Food Security Part II. Politics of Food Security in Asia Pacific: Neoliberal Reforms, Contamination, and Social Movements

Food Sovereignty Movements under Neoliberal and Frontier Capitalisms in Thailand and the Mekong

        

The concept of "food security ". has been enshrined  in official  ASEAN  including Thailand's government documents. It is  argued that there are increasing evidence of rural and ,  some urban-based social movements related to food could be more readily conceptualized under the food sovereignty concept.  Situated in the tropics, Thailand like other Mekong and ASEAN countries are rich in agrobiodiversity.  Modern agriculture, diverse cash crops have been promoted as sources of foreign currency  for the country , with much  less recognized negative impacts. These farming systems necessitate the use of agro-chemicals and monocropping practices resulted in the loss od agrobiodiversity.  More recently, expanding industrialized agricultural and animal husbandry practices have been promoted responding to market demands of globalizing trade.
In these contexts,  food sovereignty movements have been observed, from ethnic tribal highland rice farming, new organic  and  sustainable agriculture including tradtional mixed ones, peasant-to-peasant seeds  sharing, struggle to defend locally produced food ,  be it  marine and  coasts  against  mega-energy, deep sea gas/oil drilling  and industrial projects  of either national or multinational enterprises.
Despite somewhat shared concerns for food securiy,  improving livlihoods livelihoods and  sustainable agriculture between the farmers, the state and civil society groups, tensions are evident in power imbalances embedded in these  , and and contradictions in the policy spheres.

This paper aims at substantiating the transformative potentials and significance of these movements in transcending the present   productivist and growth-centric discourse.