Recent studies still show that some 800 million still suffer from chronic hunger and that some 80 % of the world’s most hungry and poor live in the rural areas. Thailand, while not reeling from extreme poverty and high unemployment rate unlike many other nations, has nonetheless also witnessed in recent years the move of people from rural areas to urban centers to look for jobs and employment. Some rural farm households had sold assets to send children to urban areas to look for jobs or to get appropriate education. Some farmers[1] feel that rural farming is a difficult back-breaking task, farming methods are traditional, investments are low and support services are coming in trickles.

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Likewise, small farmers feel that the education system is more specially inclined toward the industrial and service sectors and less on the agricultural sector. Hence teenagers and young adults are determined to move to the city. Now, most village communities in the countryside slowly have only children and the elderly. The poor farmers say that sometimes the fields are abandoned and ready to be sold. Although, there are some cultivation and production in the field by some farmers, it is characterized by lack of management, care and attention.

 

Sensing that given time, the rural farmers left behind would be old and no one to tend to the farms after them, the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives, Thailand’s premier agricultural bank, has come up with a programme to enthuse children of rural farmers, who were by now educated and entrepreneurial, to reverse the exodus and return to their roots. The Government likewise provided incentives for reverse urban-rural migration.

 

Thousands responded to the call and still counting. Now on its third year of support to entrepreneurs and new generation farmers, BAAC thus provides an annual back-to-the-farm training programme to returning farmers’ educated children on topics such as applying science and technology to agriculture, integrating agribusiness into farming, sustainability in agriculture, learning various stages of production to processing to marketing along the supply and value chains, market analysis and farm business planning.

 

These thousands of new generation farmers are sustaining Thailand’s prestige and claim as “the kitchen of the world”, the world’s number one rice exporter and the world’s third largest livestock products exporter.

 

[1] Term herein used for brevity to include those in the agricultural farming, livestock, fisheries and forestry sectors, and referring to individuals, households or groups of farmers.