Doi Tung Project from Success to Success

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These Villages in Thailand Are Part of the Global Economy

• It started in 1988 with the Royal Villa, a residence built by the Princess Mother, who was ready to leave Switzerland, where she had lived off and on, for the northern mountains of her native Thailand. Her condition for spending part of each year in the region was an official commitment to revive forests devastated by the slash-and-burn cultivation of opium poppies and to give its people other sources of income.

Doi Tung Development Project, a successful approach to fighting drugs, has given local people crucial sources of alternative income and the working papers needed to establish Thai citizenship. Their titles to land, however, are restricted, a limitation that their advocates criticize as infringing2017 regional report Minzayar Oo contributed reporting.