Like many locals, Matthana Abhaimoon left rural Thailand to study in the city. Unlike most, she chose to come back — and fight for her right to farm in the forest as her forefathers had done.
After a 20-year campaign, residents of Mae Tha won a community forest title for their cluster of seven villages, joining a small but growing back-to-the-land movement that is luring young, ecofriendly farmers away from the city.
Under the order, she and about 5,000 villagers can farm some 3,500 acres inside a protected forest in Mae Tha district, a mountainous region in northern Thailand which lies close to the region's biggest city of Chiang Mai.