Daniel Pedersen

Promise of profit benefits few over the needy

Don Talenywun

Mizzima

August 18, 2009

As the sun sets through the branches of a kokko tree on the banks of the River Moei, one of the last commutes of the day – from Thailand to Burma – takes place.

The pilot of a longboat points his vessel upstream, revs its diesel engine and in 10 minutes has sidled to the opposite bank.

It’s a semi-official international border crossing, a sideways struggle against the current, where no-one on the Burmese side is waiting to check your papers.

On the Thai side a lone soldier with an M-16 casts a disinterested glance at the locals as they pass under or around the boom gate on a road to nowhere.

A few bulbs light the two Thai restaurants perched on stilts offering a view over the river to the small temple on the Burmese side.

One of the cooks arrives, stops for a chat and shakes his head at the columns of smoke rising from houses on the other side as Burmese Karen stoke charcoal fires on which they will cook their dinners.

Welcome to Kokko, a Thai hamlet of farms, farmers, itinerant workers and one of the “tax gates” that mark this region as an international trade frontier.

Kokko is part of Ban Mae Pa district, a few minutes’ drive from Mae Sot.

Across the river, the Burmese border town of Shwe Kokko is controlled by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army – in particular it’s notorious Brigade 999.

Once the region was Karen National Union heartland but as the KNU has ceded more and more territory, the DKBA have seized this place, ensuring a revenue stream from arbitrary taxation of anything crossing the river.

They have erected a small Buddhist temple right on the bank, thumbing their noses at the largely Christian-led KNU.

The land that surrounds Kokko is dedicated to farming.

Vast fields of corn are just beginning to flower, baby cobs are forming on healthy stalks.

Eventually the cobs will be as thick as a forearm, for corn grows lush here.

Beyond the corn, sugar cane is at the height of its growth cycle, soaking up the wet season’s rains.

Come cool, dry conditions later in the year the sugar content of the stalks will soar, but for now the plants are not worth cropping, the deluges of these months diluting their harvest potential.

Even in a good year, the returns on these crops are marginal.

Last year the bottom fell out of the corn market and investors and small-scale farmers alike lost out.

So enraged were farmers that for a time they implemented wildcat blockages of the Tak-Mae Sot arterial road, in a bid to bring attention to their plight and demanding better prices.

Another reason for agri-business losses were the exorbitant “tax” rates being charged by the Burmese military-aligned DKBA, to ensure safe passage to Thailand’s markets.

In some areas, assumed loyal to the KNU, the DKBA demanded as much as Bt20 per 16kg tin of harvested cobs.

For now the land will continue to be used for farming, making a little cash from relatively low-maintenance crops.

But for owners of the properties, like those in the nearby light industrial/residential zones that cluster along Route 105 on Thailand’s national roadway grid, the real money is yet to be made.

Ban Mae Pa is experiencing a real estate boom, with prices doubling in the past decade and a Bt1 million price tag for an old elevated timber home not off the radar, depending on its location.

The old real estate adage, location, location, location rings true in Ban Mae Pa.

One landholder who bought a nice house on a nice block in the area seven years ago for 750,000 baht has since been offered Bt2.7 million.

He is at a loss to explain exactly why, except that his land is right on the highway between Mae Sot and Mae Ramat, a region bordering Mae Pa further to the north.

He is realistic about property prices, bought what he could afford and, unlike many others, isn’t looking to cash in on an overly-inflated return as soon as possible.

“Look, Mae Sot is a false economy, a totally false economy, without over there [Burma] and over here the place would be just another little Thai town,” he says.

The highway that tracks through Ban Mae Pa eventually ends at Mae Sariang.

But by the time the weary driver arrives in Mae Sariang they have experienced all manner of road conditions, from washed out gravel to multi-lane thoroughfares.

Ban Mae Pa is home to hot springs, waterfalls and caves.

Even the most casual of tourists can see a little of everything in a day and still have time for a leisurely lunch by the river.

It’s about seven kilometres from Mae Sot Airport, 97km from Pa-an airport in Burma and about halfway between Chiang Mai and Bangkok, an hour-and-a-half off the main highway between the two.

The region experiences three distinct seasons, hot and dry, hot and wet and cold and dry.

While not cold by some standards, early-morning temperatures might drop to five or six degrees Celsius during the cold season, which includes Christmas and a month either side.

