Trends in Hybrid Tomato Seed Production under Contract Farming in Northeast Thailand

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionThe development of hybrid tomato seed production among small farmers in Northeast Thailand illustrates a key aspect of the agrarian transformation of the region in the form of increasing intensification and specialization. Over the last 30 years, Northeast Thailand has emerged as one of the most important locations in the world for hybrid tomato seed production under contracts between individual farmers and local or transnational seed companies. In 1995 US-based Asgrow, the world's largest seed company, obtained 90% of its hybrid tomato seed for global sales from Thailand. The majority of this was produced in Northeast Thailand, mostly by small farmers (Rosset et al. 1999).Veerapong Saenjan (1998) reported that hybrid tomato seed production in Northeast Thailand showed signs of instability due to the uncontrollable cost of production and increasing labor costs. However, despite having some cost control problems, seed companies continued to produce newer and more popular varieties of hybrid tomato seed in the Northeast while shifting production of old varieties and easier-to-produce seeds, such as melons and other cucurbits, to China and Vietnam, where the cost of production was lower than in Northeast Thailand (Rosset et al. 1999).Previous research on hybrid tomato seed production in Northeast Thailand focused on financial analysis, the socioeconomic implications, and environmental impacts but paid little attention to inter- as well as intra-village variations in sustainability of production. The present study focuses on this aspect of hybrid tomato seed production under contract farming in Northeast Thailand.This study was undertaken with the following objectives: (1) to understand the historical background of hybrid tomato seed production under contract farming at various sites in Northeast Thailand; (2) to identify sites where the numbers of growers are increasing and decreasing, and where seed production has totally disappeared; and (3) to identify the factors influencing the dynamic of hybrid tomato seed production.BackgroundContract Farming as a Mode of Agricultural ProductionContract farming is "a contractual arrangement for a fixed term between a farmer and a firm, agreed verbally or in writing before production begins, which provides resources to the farmer and/or specifies one or more conditions of production, in addition to one or more marketing conditions, for agricultural production on land owned or controlled by the farmer, which is non-transferable and gives the firm, not the farmer, exclusive rights and legal title to the crop" (Prowse 2012). It is a form of vertical integration within agricultural commodity chains that gives the agribusiness firm great control over the production process and final product. Therefore, contract farming is a system or a mode of production that has considerable potential for governing the linkage between farmers and agribusiness firms, as a supply chain management strategy (Kirsten and Sartorius 2002; Da Silva 2005; Prowse 2012).Contracts between firms and farmers were first recorded as an innovation more than 100 years ago (Prowse 2012). Nowadays, it has expanded and became a mode of produc- tion that allows small-scale farmers to be integrated into the global agro-food system (Eaton and Shepherd 2001; Kirsten and Sartorius 2002; Prowse 2012). It offers an important way for smaller producers to farm in a commercial manner and also provides agribusiness firms with the opportunity to guarantee a reliable source of supply, in terms of both quantity and quality (Delforge 2007). In addition, small-scale farmers can also overcome capital constraints, lack of capacity to adopt technological innovations, and lack of ability to meet the required standards from agribusiness firms further down the value chain (Prowse 2012).Contract Farming in ThailandCompared to other Asian countries, by the early 1990s Thailand probably had the most extensive experience with contract farming for the widest range of crops (Glover and Lim 1992). …