Natural Resources and Environment Minister Varawut Silpa-archa said he had no objection to the possibility of new forest borderlines being drawn up at Thap Lan National Park in Prachin Buri's Nadi district if it is able to deal with issues of forest encroachment there.
"I'm confident the government won't be disadvantaged by using any forest borderlines to solve this problem inside the park.
"We would accept any borderline so long as it ends the encroachment problem," he said.
Mr Varawut on Wednesday answered questions from the media about the state's attempts to re-demarcate the borderlines of Thap Lan National Park.
The matter was recently unveiled by whistleblower Chuvit Kamolvisit.
Mr Chuvit said he had learned that state authorities were planning to use new forest borderlines to scale down the forest zone inside Thap Lan National Park.
If successful, all resort operators inside the park would benefit because their resort areas would automatically be located outside the area of the park after the rezoning, he said.
Mr Chuvit also raised the issue of a land conflict between two state agencies, the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP) and the Agricultural Land Reform Office (Alro), which have been at odds over national parkland areas nationwide.
He said the DNP wants to preserve national park status for the large tracts of land it manages, but Alro wants to see more land distributed to landless farmers, and not resort owners who often encroach illegally on parklands, he said.
Mr Varawut insisted that anyone illegally encroaching on forest land would not have the right to possess that land, as that was state policy.
Land rights are only given to those who were staying on the land before Thap Lan National Park was formed.
On Thurday, the national committee on land policy chaired by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha will conclude whether to use the new forest borderlines completed in the year 2000 as the tool to identify an individual's right to the controversial forest land.
Damrong Pidech, Forest Conservation Party-list MP, said if the committee decides to use the new forest borderline, the park will lose more than 200,000 rai of land while 38 land encroachers who have not been taken to court will walk free. This was an unfair outcome.
"You [Gen Prayut] didn't clearly state the land would be granted to the really poor, but instead vaguely said it would be given to people to earn a living," said Mr Damrong.
He also called on the public to pay attention as Thap Lan National Park is part of the country's largest forest complex and will be at risk of being delisted from the world heritage list if the changes go ahead.
