Naive hopes that smog issues in Thailand will be temporarily alleviated by the Songkran water fest have been dashed by comedians and experts alike. A running joke in Chiang Mai, the northern capital where air quality is many times higher than the government’s safe target, is “Let’s wait for Songkran” which is Thai lunar new year broadly starting with the start of the rainy season. A prankster on Jomtien’s beach road was wearing a hat proclaiming, “Squirt for health,” before being warned by police that the fun is supposed to start tomorrow.
The Thailand Clean Air Network (TCAN) said that the country’s most acute environmental disaster, the haze season February through April, is essentially caused by the smoke-carrying harmful particles caused by the harvest slashing and burning of land for cash crops such as sugar cane, maize and rice. Spraying water into the air and seeding clouds from military aircraft, hoping to wash away the nastiness, is next to pointless.
IQAir, the Swiss air quality firm, says the daily limit advised by the World Health Organization is sometimes 15 times worse than that in northern cities. TCAN points out that macro-Thai businesses and influential families ignore the health issues to protect their export businesses, whilst Thailand’s neighbors do very little to curb smoke excess. Indonesia and Laos are key offenders whilst many of Myanmar’s border regions are the center of a civil war and impervious to the needs of the environment. As the haze season ends in a few weeks, the whole subject will likely disappear from the daily news. Until next year.
