Markets for food from sustainable farming systems are growing around the world[i], including in northern Thailand. Despite their potential, however, linkages between environmentally conscious food consumers and farmers in Thailand are poorly developed. In the West and Japan, community supported agriculture schemes (CSA) are mushrooming across the land to establish just these linkages. CSAs directly connect farms and consumers to ensure the vitality of family farms, environmental protection and healthy food.
This is a 1-year pilot project for CSA in the Chiang Mai area of northern Thailand funded by the US State Department, but with a unique twist: our small natural farm in the Chiang Mai peri-urban area, Fair Earth Farm, will serve as a catalyst and a bridge connecting a group of urban consumers with farmers in two target villages. The first is Pang Daeng, an upland ethnic minority village with a decade of experience in natural farming. This ethnic Palaung village 70 km north of Chiang Mai city boasts worthy farmers and innovative systems in a fantastic landscape, but the villagers lack good market access for their products. The second village is a lowland Thai village in Chiang Mai’s peri-urban fringe. Dorn Tarn village is the home of Fair Earth Farm. It is a community of hardworking farmers, but one also dangerously dependent upon chemical agriculture. The farmers here suffer stressed ecosystems and bad commodity prices. They express interest in natural farming but lack knowledge about ways forward.
Fair Earth Co. has good relations with both communities, as well as with urban consumers and a range of stakeholders with knowledge and capacity in natural farming. Our network also includes high-quality researchers and communicators, who can help document and communicate the challenges and opportunities in helping small farmers to connect with urban markets for environmentally sustainable farm produce.
Goal and Objectives
The overarching goal of the project is to demonstrate to small farmers the potential of markets for environmentally sustainable farm products in northern Thailand.
The objective of the project is to implement a pilot-scale community supported agriculture (CSA) scheme in Chiang Mai Province that links environmentally concerned urban food consumers with existing and potential natural farmers in the two target villages. The project addresses several key societal concerns, namely biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and development of clean technologies. These are addressed through the promotion of proven sustainable farming methods that conserve and enhance biodiversity – especially soil fauna and flora – reduce dependence on fossil fuel-based farm inputs, and substitute polluting technologies and practices with environmentally friendly ones. This is done in many ways, including the use of green manures and cover crops; integration among tree crops, annual crops, livestock and fish; and an emphasis on local foods for local markets. Many of these methods are currently practiced by farmers in the target areas. Other methods are practiced around the world and elsewhere in northern Thailand, but are rare or unknown in the target villages. Many of the farmers in the target villages are potential candidates to transition to these methods.
Background
Many urban food consumers are concerned about the quality of the food they eat, feeling a disconnection between their food and the place where it is produced[ii]. This in part explains the rise of the organic food movement[iii]. Meanwhile, small farmers continue to suffer a variety of pressures on their livelihoods, including debt, health problems related to the use of agricultural chemicals, and unstable commodity markets[iv]. Consumers want a greater sense of confidence in the quality of the food they consume and producers need a better deal from the food they grow.
Beyond the immediate question of family health, some consumers are motivated by ethical considerations about food. These include concerns about:`
- the impacts of food production on the environment, including worries about biodiversity decline, climate change, and watershed contamination;
- inhumane animal rearing in factory farms;
- the wellbeing of small farmers and traditional ways of rural life;
- preserving green spaces around cities for aesthetic reasons;
- preserving and recovering agro-biodiversity, or the variety of local crop and livestock varieties;
- harmful trends in diet of modern societies
Meanwhile, much of both lowland and upland agriculture in northern Thailand has serious negative consequences for forests, water and biodiversity. It has also led to significant social problems, like exposure to toxic chemicals and debt. In response, many organizations propose alternative agricultural practices more in line with natural processes. These practices go by many names – organic farming, permaculture, and conservation farming. In this project we use the term natural farming. 
An innovative program of natural farming spearheaded by the Upland Holistic Development Project (UHDP) in northern Thailand has helped ethnic minority farmers to develop farming practices that conserve and enhance forest and biodiversity health. One obstacle to expansion of this initiative is lack of access to markets for the upland farmers’ produce. This project intends to help remedy this problem.
An innovative and fast-growing alternative to harmful trends in farming in northern Thailand is a movement toward local food systems. Several innovations have emerged in Chiang Mai city in recent years, including alternative markets selling products under various labels such as “organic,” “sustainable,” “pesticide-free,” etc.[v] In North America, the EU and Japan, a rapidly growing phenomenon goes by the name of CSA, or community supported agriculture[vi]. There are many definitions of CSA[vii], but the idea essentially seeks to knock links out of the modern food supply chain, reconnecting food eaters and food growers. In most CSA schemes, there is a direct contractual relationship between a farm operation and a group of consumers. The consumers pay a certain amount of money at the beginning of the season and in return receive a basket of produce each week throughout the growing season. Chemical-free and other more natural farming methods are implied in CSA, though strict adherence to state or other certification schemes is not. By directly linking urban consumers and peri-urban or rural producers – either through direct consumer harvesting, farm pick-ups or local networks – CSAs reduce the need for costly and technical organic certification. Consumers can see for themselves how their food is produced, and sometimes even take part in the production. Farmers gain security by contracting with a network of consumers who promise to buy produce for the season, often at guaranteed prices.
