Buying Organic Food

[Hal65]

Hope this question doesn't make me sound like a yuppie... how common are organic food stores in Thailand? (specifically meats and produce)

Thanks

[GuestHouse]

There is a small but growing market for organic food - Some of the supermarkets, Carrefore and Foodland stock a small range of organic products - Foodland has a larger range and is cheaper than Carrefour.

There is also a growing awareness of Organic food, or rather a growing scepticism over the use of chemicals in food production.

In the provinces it is not unusual to find farmers producing two crops - chemically treated crops for sale to the markets and organic food for own produce.

There are also a small number of organisations actively promoting Organic Food Production, The Royal Projects are an example, as is PunPunThailand.org.

One of the problems of course is education on Organic Food Production and Certification - I read a survey of people's attitudes towards Organic Food in Thailand a couple of years back that basically demonstrated a general lack of knowledge of what organic food was, while those who were aware of organic food had very low levels of trust in any local certification.

Keep in mind that Thailand is frequently hauled up by international food standards organisations (Thailand's food customers) over food safety, in the last couple of months the EU placed a number of Thai food products on the 'banned imports' list over food safety concerns.

The Thai Governments response was revealing - They set about ensuring food for international export was produced to international standards. The locally consumed food can presumably continue to be chemically soaked.

Also in the past couple of years there has been a raging battle over the Government banning the use of a list of herbs traditionally used by farmers to control pests, fungus etc - Garlic was one of the banned herbs. The ban came as a result of the agrochemical producers pressuring the government (read greasing palms) to ban competition to their products.

Get hold of a copy of 'The Real Dirt on Farmer John' to see how that works.

[GuestHouse]

Oops Double Post.