Sumruay Phadpol

Somruay Padpol has demonstrated a model for sustainable agriculture among peasant farmers in northern Thailand that improves rural livelihoods, preserves plant species, and conserves biological diversity.

In Nan Province, along Thailand's northern border with Laos, Somruay Padpol is reinvigorating subsistence farming. For many centuries, Thai farmers have developed and preserved plant species that are compatible with local conditions, such as many types of bananas–more than 1,000–and virtually innumerable paddy (rice) breeds which vary according to soil and rainfall conditions from region to region. However, following a worldwide trend, many small farmers are turning from their subsistence practices and attempting to mass-produce crops that they can sell for profits. Thai conservationists and their colleagues around the globe have called attention to the social and environmental costs of such a shift. Somruay is creating mechanisms to generate a counter-trend in Nan, in a model that is spreading into other farming areas, including neighboring Laos. He empowers local farmers to stay on farms that feed their families, maintain their communities, take care of the land and generate a little surplus to sell. His organizing focus is the plant species that are disappearing from the province. With consultation from modern agricultural scientists, he is helping the Nan farmers to systematize their collective knowledge and breed their local plant varieties efficiently. He believes that restoring these natural resources will ultimately help conserve biological diversity and sustain development at the community level.

Eighty-eight percent of the population of Nan is still involved in subsistence farming. Like all Thai small-scale farmers, they face a series of pressures. In the course of the country's modernization, a money economy has increasingly disrupted subsistence and motivated farmers to seek profits in order to acquire cash. However, it is expensive to adopt farming techniques for the outside market, and farmers have to borrow money to begin. Very few ever emerge from debt and actually turn a profit. When families move from the labor-intensiveness that characterizes subsistence farming to more mechanized production, there is little room for the next generation to join in traditional forms of employment. The family farmer's way of life and its links with local culture disintegrate. Thus begins a pattern of urban migration and a cycle of rural poverty that echoes throughout the hilly areas of northern Thailand. In some cases, though not yet in Nan, farms are paved over in concrete as farmers sell their land to commercial developers.

Meanwhile, plant species traditionally used both for food production and medicinal purposes are becoming extinct. Farmers who abandon traditional subsistence practices typically turn to commercial agricultural techniques, such as mono-cropping of high-yield varieties that can be sold to multinational food and drug companies; several varieties of single-culture high-yield rice have been introduced in Nan. Intensified production techniques force the opening up of new land for cultivation, so farmers encroach upon previously undisturbed forest, destroying resident plant species while contributing to soil erosion. Mono-crops typically require pesticides and chemical fertilizers, in contrast to the traditional manures; thus, they also spread harmful chemicals into the produce, soils, streams and the wildlife in surrounding forests. A study conducted in 1991 by the Department of Medical Science in the Ministry of Public Health found unsafe levels of trace chemicals in many of the vegetables tested. Nan farmers have found that if a few within their communities begin to use insecticides, insects invade neighboring farms and overwhelm balances that had worked before.

Farmers have a wellspring of knowledge but lack leadership and experience to adapt it to meet contemporary challenges to their way of life. For example, they know the nutritional and medicinal values of foods and herbs. They know that Coccinia indica is high in vitamin A and that the morinda leaf has a high calcium content. Farmers know which paddy breeds are suitable to their particular soil conditions and which are not disturbed by local plant enemies or insects. The women who weave cloth have traditionally taught the younger generations which plants and barks to use for their dyes and where to find them in the forest. However, there have been no mechanisms to consolidate and employ such useful knowledge strategically and systematically.

Somruay works through an organization that he founded and named "The Conservation of Native Plants, Herbs and the Transmission of Knowledge to Youths." Though his strategies include organizing community leadership and stimulating a shift in the economic expectations of small farmers, his first priority is environmental: He retrieves plant species that are being threatened with extinction. He collects their seeds and then asks village leaders and farmers to identify and document the traditional approaches used for preserving and planting them. Somruay breeds seeds in an eight-by-twenty-meter nursery and disseminates the resulting data to the local communities. His goal is to collect 550 kinds of plant breeds, both food plants and herbs, and he has already grown more than 5,000 seedlings of 130 kinds of plants. He has organized volunteers from youth groups to plant seedlings in the nursery and care for them.

Through support from a local institute of community development, Somruay has secured the participation of 270 farmers and has acquired for them the advice and support of four agricultural extension workers. The participating farmers plant the seedlings from Somruay's nursery and in turn contribute data about their production, related growing conditions and harvest. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Somruay's work is that he is systematizing what individual farmers have long observed and understood in their separate experience and making that knowledge available to everybody. The project encourages farmers to use traditional organic methods to grow enough for their families' consumption; further, the farmers are developing new varieties–for example, of cucumbers or peppers–to sell for small profits. They receive training in small-scale marketing strategies. Somruay has also formed a group of children who will share information about the herbal medicine used in their own communities. He plans study tours to observe herbs and food plants and has established a youth camp to transfer this knowledge to youngsters.

Somruay's model has spread througout Nan Province and is being adopted by groups from Laos who have visited Nan in order to observe it. Several conservationists in Thailand, including other Ashoka Fellows, have invited him to present his work in agricultural communities in other provinces.

Somruay was born into a traditional farming family in the late 1960's. His father is a well-respected traditional medicine healer who uses herbal medicines found in the plants that are now being destroyed. Somruay studied agriculture in high school and then earned a bachelor's degree in general management from Utaridit Teachers' College.

In 1991 Somruay started to collect local plant breeds of vegetables and the nearly extinct short-term breeds of rice grown in northern Thailand after an experience that made him realize their importance. As an agricultural volunteer at a Laotian refugee camp at Namyuen, Nan province, he observed that the hill tribes surounding the camps were quite healthy in spite of their adverse circumstances. He attributed this to their diet, which consisted of many varieties of plants such as corn, sweet rice, squash, eggplant, peppers, etc. He realized that these domestic plant breeds should be conserved since they were so important to the diets of the people.

Soon after, he joined with a group of monks and villagers' organizations to organize a "Love Nan Province" campaign of community development activities. He later worked with the Plant Conservation and Integrated Farming Promotion Project, the Children's Growth Promotion Project, and the Women's Development Project to encourage farmers to use local plant breeds. In 1993 he became president of an association of farmers, learned people and private development workers in Nan province that studies and develops plant breeds.