I don't know what has to happen in order for Thailand to start to do something about the annual "burning season" here in the North of Thailand. Every year the smog causes massive air quality problems and every year the government says they are going to do something about it.... and every year they do nothing and it remains the same as it has always been.
A lot of people avoid coming here during this time of year because the AQI (Air Quality Index) puts areas in the North, especially Chiang Mai in a state of having some of the highest levels of air pollution in the world. The people with the resources to temporarily move away do so, but that is beyond the reach of a vast majority of the population.
Although I did not take the above picture, I could take one like it almost every day because virtually every day during this time of year it is so smoggy that you can see the outline of the sun in the sky, but you can't actually see the sun. Sometimes it remains this way for weeks at a time.
This has caused respiratory problems in a lot of people and recently there has been a rush of hospitalizations by people having really bad reactions to the particles of bad quality air that all of us are surrounded by on a daily basis.
Thousands of people per year check into the hospitals because of respiratory illnesses but this year it has been particularly bad with over 12,000 people going to the hospital due to problems directly related to the smog.
This was taken in the past few days and to make matters even worse, this is considered by many to be a "good" day as it can get up to 500 on the scale on a lot of days.
This is caused a great deal by the topography of Chiang Mai because the mountains that surround 3 sides of the city prevent the smog from moving on - not that it moving somewhere else would really mean that it is a solution, it would just mean that the problems was somewhere else or more spread out. The main cause of the problem is that this is the time of year where farmers burn off their fields to prepare for a new planting season that is coming up later this month. The process of burning off fields is banned in most civilized countries around the world, but it is a cheap an effective way of preparing fields for new planting.
For the most part the fires are controlled but every year something like a shift in the wind results in the fires spreading to somewhere they were not intended and this is the situation right now in a place nearby called Nan where a blaze extended to surrounding jungle areas. Sadly, the blaze got so bad that a volunteer firefighter was killed while helping to put out the fire. This is the 2nd such death to occur in 2023 from firefighting out of control forest reserve blazes. There have also been many injuries that are a direct result of attempting to combat accidental out of control fires from crop burning.
What is it going to take for Thailand to actually do something about this annual and very predictable problem? They know exactly what is causing it but every year they do nothing to prevent it. It's a difficult problem to address because the people who are doing this have been performing this practice for hundreds of years and the guilty parties are normally very poor villagers. It's a bit of a conundrum because while it is easy to point the finger and say "bad farmers! Stop it!" they don't really have any alternative. There are other ways to clear fields but it is time consuming and involves expensive equipment and disposal that is well beyond the financial means of the farmers who already don't really make any money.
The only solution would be for the government to give away the equipment to all the farmers because this isn't USA... Thailand doesn't just take poor people who really don't have a choice but to do what they do and throw them in jail for doing it. The country also doesn't have the money to give away billions of dollars worth of equipment to the farmers - I would argue that countries like USA don't have the money either, but they do it anyway.
But now people are actually dying as a direct result of the smog that up until now I have viewed merely as an inconvenience. Who knows what the long term consequences of the burning season will be as far as the population is concerned but it can't be good to have people breathing some of the dirtiest air in the world for 2 months a year consecutively, every year.