach that lay almost bare at low tide. Only a thin layer of seawater covered the grass. The most abundant was a short-leaved seagrass—the dugong’s food.
Nok pointed to a series of very shallow grooves under our feet. “These are dugong tracks.” In the slanting light, the tracks were clearly visible. When the tide came in, dugongs would swim to this spot, pressing their mouths to the sand, undulating forward in big, satisfied feeds. A single adult dugong eats 45 kilograms of seagrass a day.
Once a seagrass bed is destroyed, dugongs can quickly be driven to starvation and even death. This is the tragedy unfolding in these waters in recent years.
The cause is the dredging of the Kantang Channel on the Trang River, undertaken to accommodate larger cargo vessels. In a regional sense, the project serves the development of the “Indonesia–Malaysia–Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT).” But the silt and rock excavated were dumped at sea, spreading outward along the estuary. Although this area falls within a no-fishing protected zone and is some distance from the worksite, it has been affected nonetheless. According to Nok, the sediment that washed here destroyed virtually all the seagrass beds. SAN members have seen no few dead dugongs in this area.
In 2020, the dredging operations sparked public protests. The government was forced to temporarily halt the project and re-commission experts for a fresh environmental impact assessment, to find a suitable disposal site for the silt so that the channel could be dredged without damaging the ecosystem or affecting fishers’ livelihoods.
This area once had over a thousand hectares of seagrass bed, sustaining the largest dugong population in Thailand. But Nok says the contractors’ explanation for this catastrophic outcome is a single sentence: “When work began, we thought the impact would be confined to the channel.” Four years after the halt—that is, in 2024—seagrass began to regrow here, the very patch beneath our feet.
According to a report by the US non-profit environmental media outlet Mongabay, Thailand’s dugong population was around 273 in 2022, 90 per cent of which lived in the Andaman Sea, but a third of the population may now be gone. In 2024, at least 40 per cent of dugong deaths were attributed to starvation caused by widespread seagrass die-off.
A government scientist interviewed by Mongabay found that most dugongs from Trang had either died or were drifting along the coast, scrambling to make a living—north as far as Krabi, Phang Nga, and Phuket, even into Myanmar; to the south, they had found at least three dead dugongs near Langkawi Island in Malaysia. The scientist estimates that Trang Province may now have fewer than ten dugongs.
So to see the recovering seagrass bed and dugong feeding traces that day was truly to witness a scene of survival after catastrophe. But Nok worries that the displaced dugongs face a hard time surviving too: they need to adapt to new environments and can be injured by colliding with unfamiliar fishing boats. “In Trang, fishers know how to control boat speed to avoid dugongs; but people elsewhere don’t have that awareness.” He said, “Here, we will protect the dugongs. Elsewhere, we are powerless.”
The faraway places dugongs swim to are not guaranteed to have food; as the aforementioned Mongabay report noted, there are virtually no usable seagrass beds around Phuket. Government officials have even tried supplementing migrating dugongs with food such as kale and cabbage—the kind typically fed to rescued dugongs in aquariums.
Fishers can rally and cry out for their own destroyed homes, but for dugongs, seagrass, and coral, only an environmental NGO like SAN can speak up.
On Libong Island there is another species of seagrass with long leaves, which is food for sea turtles. But Nok explains that this seagrass takes two years to mature enough to reproduce, and if it is eaten by turtles in the meantime, it is very hard for it to spread into patches. “So conserving sea turtles and seagrass is a contradiction.” They looked troubled, even though one of the purposes of conserving seagrass is to provide food for turtles.
In something of an experiment, they have cordoned off a few square metres of beach with bamboo poles and fishing nets and planted long-leaf seagrass inside, but the results have not been good. When we went to look, it was almost bare, with just a few scattered shoots of long-leaf seagrass poking up.
III. Crab Bank
Since the 1990s, global demand for crab meat has grown, and unsustainable fishing methods such as trawling pushed Thailand’s Blue Swimming Crab catch to a peak of 46,678 tonnes in 1998—far exceeding the maximum sustainable yield. To protect fishery resources, Thailand introduced a series of policies aimed at restoring fish stocks, and civil society began acting as well; the Crab Bank is one such initiative.
The Crab Bank we visited is located in the community conservation centre. It is a simple wooden shelter. On the ground sit a row of large blue plastic barrels, and on the table are several glass fish tanks, densely packed with tangled clumps of plastic tubing used to oxygenate the water. The village head casually picked up a female crab from one of the barrels; its underside was a bright mass of orange crab eggs. Thousands upon thousands of eggs, held in place by mucus, clung to the mother’s abdomen. The orange colour meant the eggs were still developing. The village head explained that once the eggs turn grey, it signals they are close to hatching and must be released back into the sea within five days.
These eggs will hatch in seawater into planktonic larvae, with a single female producing hundreds of thousands to over a million at a time. The village head believes the Crab Bank is useful for population recovery. He says that before, Blue Swimming Crabs could only be caught for six months of the year, but now they can be caught all year round, making them an important livelihood source.
