SELF-SUFFICIENCY FREES FARMERS FROM BAD DEBT

       Under a government plan to assist poor farmers using His Majesty's self-sufficiency programme, 80,000 communities are being targeted to become recipients of its training and funding facilities.
       So far, 20,000 communities nationwide have qualified for the programme.
       Each will receive severall hundred thousand baht, depending on their respective scale, tapping the Bt20-billion scheme.
       At a training centre in the outskirts of Nakhon Nayok town, about a two-hour drive from Bangkok, hundreds of farmers attended a seminar last week to learn how the sufficiency economy worked.
       They will become part of a dynamic grass-roots movement designed to free them from debt slavery by corrupt corporations and banks.
       The scheme is aimed at making small farmers financially independent and protecting them from a highly exploitive system that largely benefits big business and foreign entities.
       "The whole idea is to free farmers form the misguided belief they must invest heavily in land, construction, fertilisers and pesticides," said Sumit Champrasit, director of the Sufficiency Economy Office under the Prime Minister's Office.
       "All farmers need to do is work on 1 rai of land."
       On that 1 rai, they can cultivate rece, breed firsh and shrimp and grow cash crops like papayas, bananas and herbs.
       Sumit said the recent longan and lichee scandal and other cash-crop schemes had devastated many rural families, forcing government intervention, which itself was riddled with graft and theft.
       "For the past 50 years, we've been programmed by the West, its education and commercial system to embrace ideas that do not work well for markets like Thailand," he agrued.
       Under the training programme, farmers are told it is absolutely unnecessary to use imported fertiliser, construct costly air-conditioned breeding houses and buy dangerous pesticides.
       Through first-hand experience, one farmer lost Bt40 million after investing in huge tracts of land, purchasing all of the chemicals, farme quipment, feed meal and seeds, only to find out they were costly mistakes.
       "Because of the outlay, I had to borrow money from banks and went deep into debt," he says. "When crop prices fell, I went broke and for the last 10 years have been struggling to pay back the loans."
       Sumit said that farmer was one of thousands who had been poorly advised and encouraged to take risky positions and adopt Western farming methods that did not work well in Thailand, which for centuries had been a sucessful agricultural producer. While the anti-Western and anti-corporate tone may sound xenophobic at first, the fact is Sumit is only echoing what many respected scientists around the world are now saying: be wary of corporations and their promises of quick profits.
       In South American countries like Bolivia and Peru, where potatoes originated some 8,000 years ago, Western horticultural experts have recently announced the huge mistake by countries that support only one strain of spud while destroying hundreds of other types of the crop.
       In a BBC expose in the Andes, we are told supermarkets carry only one type of potato, because monopoly is ultimately the end game of big corporations.
       The wisdom of having other strains is if one type becomes afflicted with disease, the others will likely survive, and there will be no need for pesticides. But chemical firms would not be ecstatic if such a choice were available.
       This week, UK scientists in that country's Agriculture Ministry said the old emphasis of achieving high yield and wmploying huge tracts of land for production was the wrong way to go.
       The solution lies in finding ways to farm on smaller plots and use less fertilisers and pesticides - exactly what His Majesty the King's self-suffiency farming programme champions.
       Thailand, like all developing countries, has every right to be paranoid aout the intentions of global corporations - and Western governments, if they are not in bed with big business, will agree.
       The Grorge Clooney film "Michael Clayton" showed how global executives put profit above public health.
       The chilling truth is such movies are based more on fact rather than fiction.
       In India, the recent clash between farmers and Monsanto in its attempt to sell rice seed that would forever make farmers completely dependent on the firm for future crops and fertiliser, offended even the most broad-minded supporter of genetically modified foods.
       The self-sufficiency idea is in many ways anything but revolutionary. Sumit said all it did was speak bluntly and realistically about the failings of a consumer system that would only ruin unsuspecting farmers. The present global meltdown is a wake-up call to everyone to re-evaluate the sustainability of an immoral market system that insults the very core of capitalist principles.