ment
World Food Policy
2000 • Kitchen to the World
• Free Trade Agreements
• Establishment of National Food Committee
• One Tambon One Product program
• Sustainable agriculture , sufficiency economy , and organic agriculture enter national discourse — farmers encouraged to diversify crops and balance subsistence and market crops
• Abundant cheap processed food
• Rice mortgage schemes to help farmer incomes
2.1 . The Kitchen to the World and Contract Farming
Since the 1970s , a main Thai government approach to rural development has been to increasingly commercialize agriculture and bring farmers into the cash economy . The assumption was that rising incomes would allow rural Thais to purchase the food products they did not produce themselves and become more food secure . In the contemporary Thai food system described above , this approach is extended to including small holder farmer participation in agri-business dominated , export-oriented production . The Kitchen to the World policy aims to increase production and export of both primary agricultural products and processed foods on a massive scale ( Supaphol , 2010 ). One outcome of this policy approach has been an increase in the use of contract farming in Thailand . Producing for the international market increasingly requires standardized , high-quality , hygienic produce . Contract farming is seen as a way to achieve these standards .
Contract farming began in Thailand in the 1970s with the CP group , but rapidly expanded in the 1990s . Thailand is now the biggest contract farming country in Asia , with more than halfa-million contract growing households ( Singh , 2006 ). The Thai government has been actively involved in this process with the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives and the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives helping facilitate contracts , providing farmers with credit to help establishing new production methods and also providing tax concessions to agri-businesses to encourage their participation ( Delforge , 2007 ). A key government strategy has become “ private-led integrated agricultural development ” ( Singh , 2006 ).
Access to markets , as well as increases in production , can be key to poverty reduction and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization views contract farming as an effective method to link farmers to global
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