Early this year the Tak Chamber of Commerce proposed a new bridge be built across the Moei River to further facilitate already-booming trade.

The current friendship bridge opened in August 1997, dark days for the Thai Kingdom’s corporate elite.
It was a time of bankruptcy and suicides, with the “Asian Tigers” in the grip of a meltdown that shook South East Asia to its very core.

Thailand precipitated the region-wide disaster when it floated the baht in the face of runaway foreign debt.

The former peg to the greenback was abandoned and the baht went into freefall taking others, such as Indonesia’s rupiah, with it.

The danger signs presented themselves in early 1997.

But by early August, just days before the opening of the Mae Sot’s Friendship Bridge, the government had formally shut down 58 Thai finance companies and accepted a US$16.7 billion bailout by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In Mae Sot the effects weren’t sorely felt in the local business community.

At an informal gathering over coffee of prominent businessmen in Mae Sot one Sunday afternoon the consensus on 1997 in Mae Sot was “sabai, sabai” (all’s well, or no problems).

They are wealthy men in a wealthy town, and they know they owe much of their good fortune to the bridge, and in turn Burma.

The talk then turns to just how much money is being made via the Friendship Bridge.

One mentions that Birdy, the popular chilled-milk coffee brand, sends Bt35 million worth of product over the bridge in Mae Sot annually – with a Bt2 mark-up on each can at wholesale rates.

A 180-millilitre can of pre-mixed, sweetened milk coffee sells for Bt13-Bt14 in Mae Sot, just five kilometres away, over the bridge, it can sell for as much as Bt20 or more from a local retailer.

Birdy is produced in Ayuddhya, an hour or north of Bangkok and 450km from Mae Sot.

In the final five kilometers from Mae Sot to Myawaddy on the Burmese side of the Moei, the product increases in value by more than 10 per cent.

Business has always pioneered river crossings in this part of the world, whether by boat or bridge, legal or illegal.

The Tak Chamber of Commerce estimates Thailand earns Bt1 billion each month from cross-border trade via the Friendship Bridge.

That figure can be doubled with a second bridge, says Chamber President Ampol Chatchaiyareuk
“If they [the Burmese government] agree to it, we will build it,” he said earlier this year.

The DKBA is ready, the road on the Thai side is a potholed mess, on the Burmese bank a semi-trailer could U-turn comfortably.

The first vehicular crossing of the existing bridge, other than trucks involved in its construction, was a convoy of 20 vehicles carrying 51 Thai businessmen and led by then Chamber of Commerce Vice President Panti Tangphati.

Greeting them in Myawaddy was Lieutenant Colonel Khin Maung Win.

The military runs business in Burma, and only a strange blend of patronage and submission enables civilians to open a business.

As evening’s twilight settles on a Saturday night at Kokko two high-sided, dual-trailer trucks are loaded with sawdust destined for Bangkok.

The sawdust will be used as fuel to fire a furnace for dyeing textiles.

The trucks are perched on an earthen ramp that leads to the water’s edge and their trailers chocked in place with rocks and coarse gravel.

Loading them is labour intensive.

On the Burmese side the sawdust is packed into 50kg rice sacks then transported by longboat across the river, unloaded, then manhandled into the trailers.

The truck drivers’ family members either slumber under a rough bamboo shelter at the ramp’s edge, or tend a huge pot of rice soup, awaiting departure time.

As night closes in it seems the day has defeated them, the trailers are not yet fully loaded and the five longboat owners have gone to their homes on the Thai side to eat.

There is no lighting at the ramp.

At dawn the slow shuffle of bags will begin again.

On Sunday, probably by mid-morning, the load will leave for Bangkok.

This is the slow pace of the transportation industry in Kokko, and workloads of the men working here, clad in ragged T-shirts, cut-off jeans and flip flops, would make a stevedore in the West shudder.

But even with loading mired in such inefficiency, there is still obviously money to be made.

A new bridge would undoubtedly hasten progress, but the greatest share of profits would remain Thailand.

The key to this inequitable arrangement is the fact Thailand at least has some economic legal infrastructure, such as property laws, a working banking system and credit lines open to most people if they can pay it back.

Rubbery as Thailand’s laws might be in reality, the gateway from Burma to Thailand is overseen by men with guns, illegitimate power and privilege.

Kokko bridge

Wangpha casino & resort,
Shwe Kokko

ENDS