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Health Check: Issues and
Problems in the Management of Water Resources
The current water resource management system
in Thailand can be characterized as fragmented and centralized.
This means that the people's sector has not been able to fully
participate in the decision-making processes and in the identification
of the future direction of the water resource management.
At present, such centralized control and management has inevitably
transformed and disrupted the traditional practices and culture.
This can be seen clearly in the case where a traditional community-based
irrigation system, locally known as Muang Fai, has been discouraged
and modern irrigation systems actively promoted.
As the globalization force has grown stronger,
there is a prevailing trend to supply more and more water
resources towards industrial areas and expanding cities. There
has been an increase in water privatization and the formulation
of water management policy that aims to extract economic returns
through enforcing water levees from the resource users, including
from rural communities. Given an existing inappropriate water
management system and policies, the impacts are an imbalance
between water resource supply and the growing demand for resources
from the agricultural and industrial sectors, not to mention
problems of water pollution and chemical contamination discharged
from the industries.
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