MAP TA PHUT, Thailand — Villagers here avoid walking in the rain because they say it burns their skin and causes their hair to fall out. They have trouble breathing at night when, they say, factories release toxic fumes. And they are terrified by what studies show are unusually high cancer rates.
Map Ta Phut is the heart of Thailand’s industrial underbelly, an area rarely seen by the millions of tourists who visit the country every year. Jutting out into the Gulf of Thailand, the industrial zone is on the scale of a midsize city — only instead of office buildings and apartments, there is block after block of tangled tubes of steel, vats of chemicals and towering, fire-breathing gas flares.
Two years ago, a group of residents decided to take their health grievances to the courts, a relatively rare move in Thailand, where street demonstrations are the preferred form of civil action. The lawsuit, filed by 27 villagers, has become a landmark in Thailand’s environmental movement, leading to a cascade of decisions that halted a staggering $9 billion worth of industrial projects, including Japanese steel factories and German-owned chemical plants.
But from the perspective of Srisuwan Janya, the lawyer who won the case, the injunction signaled a new dawn in the country’s development and the end of an era in which Thailand’s paramount objective was bolstering gross domestic product.
“From now on industries will not only care about making money,” said Mr. Srisuwan, who comes from a family of rice farmers. “They have to care about the environment and the well-being of the people in the community.”
Even among critics of the court decisions, there is widespread agreement that Map Ta Phut is heavily polluted and unhealthy for those who live nearby. But environmental experts remain skeptical that the court decisions will fix the problem.
The injunction stopped new projects, but older, more polluting facilities were allowed to carry on. The rulings require the government to write a new set of environmental laws. But what Thailand needs, experts say, is not new laws but better enforcement of existing ones.
Reports detailing how unhealthy this area is for those who live and work in the shadow of the refineries, plastics factories and other petrochemical facilities here have stacked up over the years.
Thailand’s National Cancer Institute found in 2003 that rates of cervical, bladder, breast, liver, nasal, stomach, throat and blood cancers were highest in Rayong Province, where Map Ta Phut and other industrial zones are located.
A study released in 2007 found that people living near Map Ta Phut had 65 percent higher levels of genetic damage to blood cells than people in the same province who lived in rural areas. Such cell damage, which is a possible precursor to cancer, was 120 percent higher for refinery workers than in residents of rural communities.
Marco Peluso, the lead author of the study, said similar levels of genetic damage might occur in some places in Eastern Europe or developing Asia, but it that would be rare to see these levels in the West.
The main problem appears to be air pollution. The Thai pollution control department reported in September that it had found nine types of carcinogenic compounds in the air around Map Ta Phut.
In March, an initial court decision from the lawsuit by the 27 villagers declared Map Ta Phut a “pollution control zone,” obliging the authorities to measure soil and water quality regularly and to come up with a plan to reduce pollution if it is too high.
But the real sting for companies came in September, when another court ruled in a related lawsuit that 76 projects, most of them under construction, should immediately stop work because they were not in compliance with environmental provisions in the country’s new Constitution. The decision was upheld by a higher court in December for all but 11 of the projects.
Among the companies affected are Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant; Aditya Birla Chemicals, an Indian conglomerate; BlueScope Steel of Australia; and two dozen companies belonging to PTT, the Thai energy giant.
Lawyers for the companies say the most galling aspect of the injunction was that they could not possibly comply with the law because detailed regulations have yet to be written — a problem that the government acknowledges.
The generals who carried out Thailand’s 2006 military coup promulgated a new Constitution that strengthened environmental law, requiring detailed studies before any project that causes “serious impact” to the environment or people’s health is approved.
But “serious” was never defined, and specific guidelines for companies were never drawn up, partly because government officials have been distracted by Thailand’s continuing political turmoil.
“Right now companies don’t know which way to turn,” said Sivapong Viriyabusaya, a partner at Baker & McKenzie, which is representing companies affected by the injunction. “They want to comply but they cannot because there are no rules.”
Mr. Srisuwan, the lawyer who won the injunction, is unapologetic about the potential economic effects of the decision. “I don’t care about investors,” he said. “I don’t care about losing employment and the economy. I just care that people’s lives will be protected.”
The frustration is echoed by Noi Jaitang, a 70-year-old fruit farmer. Over the past two decades, Mr. Noi says, he has lost six members of his family to cancer. Now his wife has a cancerous tumor below her left eye. In October, Mr. Noi walked barefoot to Bangkok — about 125 miles away — to protest the pollution, which he blames for the deaths in his family.
“It’s not that I want to burn the factories down,” he said. “We just want to be able to live together.”
The government says it is moving as quickly as it can to pass the requisite laws that will allow the injunction to be lifted. But Mr. Srisuwan, the lawyer, calls this lawsuit only the “tip of the iceberg.”
There are another 181 factories in Thailand that are not complying with the new Constitution, including paper, steel and petroleum companies, he says. “I will file lawsuits against all of them.”
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