PUBLISHED: 5 Feb 2025 at 05: 06
The largest agribusiness conglomerate in the nation, Charoen Pokphand ( CP ) Group, reiterated its stance on Tuesday that buying maize from regions where growers choose to burn the plants after harvesting is against the country’s policy of promoting sustainable agriculture. The policy is intended to combat the transboundary haze problem.
According to older vice-president of CP Group Jomkitti Sirikul, “CP has clearly stated it will not buy or help corn that comes from any regions where producers practice crop grow burning.”
He was speaking on Tuesday after a conference with Narumon Pinyosinwat, the minister of agriculture and partnerships, where they discussed the current PM2.5 sand waste, which is a part of intergovernmental cloud.
According to him, “CP has also adopted a telescope technology to find warm spots so that it can determine which areas are immediately prohibited from selling land items to the company.”
The company usually purchases corn, for example, for its pet feed production business, he said.
In 2016, CP introduced a tracking program into Thailand’s animal feed manufacturing sector, which has now been expanded to cover 230, 670 hectares of maize-growing areas in the southeastern part of Shan State in neighbouring Myanmar, he said.
He claimed that this surveillance has significantly reduced the amount of haze coming in from Myanmar and increased confidence in Thai products made with ingredients from Myanmar that were exported.
Additionally, he claimed that CP has implemented a program to encourage farmers in Nan, a northern province, to stop burning biomass and instead switch to green agriculture.
Farmers are encouraged to switch from growing coffee plants to growing a single crop on the same land, which earns them more than 1.6 million baht annually under this program, he said.
He claimed that the project has recently been expanded to include forests totaling 12,079 rai in other provinces, including Chiang Mai.