Opening the Green Box: How Organic became the standard for alternative agriculture in Thaialnd (original) (raw)
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World Development, 2024
There is increasing interest in organic lowland rice cultivation in Thailand. Farmers are becoming more wary about the human health and environmental impacts of using herbicides and pesticides. In addition, consumers are increasingly demanding rice cultivated without the use of chemicals. There is also more interest in accessing international and local organic rice markets. Thus, in 2017 the government of Thailand's Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives rolled out a project designed to promote organic rice farming through subsidizing the conversion of one million-rai (160,000 ha) of lowland rice farms to being organic over a three-year period. Although the initiative was well intended, and constitutes local agency, the project has faced serious obstacles because the organic certification standards associated with the project do not align with international standards. This has negatively impacted the structures that support organic farming, by giving farmers unrealistic expectations regarding what is required to produce organic rice for the international market. The Thai certification system also has different ecological implications compared to other certification systems, because value systems always affect certification systems and their material implications. Applying a political ecology approach-with an emphasis on political relations, economic structure, ecological change, and scalar politics-this article examines the one million-rai project. It is contended that 'certification nationalism' is manifesting, and that there are important lessons to be learned about planning and implementing such certification initiatives.
Environment and Natural Resources Journal, 2011
Despite the urgency of reducing the environmental impacts of food production, the public and private sector continues to promote intensive agriculture methods. Studies show that input substitution strategies have led small-scale farmers into a cycle of debt and degraded soil fertility. In Thailand, non-governmental organizations have assisted farmers through organic extension programs. This research examined the socio-ecological benefits of organic production to rice farmers through a mixed methods approach. Coding and categorizing of semi-structured interviews with 50 Northeastern Thai organic farmers’ sheds light on shared values, perceptions, and actions towards nature. Through grounded theory I discovered the salience of fertilizing practices as a medium of associations between farmers and nature. A subsequent phase of structured interviews with 75 members of organic farmer groups investigated the ways that informants improved soil fertility. Organic farmers perceived bountiful ...
Over the past decades, development policies in Thailand have succeeded in achieving economic growth for the country but not an equitable distribution of that wealth. The purpose of this research project is to compare and contrast two main approaches to development – the Green Revolution and the Organic Revolution – to determine their impacts on inequality and to explore the causes of those impacts. Both qualitative and quantitative data are relied on in this study, including but not limited to trends in income inequality, trends in organic farming, and policy documents. Surin province, once the second poorest province in Thailand and today a national leader in organic farming, is chosen as a case study. I conclude that both the Green Revolution and the Organic Revolution did not succeed in combating economic inequality. Although the premise of each development approach is significantly different, the implementation of them contains parallels (high transition costs, a rhetoric of “technical expertise”, an export-oriented direction to production expansion, and the role of agribusinesses) that point to an underlying problem of development in Thailand – its enclosed policy circle. The involvement of civil society actors in the organic farming movement and the lack of them in the Green Revolution may indicate that the Organic Revolution has more potential to decrease inequality than the Green Revolution.
Processes of globalisation in the conventional food provision system have had widespread negative impacts on small-scale farmers. Yet, alternative food networks, which are characterised by more sustainable production/consumption practices and fairer trade relations, have increasingly been 'going global' and, in the process, have been integrating small-scale farms in the South. One such high-value export-led commodity is certified organic shrimp. International third-party certification schemes are becoming popular as a tool to verify the intangible attributes of such commodities. Using concepts of multifunctionality and agrarian change, this paper examines the implications of introducing an international environmental certification programme to a site where the 'peasantry' has been preserved and has limited integration in the global agro-food system. Drawing on a case study that examines the first certified organic shrimp production project in Vietnam, this paper concludes that the current movement towards post-productivism in the global North has potential to keep local farming practices in the global South by justifying the value of peasant-like production methods through international certification. As a result, the development path of agrarian transition might be reshaped into a form not necessarily pursuing industrialisation. This leads to the new interpretation of pre-and post-productivism beyond the North and South divide.