The fishers have developed a habit: not just Blue Swimming Crabs, but other marine creatures in their breeding period are also kept here to be raised. We also saw squid eggs, like a string of transparent grapes. Someone had found them tangled in their net while hauling it in and brought them back.
According to Mongabay, data do show that since the Crab Bank and other measures were implemented, the Blue Swimming Crab population has increased. In 2017, Thailand’s Department of Fisheries, WWF, and several private-sector partners jointly launched the Fisheries Improvement Project, which promotes measures including the Crab Bank, seasonal bans on catching berried crabs, and restrictions on trawling and certain gear (such as crab pots with a mesh size smaller than 6.4 centimetres).
However, restocking alone is not enough. Amonsak Sawusdee, a marine biologist who has studied Blue Swimming Crabs for decades, also emphasises that establishing appropriate regulations for fishing gear and enforcing them, as well as creating protected areas for spawning crabs and juveniles, are all crucial.
Right in the same stretch of sea, the project that devastated vast tracts of seagrass bed coexists with the fishers’ Sisyphean Crab Bank—a scene that looks rather absurd to an outside observer. Yet it is precisely the fishers’ communities, acting spontaneously in partnership with NGOs, that have weathered destructive industrial projects and overfishing, and that are safeguarding native species.
How can this conservation model, rooted in local knowledge and co-governed by coastal communities, become the norm? LMMA offers one possibility—this is the government–community co-management “community-managed protected area” model we have been describing.
IV. LMMA: Putting Communities in Charge of the Sea
LMMA emphasises the coexistence of conservation and livelihoods, because only then can community members remain in place. How fishing communities explore their own livelihood models will be the focus of the next field note. In this one, we first look at how an institutional framework involving multiple stakeholders—government, non-governmental organisations, and community associations—actually takes root.
First, a point of clarification: as in China, in Thailand the sea and coastal resources (such as mangroves) are state assets, and the relevant administrative body is the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources (DMCR). Community-managed protected areas are also managed by DMCR. Areas designated as marine national parks carry a higher protection level and are managed directly by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation.
But in Satun Province we visited the well-known Mu Ko Phetra National Park, into which two community-managed protected areas have been wedged. The head of the local national park office told us that the park had been in operation for 42 years under a closed-management regime—in the field of biodiversity conservation, a “protected area” is a designated zone set aside for the purpose of species protection, with national parks being the typical example, yet in many places this has resulted in the exclusion of indigenous communities.
But the managers eventually came to recognise that this approach was not workable and that local people should be allowed to make a living from within the national park, provided it was done sustainably.
As we spoke, we were standing beneath a blue sign posted last year on the shore. It is a public notice of the community-managed protected area’s management rules, specifying the area’s boundaries, prohibited activities (such as illegal fishing gear), and penalties. The map in the centre of the sign shows the entire area as falling within the national park, with the yellow and orange zones marking the community-managed protected areas of two respective villages.
Fishing is strictly restricted throughout the national park; if fishers want to catch anything, they may only use the most traditional gear. But within the two community-managed protected areas marked in yellow and orange on the map, fishers can carry out more fishing and gathering, with corresponding obligations: species monitoring, patrolling, and building fish habitats. At first glance, these two community-managed protected areas feel like snatching food from the jaws of the national park, but correspondingly, fishers must also demonstrate that while practising their fishery, they are repairing the marine ecosystem.
That makes it rather interesting: these community-managed protected areas, known as LMMAs and managed by DMCR, actually fall within the national park. The governing departments are different, and in terms of legal standing, the National Park Act takes precedence over the community-managed protected area management framework. In other words, this arrangement is essentially LMMA as a governance approach embedded within the national park’s legal framework. Reaching this point has truly depended on the long-standing constructive interaction and mutual trust among various government departments, fisher associations, and NGOs.
In practice, LMMAs are indeed implemented through negotiation between communities and the government. Only areas like the following can apply to become community-managed protected areas: the community holds traditional or pre-existing use rights; there is a clearly defined community organisation (such as the fisher associations we encountered on this trip); and consensus is reached within the community, with a set of management rules formulated.
On the point of “formulating management rules,” the role of NGOs is often indispensable. They mainly carry out awareness-raising and capacity-building work within the community—teaching fishers to conduct species monitoring, draw community maps, master meeting procedures, popularising legal knowledge, and so on; outwardly, they play more of a “mediator” role, “translating” the community’s claims on rights into language that facilitates communication with the government and stakeholders, particularly the “legalese” involved in policy advocacy and legislative proposals.
This bridge role is vividly reflected in the arrangement of our visit itinerary. The fact that we were able to meet and chat with the head of the national park management office was actually arranged by the Thai Sea Watch Association (abbreviated “Sea Watch”). Whether in Sea Watch’s office, aboard a boat visiting fishery protected areas at sea, or sitting on the ground in the community chatting with villagers, the backgrounds of those present were diverse: community representatives, women’s representatives, local council representatives, government officials—and often from several departments, such as DMCR, the National Park Office… Even when a translator was needed for consecutive interpretation, sentence by sentence, and a half-day of conversation was rather tiring, they patiently participated throughout.
