"My Job in Thailand" Top 5 Page for this destination Lop Buri Travelogue by riproy

This will not be of interest to all, but i wanted to write a little about my job and plant agriculture in Thailand (after all, we all eat while we are in Thailand) as seen thru my job.
In 1994 i began working as a Plant Protection Officer in the Lopburi Provincial Agriculture Extension Office. This office's mandate is to educate farmers on insect, rat, bacteria, fungus, virus, weed, snail management in relation to their crops (yes, rats eat rice). Usually what this amounted to was advising on what kind of pesticide to use when and on what crops. I was there to promote alternatives to pesticide use in agriculture. Pesticide overuse was/is too common in Thailand, especially in vegetables, but also in fruit and rice. Above are my initial coworkers. Eventually i was left with only Manit on the right.

As a matter of fact, i AM taking a leak

Manit was a godsend. He liked to work with farmers, as much as his position would allow. He liked to laugh. He took the crap that fell from above (management) in stride. Kept an even keel. He didn't speak English other than a few words like 'bacteria' and 'fungus', though even these were sometimes hard to understand at first. He was interested in talking to me and enjoyed using my dictionary that i toted around with me for the first 6 months as much as i did. He liked to teach me vulgar words and Thai expressions which i soaked up. Most important, he understood my lousy Thai almost right from the beginning. I don't know how - i think he understood me and where i was coming from which is strange since i was the first foreigner with whom he had had any significant contact. He was a very important colleague for the work i did, and more importantly, he was a good friend. I learned a lot from him, esp life lessons-type stuff.
Here he is during a flood at another colleague's home while we were moving her furniture.

Free rat poison to all comers

It wasn't long on the job (Day 2) that I began seeing how pesticide was abused in Thailand. I went to a farmer meeting on mango pests lead by our office. At the end of the meeting, every attendee was given a kilo of rodenticide out of the back of the government pickup truck, specifically rat poison! Rats in Thailand are a pest of rice. The problems with this gratuity are of course that it assumes that farmers attending the mango meeting grow rice (a naive assumption, it turns out) AND that they have a rat problem that warrants a pesticide application. This pesticide gift has no link to need. No wonder there were so many old people who couldn’t possibly be farming anymore coming to these meetings – there was a freebie involved and all you needed was a signature and a pulse.

Also, it is true that when you receive something for free, it has little value and you end up using it carelessly. For example, in the case of pesticide, doubling the prescribed dose, or using it on cutworms to see if it works to save some money, or letting it sit around the house until a kid gets into it, or the floodwaters reach it and it contaminates your food supply. I was in shock when I saw this happening at the mango meeting. Boy, was I green. This was a typical day.

Why does this happen? Our office, part of the Plant Protection Section of the Dept of Agriculture Extension, had (and still does have) a ‘pest outbreak budget’ – basically a large warehouse of assorted pesticides, many near expiration, that it doles out to farmers when there is the perception of a pest problem, or to reward those who come to meetings. From a policy standpoint, this budget was meant to stem pest outbreaks like the brown planthopper (BPH) explosion of 88-89 that devastated rice crops in central Thailand and beyond. So it was important to have in order to prevent epidemic situations. Seldom was it used for this since there were rarely outbreaks of the BPH scale. However, this pesticide trove was very important politically in another way. I will illustrate:
A couple of farmers have a pest problem in their fields and go the their village headman. If the village headman, an elected position in the village, was worthy of this standing, he would have the influence to summon the local ‘kaset tambon’ (KT), or agriculture officer. The KT in turn contacts the Plant Protection people and asked them to assist in this particular village. The Plant Protection office would visit the village that had a couple of farmers with, let’s say, a cutworm problem in the field. When the officers arrive, lots of villagers have gathered though only a handful would have the insect problem. Others arrive knowing that there will be some pesticide given out because a govt officer has come. The Plant Protection official would try to comfort people by explaining the problem, identifying the pest, explain the biology of the pest, methods of managing the pest, and the likelihood of economic losses due to this pest. [Briefly, varigated cutworm will rarely cause widespread or long-term damage in rice. What happens is that the rice looks awful in spots, but it grows back when the cutworms mature and turn into moths. The feeding period is short – the problem is solved on its own.] Now, the Plant Protection officer is in a situation – he must show support the local KT and the village headman by giving out pesticide or the villagers will lose respect for the KT and the village headman. No respect for the headman means no re-election. No respect for the KT means s/he will have trouble working in that area again. And the KT will be wanting to implement projects in his/her area in the future and will need the cooperation of farmers to do so. So, a farmer is thinking 'you scratch my back and i'll scratch yours' - get us some pesticide for our problem and we will be more inclined to cooperate with your future (and usually useless) projects. The Plant Protection officer must then also play ball, so to speak. Hence, pesticide is given to farmers not according to need, but for political expediency.

That isn't milk they are standing in

This picture is of farmers moving rice seedling from a nursery area to be planted in the water-covered field. As you can see, it is hard work. One of the reasons for this backbreaking transplanting is that weeds cannot establish themselves in water. That is, weed seeds need oxygen to gerrminate. So you have a naturally weed-free crop. Nowadays, germinated seed is often broadcasted over moist soil and allowed to establish before the field is submerged in water. Weeds will grow, but now you can buy herbicide to help control those.
Pesticides have undoubtedly eased the work of farmers in Thailand. Thai farmers were quickly wooed into a love affair with the chemicals when they saw how quickly they killed bugs and how effectively they killed weeds. As demand rose, so did the number of suppliers that saw dollar signs in this business. While pesticides are formulated in Thailand, virtually all the active ingredient (pesticide is never 100% active ingredient – there is always a percentage of carrier in the formulated product) is imported from western nations and Japan (I think locally produced paraquat is the one exception). As registrations for new pesticides in Thailand were relatively easy to obtain and very loosely regulated, many companies started importing several active ingredients, formulating them into on-the-shelf pesticides, and marketing them as their own product with their own trademark brand name. The effect? An explosion of product names on the market compounded by confusion between general names and brand names created an overwhelming situation for farmers. For example, methyl parathion is the general name for a very toxic insecticide (WHO rated class 1A = extremely hazardous, and banned in many countries). In Thailand, it was sold under more than 250 brand names. English brand names that are hard to pronounce in Thai and have no meaning to the average Thai citizen - words like "Fight" or "Ambush". Same goes for monocrotophos, another class 1A insecticide banned in many countries. It was also marketed with around 300 brand names. Multiply this by the dozens and dozens of insecticides available in Thailand, all with many brand names. Then add to this the names of herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, acaricides, etc. also on the market.