Thailand has been experiencing agrochemical-based commercial rice production for several decades now. Until recently, organic rice production has survived, but with little expansion. The present study applies a Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) to analyze the composition of the related socio-technical system, from macro to micro levels, to cast a light on both the large picture and niche operations. This research used mixed methods comprising documents and interviews, while compiling secondary statistics to analyze the establishment and dominance of commercial or mainstream rice, as well as the emergence of organic rice as an experiment. When analyzing information at multiple levels, it was found that the agrochemical-based commercial rice regime has become a dominant socio-technical regime comprising; interwoven power of government policy, commercialized agro-businesses, markets, industry, technology and Thai cultural dimensions. Furthermore, government policy has been responding to the increasing landscape changes, it has simultaneously created barriers for organic rice production. The development of organic rice as a niche experiment was partly due to landscape changes but also due to NGOs, farmers and academic leaders, often as a reaction to the negative impacts of agrochemical-based commercial rice. This in-depth study has found that if intensive promotion is applied, organic rice could become quite successful in terms of production and marketing. Until now, its expansion has been very minimal due to government regulations and policies, along with fewer business supports. Therefore, there have been limitations in the up scaling of such experiments.
Opportunities and constraints of organic agriculture in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand
Asia-Pacific Development Journal, 2013
The application of chemicals in conventional agriculture to increase productivity can result in environmental degradation, bring about economic problems and cause harmful effects on farmers, labourers and consumers. Responding to these problems, a number of nongovernmental organizations and government agencies have been promoting organic agriculture in the province of Chiang Mai in order to assure food safety and at the same time alleviate the poverty of farmers. The present study discusses the organic agriculture movement in Chiang Mai and compares organic agriculture with conventional agriculture in terms of yields, socioeconomic considerations and human health aspects. The findings show that organic agriculture could generate significant benefits. However, constraints inherent to organic farming practices and other factors, including off-farm works and perceptions of organic agriculture, complicate the process of organic certification and standards, and to some extent weaken extension efforts in promoting organic agriculture. In order to improve organic farming, there is a need for all stakeholders, namely, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, consumers and farmer organizations, to work together.
Forest and Society
This is an introduction and review for a special section on agrarian transformation in Thailand. The article seeks to guide greater attention toward issues affecting rural Thai landscapes and livelihoods. Through the examination of specific commodities across various geographies, the paper seeks to refocus research towards decision making processes among rural communities. The research draws on field study cases that follow various aspects of particular commodities, including rubber, pomelo, tomato, cassava, and furthermore, incorporates complementary research in Forest and Society on coffee, ginger, jujube, and agrotourism in Thailand. Through the factors shaping engagement with these agricultural commodities, we examine issues including labor, soil fertility, contract farming arrangements, drought resistant crops, climate change, and others. In this way we seek to draw attention to the complex dynamics taking place on the Thai rural landscape and the factors that are reshaping lan...
The emergence of community-based resource management cannot be simply understood, especially in the recent shifting seed regime of Thailand in the neoliberal era. By employing the concept of neoliberalization of nature, this paper turns to see the connection between neoliberalism, environmental change and environmental politics in order to understand how small-scale farmers in Northern Thailand are integrated into contract farming for hybrid seed production under global seed companies and conservation of agro biodiversity under socio-environmental movements. By this, an emerging question for socio-environmental movements with anti-neoliberalism is whether the community-based seed management in such circumstances can be grasped as the " commons versus private. " To say more, there are ambivalences of common and private domains in seed management as well as the invention of natures amongst actors like seed companies, state agencies and NGOs under the neoliberal era. The main discussion of this paper is that the socio-environmental movements might help in reclaiming the farmers' rights to access to plant genetic resources by raising the value of the commons and sustainability; however, the movements, in some ways, still position farmers in the opposition of " public versus private. " Thus, it leads to the limits of understanding how farmers conserve and utilize the plant genetic resources in multiple political spaces in the neoliberal era.