In northern Thailand, several organizations[viii] have helped organize twice-weekly markets in Chiang Mai where members of farming cooperatives from the area can sell organic or pesticide-reduced produce, usually for prices consistent with general markets. These markets are welcome alternatives in Chiang Mai, but are still quite under-developed in terms of promotions and advertising. For example, the rapidly growing expatriate community seems to be largely ignorant of their existence. In terminology familiar to the organics movement, these would be considered “farmers’ markets,” rather than CSA. The farms are far enough away from the city (around two hours) to make them inconvenient for consumer visits. The consumers can buy directly from the farmers at the markets, but do not have personal experience with the farms themselves. And the idea of a “community of individuals who pledge support for a (specific) farm operation”[ix] is absent from the system.
The creation of a CSA in northern Thailand, with assistance from the government of the United States – one of the nations spearheading this progressive movement – will be a novel and, it is hoped, trendsetting enterprise that could simultaneously further environmentally responsible land stewardship, economically viable small farms and healthy food consumers.
Program Strategy and Approach
This is a proposal for action research, straddling the boundary between research and development. In this case, action research refers to an effort to create a new yet modest institutional arrangement – the CSA – to improve the environment, health and livelihood of poor farmers by tapping into the potential of consumer demand for safe and healthy food produced in an environmentally sustainable way. This will require both study and action. By carefully documenting, analyzing and disseminating the lessons learned through this development intervention, it is hoped that these lessons will inform food and social policies, as well as development agendas.
In terms of stakeholder engagement, the strategy is three-pronged. We will recruit and facilitate:
- a group of urban consumers (app. 15 families), who will agree to contract with a network of producers for a 1-year pilot demonstration project and make weekly purchases of farm products;
- a group of upland ethnic minority farmers in Chiang Dao District to produce food for the CSA membership.
- a group of lowland Northern Thai farmers in Mae Rim District to produce food for the CSA membership.
The consumer group will be ethnically and socio-economically diverse, but will have in common these criteria:
- concern with food health and safety;
- concern with environmental impacts of food production;
- concern with farmer livelihood and security;
- willingness to participate in CSA research and development, including responding to surveys and joining workshops, and regularly visiting the farm to familiarize themselves with natural farming; and
- capacity and willingness to disseminate information about CSA to diverse sub-segments of the consumer population.
The first group of farmers, ethnic minority farmers in Pang Daeng village, have developed innovative and productive agroforests and integrated upland fields, but lack market access sufficient to sustain and expand their initiatives. This situation exists alongside unsustainable trends in expansion of monocultures of feed maize, rubber and other non-staple cash crops, as well as persistent problems of ethnic marginalization, food insecurity and health problems[x]. This farmer group has a decade-long relationship with the Upland Holistic Development Project[xi], an NGO that works with the most marginal of Thailand’s mountain people. The villagers and UHDP have yielded important results in the research and development of complex and biodiverse alternative farming systems[xii]. This project will seek to help the villagers market their nature-friendly products[xiii].
The lowland farmers in Dorn Tarn village are struggling with a raft of problems attributed to chemical-intensive farming, including deteriorating health, soil degradation, debt and social dislocation. They lack knowledge of clear and sustainable alternatives. This village in Mae Rim District has good transportation and irrigation infrastructure, and hard-working and innovative farmers, and thus real potential to connect with alternative markets in the city. However, these connections need to be catalyzed. That’s the role we will try to play.
[i] McKibben, 2007. “Deep Economy.” New York: Times Books.
[ii] “In 1993, a Swedish researcher calculated that the ingredients of a typical Swedish breakfast — apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream, orange juice, sugar — traveled a distance equal to the circumference of the Earth before reaching the Scandinavian table.” See Worldwatch: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6064
[iii] See Conford, 2001. “The Origins of the Organic Movement.” Edinburgh: Floris Books.
[iv] For information on the specific problems faced by the upland study village in this project, see http://uhdp.org/Condition.html.
[v] For a list of markets operated in Northern Thailand by the Institute for Sustainable Agricultural Communities (ISAC), see http://www.intracen.org/Organics/Country-Profile-Thailand.htm
[vi] The CSA idea originated simultaneously in Japan and Germany in the 1960s. The first CSA in the USA started in 1985. By 2006 there were 1,500 operating across the country. (McKibben, 2007. “Deep Economy.” New York: Times Books; pg. 81).
[vii] One definition, from http://localfoods.about.com/od/localfoodsglossary/g/csa_glossary.htm: “Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a food production and distribution system that directly connects farmers and consumers. Consumers buy “shares” in a farm’s harvest in advance.” Because this is a research project, the consumers will not be required to buy shares in advance in the first year of operation. See part e (methods) for elaboration.
[viii]The Institute for Sustainable Agricultural Communities (ISAC) and the Chiang Mai University Multi-cropping Center are two such organizations.
[ix] http://www.geocities.com/rainforest/7813/c_umass.htm
[x] For a report on the history of the target upland villager, see http://www.statelessperson.com/www/?q=node/685
[xi] See www.uhdp.org
[xii] For a slide show of UHDP’s work, see http://www.danieljpowell.com/uhdp_evaluation
[xiii] For a list of the indigenous agroforest products promoted by UHDP, see http://uhdp.org/Doc/Agroforestry-English-web.pdf, pg. 40.