Dressed for the slopes, but not for spraying

Pesticide usage in Thailand a huge issue and more complicated than i present it, but i would like to explain it to illustrate how technology can be destructive when it is virtually unregulated, introduced in conjunction with little education, and driven by profit-hungry businesses.

Let's face it - pesticides are poison. That is the bottom line. They kill target organisms, and sometimes they kill non-target organisms too. Sometimes they contaminate water. Sometimes they make us sick. That is why i was completely mystified when i realized that the Thai word for pesticide is 'yah' - the same word used for medicine! What do you do when you are sick? Well, of course you take medicine. Doctors in Thailland are notorious for prescribing medication for every problem because there are kickbacks involved for the doctor. So the Thai population has become very accustomed to taking colourful lots of synthetic medicines whenever they are not well. This 'silver bullet' treatment of symptoms instead of treating the problem has become the overriding behaviour when faced with sickness.
So what do you do when a plant is sick? Give it medicine. Pesticide in this case. It gets worse - the Thai words for "injecting medication" (cheet yah) is the SAME phrase used for "spraying pesticide". The pesticide companies couldn't have planned this any better.

Initially (about 20 years ago) pesticides worked very well. Farmers would talk of when they would spray an insecticide and kill all the insects in a field immediately dead, no exceptions. After years of using the same insecticide, insects get used to it - they develop resistance. So they would have to switch to another product (problem - might be same product with a different brand name), and the cycle would repeat itself and then they would move on to another product. Eventually there were no more products - the insects adapted too quickly, and now nothing kills them.
Now the farmers are in a quandry. In the past there was always something else that they could buy, so they keep looking for that 'silver bullet', always looking for that quick fix.
Had insecticides been introduced properly, and rotation of insecticides with different modes of action been stressed, this probably would not have happened, or at least happened more slowly. But short term profits may have suffered, and educating the public was a big chore, so it was not done.
And the government offices, like the Plant Protection office, were useless to curb these wrong-headed practices because they were in the pocket of the US, Germany, etc. as they had received great sums of money from these countries to beef up the number of employees, pickup trucks, and other equipment given to them. Can't bite the hand that feeds you, right?

So what is a farmer to do? Well, what Thai farmers started to do is spray for insect control more frequently and/or at a higher dose to try to stay on top of the pest insect population. Some of the farmers i worked with were spraying their yard-long beans for insect control every four days. Some would spray them in the evening and pick the next morning. They knew that this might be harmful for the consumers, but the consumer wanted insect-free produce, and the farmers had to make a living.
Not to mention their own health - spraying every four days wasn't doing their body any good. Pesticide companies touting the use of rubber boots, Tyvek coveralls, respirators, plastic gloves and goggles (as they did in the West) quite obviously had no clue as to how uncomfortable this clothing was to wear in tropical heat. Or how expensive it was just to change the cartridges on a proper chemical respirator - far too expensive for any Thai farmer. If you were lucky, you would see a farmer spraying in rubber boots, cotton gloves, long shirt sleeves and a polyester belaclava. Nowhere near adequate for the types of toxic stuff they were handling.

Cooperating farmer with kids; Thais love kids

I once visited a farming family at noon and they were resting under a tree. Turns out they were not feeling well. On asking i found out that after they had sprayed diazinon, an organophosphate insecticide, in the morning on their tomatoes, and then later in the morning they went back into the tomato patch to cull the fruit with worms - with no protection whatsoever. According to the Amreican EPA, it is still not safe to enter into a diazinon-sprayed area at 24 hours after spraying. And, from the EPA website, "Diazinon is one of the leading causes of acute insecticide poisoning for humans and wildlife." NO WONDER they were sick. There is little respect for how dangerous this stuff is. They are aware - farmers here all know of others who fell ill or died after spraying, but farmers also feel they have no choice. That is where my role was - suggest althernatives.

more to come..

Sunset along the peaceful Mekong River

People often say that traveling makes you appreciate what you have at home more. I found that i was better able to criticize what we have at home.
One issue is money. Over there, i earned enought to make it to the next month, had very basic housing, and i was satisfied. Here, there never seems to be enough (a product of our consumer driven society) but even if there is enough (and what is 'enough' really?), it is a constant concern. We used to joke that life was cheap in Thailand - with all the needless motorcycle fatalities and lax safety standards, not much value was put on life. But here it seem we have gone to the other extreme, putting value on too much (insurance, permits, registrations, red tape..) that life has become oddly very expensive. There must be a happier medium.
Then there is time. There was more time in Asia to enjoy simple things - write letters, enjoy dinners, read more, watch the bugs flying around outside, enjoy sunsets like the one above taken at a restaurant in Vientiane over the Mekong. Here it seems life is full to the armpits with commitments to family, friends, work, etc. There never seems to be enough time in the day. Maybe in north american we are so afraid for being bored that we suffer from too many things to do. Maybe i need to buy a daytimer?