AAN comes to Surin

Rice Fund Surin hosted Friday's Alternative Agriculture Network - Isaan (AAN) quarterly meeting. The meeting was made up of groups of farmers and NGOs from 8 provinces (Roi Et, Ubon, Yasothon, Mahasarakam, Khon Kaen, Kalasin, Petchabun and Surin). The morning session focused on network mechanics, the responsibilities of the network committee's 25 members and the re-appointing of Bunsong Matkhao as president of the network.
The AAN currently focuses on 7 major issues:
- Developing a sustainable agriculture system - organic seed saving, local variety production and using the network to raise the status of model farmers to be teachers and advisers for other organic farmers
- Agricultural knowledge preservation and expansion - improving the resources available for members projects and creating new opportunities for agricultural knowledge
- Community Resources - moving beyond what is available to an individual farmer and working on a community level to sustainably utilize common resources like community forests and local irrigation systems
- Policies and Movement - creating a relationship between the farmers' movement and government policies by distributing information about government policy plans, agro-industry and other issues to members
- Children in farming communities - working to find ways to promote small-scale, organic farming as a sustainable livelihood
- Network Fund - managing funds to distribute among farmers' groups for local-level projects
- Alternative Markets - establishing Green Markets throughout the Isaan region


The afternoon session was focused on national-level political issues, with several presentations intended to provide up-to-date information about agriculture and trade policy. Satjin, of the Sustainable Agriculture Foundation in Bangkok, discussed the relationship between the energy crisis, the food system, and government policy. With increasing concern about climate change in the Global North and the promotion of biofuel crop production in the Global South, Thailand's agro-industrial economy plans on developing "production zones" for crops like sugar cane and cassava that will then be processed into biofuels. ASEAN is also poised to manage the trade and distribution of "green agribusiness" resources throughout the Southeast Asian regional "community market."

The AAN is critical of this policy-making direction because of the corporate pressure and control that is already exerted on the biofuel industry, the environmental degradation that is occurring in other developing nations around the world as a result of intensive biofuel production, and the threat that expanding monocultures have to the small-scale biodiversity that organic farmers in the AAN are working to generate.

Beyond discussing these political issues, the meeting distributed information to AAN members for local seed saving projects. Above, Presong Seesa-Ard and Arat Saengubon review the most updated seed saving and management materials for the Tatoom farmers' group.

The future of the AAN looks bright