Rethinking sustainable agriculture in Thailand: A governance perspective

This paper examines the feasibility of official institutional programs for sustainable agriculture in Thailand during the last decade. In Thailand, both popular and official attention was paid to sustainable agriculture well before the Asian economic crisis occurred in 1997. However, the policy implementation of sustainable agriculture programs began only after the turn of the millennium, and the processes and outcomes have not been adequately studied from a feasibility standpoint. This paper aims to fill the gap by employing a 'sustainable governance' perspective for examining the programs of three main official institutions promoting sustainable agriculture in Thailand. It is concluded that the social impacts of public sustainable agricultural interventions in the past decade remain limited for the estimated 5 million small-scale farmer households in Thailand.