The FAO-ESCAP pilot project on national water visions. From vision ...

action plan required by the terms of reference and to be used by ONWRC as a road map towards
achieving the vision statement.
In order to give readers a complete view of how the vision and the strategic action plan were
formulated, this report covers the history of Thai water management in Section II. In addition, the
section surveys the different water situations as dictated by geography (i.e. river basins) and by the
five-year national plans. Section II thus presents the lessons learned from the past and the constraints
and opportunities of the current situation. Using these as input, Section III explains why a unified
national water vision is needed. <strong>The</strong> section identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the existing
institutional system of water management in Thailand as key components of, or driving forces behind,
the formulation of the national water vision. Section IV describes the national water vision statement
and associated strategies and how they were evolved. From the contents of the four first sections,
guidelines and actions are presented in Section V.
For readers unfamiliar with Thailand, Section I provides background information on the country’s
current water situation. <strong>The</strong> information in this section is used in the other sections as well.
4. Background information on Thailand
4.1 General information
Thailand, a tropical land which is part of the Indochina peninsula, is bordered in the north by the Lao
People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), in the east by Lao PDR and Cambodia, in the south by the
Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and in the west by the Andaman Sea and the Union of Myanmar. <strong>The</strong>
total land area is about 512 000 km 2 . As of 1997, the estimated population was about 60 million, with
a growth rate of 1.0 percent per year. <strong>The</strong> urban population was estimated at about 11 million, with
high concentration in the capital and the regional centres.
<strong>The</strong> country is still agriculture-based, with a total agricultural area of about 265 200 km 2 . More than
60 percent of the population engage in agriculture, yet agricultural production accounts for only about
12 percent of GDP.
Due to rapid economic development in the past decade, water demand continues to grow and two of
the four regions, namely the Northeast and the Central Plain, experience frequent droughts, and
flooding also occurs more frequently due to deforestation. <strong>The</strong> water resources development budget
has been increasing and represents a large portion of the national budget for development. However,
current environment constraints may slow down large water resources development <strong>project</strong>s in the
future.
<strong>The</strong> agricultural sector remains the main user of available water and accounts for 71 percent of total
water demand; the industrial sector accounts for two percent, the domestic sector for five percent and
the remaining 22 percent are for ecological balance. <strong>The</strong> trend, however, is for a reduction in the share
of agriculture with a corresponding increase in both industrial and domestic water usage.
Currently about 80 percent of the urban population have access to treated pipe drinking water and this
is planned to increase to 91 percent by the year 2017. As for the rural population, about 70 percent are
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National water visions in Southeast Asia