Collaboration, education crucial to agro-food trade

Collaboration is one of the keys to success in agro-food business, through the exchange of technology and lower research costs, experts told a major forum yesterday.

Moreover, education can help change the negative mindset that Thai students have towards agriculture businesses, with their heightened interest ultimately increasing the number of skilled workers in the industry.

During his presentation at the “Thailand Competitiveness Conference 2014”, arranged by the Thailand Management Association, Roger van Hoesel, managing director of the Netherlands-based Food Valley, said collaboration between universities, companies and the government, or public-private partnership, would enhance the development of the agro-food industry.

This would entail the transition of classroom studies into applied practical use – while students can also learn from the real needs of the market and the problems within the industry, which can be used to improve their research criteria, he said.

Specialised education programmes can also further the connection between the educational sector and the business sector, he added.   

“The challenges that are there for the food industry are huge, complex, and they are specific for the country, which requires collaboration between industry, knowledge suppliers and government within the country, and at the regional and international levels, in order to overcome them,” said van Hoesel.

International collaboration between private firms and networks of clusters can lower the cost of research and development and encourage the exchange of ideas and market information, said the Dutch businessman.

Subhrajit Bhattacharya, programme head at IBM, said that while there were huge opportunities within the food industry, the negative mindset that students in India and Thailand have towards the agriculture sector has to be changed in order to enhance the development of the industry.

“I have found vast opportunities in the food and agriculture industry, since the world’s population is rising and is expected to reach 9 billion people in the year 2050, which means that the food output of the world would have to increase by 50 per cent [from today’s level] to support this growth,” he said.

Bhattacharya said the future of the food and agriculture industry started with children, and the educational system must therefore make the sector more exciting and profitable in order to encourage them to study and find work within the sector, because this would ensure that the country made better use of its agricultural land.

The education of farmers is also crucial for the agriculture industry, because it can lower and even eradicate some of the major problems in the industry, such as excess use of chemical fertilisers that are polluting the landscape, and soil degradation due to overuse and impropriate farm management, which have combined to reduce the amount of land that can be used to grow crops, he explained.

“The impact of unsustainable practices will grow with the increase in food demand, and climate change will exacerbate the effects of unsustainable farming, which means that sustainable practices are required to reduce losses and fend off future catastrophes,” he stressed.

Implementing and monitoring policies to reduce unsustainable farming practices would be easier if farmers were educated and understood the need for regulations, he added.

Thailand ranks 14th globally as an exporter of food, shipping around Bt31 billion worth of produce last year, accounting for 8 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Meanwhile, 80 per cent of the raw materials used for making food products are sourced from within the Kingdom, and some 40 million people work in the agricultural and food sector at the moment, the conference was told.