Ms. Chutima Boonyaprapatsorn, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives, visited farmers participating in the large rice field management scheme in Ubon Ratchathani province, a BRIA project site in the Northeast of Thailand, on 23 July 2017.

The scheme, which is being promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, encourages farmers to form a group, combine rice fields, pool manpower and share farm machinery services in order to achieve economies of scale, reduce production costs as well as increase the bargaining power of smallholder farmers. She emphasized the need to maintain high rice quality and urged farmers to grow rice to satisfy international requirements, such as GAP or the SRP standard.

For their part, the farmers are satisfied that they can apply the recommendations to produce quality ‘SRP rice’, all of which was bought by Olam last year. The current BRIA farmer training activities are being supported by the Rice Department (RD), Department of Agricultural Extension (DoAE), Bayer, Olam and BASF. Surin, Roi Et and Sisaket provinces are also covered by the project.

To reach more farmers this year, BRIA has introduced SRP by conducting meetings with farmers, as follows:

The total number of the SRP farmers in this province is 1,336 and all of them are members of 19 Community Rice Centres (CRCs).