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Across Northern Thailand, het thop mushrooms (Astraeus) are foraged and sold into an increasingly commodified marketplace. A species of wild fungi that only appears for a short time each year, it is widely enjoyed across the diverse range of communities living in the region and increasingly positioned as part of the Lanna food and cultural aesthetic. Through a rapid rise in price over recent decades and the subsequent forging of supply chains linking rural communities to urban and online markets, foraging practices now provide significant seasonal incomes and form an essential part of annual livelihoods. However, as this paper contends – working closely with the analytical framing of "precarity" put forth by Tsing (2015) in a similar fungal context – there are forms of precariousness and uncertainty that are inherent in wild products, from the indeterminant ecologies from which it emerges, to the unreliable livelihoods that arise from it, and the fickle market for such products. The purpose is not to dismiss this market as frivolous or problematic, but rather to suggest that in a disturbed and distorted environmental and economic context such as Northern Thailand, this is indicative of a wider shift toward a "salvage economy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Harvesting from common resources has been studied through experimental work in the laboratory and in the field. In this paper we report on a dynamic commons experiment, representing a forest, performed with different types of communities of resource users in Thailand and Colombia, as well as student participants. We find that all groups overharvest the resource in the first part of the experiment and that there is no statistical difference between the various types of groups. In the second part of the experiment, participants appropriate the common resource after one of three possible regulations is elected and implemented. There is less overharvesting after the rules are implemented, but there is a significant amount of rule breaking. The surprising finding is that Colombian villagers break the rules of the games more often than other groups, and even more so when they have more trust in members of the community. This observation can be explained by the distrust in externally proposed regulations due to the institutional and cultural context. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We examined the contribution of rubberwood to the timber export markets of Malaysia and Thailand. In Malaysia, rubberwood has grown from 26% of total exported wood products in 1998 to 35% in 2007. A high proportion of furniture products (80%) is rubberwood, whereas the contribution of rubberwood to other wooden products is less than 20%. Only 10% of sawn timber and logs is rubberwood. In Thailand, rubberwood contributes to around 60% of total exported wood products, arising from a high share of not only furniture products (70%) but also other wood products (around 50%) and sawn timber and logs, which have increased in share from 40% in 1998 to 79% in 2007. We conclude that the high proportion of rubberwood products in the wood export markets of these two countries is a result of: (1) scarcity of raw wood materials because of strict controls on the logging of natural forests; and (2) governmental support to rubberwood production, including financial support to rubber planters and technical assistance to downstream timber processors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community forest management (CFM) has received increasing worldwide attention from governments, researchers and educational institutions over the past two decades. Many governments, especially in developing countries, have prioritized CFM over traditional forest management systems. In Thailand, CFM is not recognized by the legal system; however, there are de facto CFM practices under common property resource regimes. CFM has in essence been practiced here for hundreds of years by local people, and represents an important aspect of Thai culture. This study aims at evaluating CFM in Thailand in the context of sustainable development. To meet the objective, the study gathered information through focus group discussions with various stakeholders: academics, Forest Department staff, and members of the Chang Tok Tay community forests. From the study, it emerged that forest resources are critical for the livelihoods and survival of rural people, and so they have protected forests to ensure sustainable livelihoods. This study identified that prospects for sustainable CFM in Thailand are bright because: (i) community members are highly motivated and are sufficiently interested to protect trees because they are well aware that their livelihoods are under threat from depleting forests; (ii) tradition and culture of rural people support their relation with nature; (iii) non-timber forest products (NTFPs) play a crucial role in local livelihoods for subsistence and necessitate protection of the forest watershed, which is vital to support their occupations; (iv) spiritual rituals such as those where Buddhist monks bind yellow cloth on trees play a vital role in protecting trees, something rare in other countries. The study further identified various hindrances to achieve sustainable CFM: (i) legal support for CFM is absent; (ii) the Royal Forest Department (RFD) cannot transfer appropriate technology to community people due to lack of legal support; (iii) scope for developing effective strategies for sustainable CFM by combining traditional knowledge with existing scientific knowledge is limited; (iv) a formal institutional arrangement for CFM does not exist; and (v) community members’ access to the hard technology of CFM is limited. Therefore, in addition to legalizing CFM, a formal institutional framework for elaboration, implementation and control of CFM is essential to achieve sustainable CFM in Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edible shoots of rattans are traditionally viewed as non timber forest products. However, in Thailand and Lao PDR (Laos) several shoot-bearing species have recently been adopted as crop plants. This new industry is little known outside the region. A description is given of the process of adoption and the characteristics of the species involved, focussing on Calamus tenuis Roxb., the main species planted in Laos. Likely factors triggering domestication and some probable future developments are outlined. It is suggested that other wild species in the region are also likely to be suitable for domestication, and that this example lends weight to arguments in favor of conserving wild species. The implications of market competition between wild-harvested and farm-grown shoots are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relates problems with the assumptions of village studies, and suggests ways of turning these issues towards region and history, The case concerns ways in which communities of Karen have been caught up in internal tensions as well as regional dynamics of both world-view and political economy, and how in the current context marginal communities such as Karen villages are framed by decisions at national and international levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]