Fishers need to formulate their own community’s rules and regulations. In Satun, fishers in several LMMAs working with Sea Watch were also asked to name their respective protected areas: through this rather ceremonial act of “naming,” they are made to feel a sense of community ownership.
The multiple government departments involved in LMMA management must all recognise the LMMA’s management rules. Tab, the head of Sea Watch, showed us a memorandum of understanding signed by the community, local government, and NGO. Two large sheets of paper were densely covered in Thai, all management details that had been negotiated clause by clause and confirmed by all parties. There were 19 categories relating to the community alone, for example: one must not act alone; cooperation with partners is required, and partners can be government departments, NGOs, or even neighbours.
Language is a tool of thought, and coining concepts is also a common technique in NGO policy advocacy. Take, for example, the concept of OECM—Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures—created to advance global conservation action. Many LMMAs could apply for OECM designation, but Tab says they prefer to keep working with the LMMA concept.
OECM refers to areas outside formally designated protected areas where governance delivers sustained in-situ biodiversity conservation outcomes, such as urban green spaces or nature-friendly farmland. In 2018, OECM was formally defined as a statistical tool under the Convention on Biological Diversity; it must be reported by national governments and is used to track global conservation targets and progress.
Whether it is “protected area” or OECM, these concepts were pushed into the political agenda of global environmental governance by international bodies—in other words, a “top-down” process. Driven by international negotiations, OECM is becoming the accepted vocabulary used by governments and international organisations. Many community-managed protected areas have the potential to be designated as OECMs—they may not attract direct funding the way formal protected areas do, but the OECM label makes it easier to secure external support such as international cooperation and carbon credit projects.
Yet NGOs and fishers tend to favour the more grassroots concept of LMMA, which places greater emphasis on community self-management. Tab’s casual dismissiveness toward OECM revealed an interesting shift: grassroots NGOs seem less interested in the grand, halo-laden concepts of the international environmental governance framework, and more attentive to approaches that reflect genuine autonomy and deliver tangible benefits.
V. Rejecting Carbon-Sink “Enclosure”
The cause: the mangroves here had been occupied by a company for 21 years under a charcoal-business concession. During that time, if villagers needed timber, they had to obtain the company’s approval—which was rarely granted—so they could only cut in secret. Over those years, they noticed that food was becoming increasingly hard to find in and around the mangroves. They regarded crabs and shellfish as indicator species for the health of the ecosystem—and it was not just those two that were declining; some seafood had disappeared altogether.
The villagers believed this was directly linked to the company’s felling of the mangroves. A very tangible example is the mud crab: these crabs dig burrows in the mud to live in. Without the shade of the trees, the mud bakes in the sun until it is scorching hot, and the mud crabs simply cannot survive the heat. In other words, without the mangroves there is no living space for the animals, and the beach transforms from a thriving paradise into a desert.
So, after the concession expired, some villagers who had come to recognise the problem began planting trees on their own initiative. Five villages came together to form a mangrove conservation group and applied to DMCR for community-managed protected area status.
In 2024, the application was approved. They successfully secured a “community forest,” which means they were granted 10 years of mangrove management rights—providing a legal guarantee for the community’s right to use its resources.
In 2025, a report by Thailand’s Knowledge Promotion Foundation found that, in the context of addressing the climate crisis, the Thai government has been vigorously promoting a voluntary emission-reduction scheme, allowing companies to purchase carbon credits by funding mangrove restoration to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. However, the implementation of this scheme at the grassroots level has raised serious issues of unfairness. For example, in existing projects the profit distribution sees companies taking 70%, communities receiving only 20%, and DMCR taking 10%, yet neither the companies nor the government has ever transparently explained the basis for this distribution ratio to the communities.
Moreover, DMCR and the companies often bypass the wider village population and go directly to the village head or specific representatives for signatures. Villagers have even been pressured by government officials and forced to sign agreements without understanding the contract terms. This top-down, behind-closed-doors approach has also sown suspicion and division within the community.
In an interview with HaRDstories, Tab argued that mangrove carbon-sink projects cannot genuinely address global warming. “The principle set by the United Nations is that the polluter pays and bears responsibility for remediation, yet it has been twisted into the idea of giving us a carbon market,” he said. “Solving global warming means reducing emissions, not using money to grab things that never belonged to them in the first place.”
Now that they have a community-managed protected area, residents feel more empowered to say no to this kind of enclosure project.
Coming up next
This is the second of three field notes from Foodthink’s visits to small-scale fishing communities in southern Thailand. The first, “Thirty Years Guarding the Sea Together: Only in Unity Is There Fish to Eat | Field Notes from Small-Scale Fishing Communities in Southern Thailand”, discussed how small-scale fishers in Satun Province joined forces to drive away commercial trawlers, and how fisher associations across regions have further organised into a national alliance, actively participating in legislation and policy advocacy. To learn how conservation and development can coexist in local fishing communities, please stay tuned for the third article.
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs in this article were taken by the author.
Editor: Pei Dan