This Technology Transfer Advances Thailand's
- Nationally Determined Contribution to promote a sustainable agriculture and approriate resource allocation, Good Agricultural Practise (GAP) and to safeguard food security.
Context
Agriculture plays an important role in Thailand. More than 40% of the labor force (39 million people) is engaged with agricultural sector. To minimize the impact of climate change, several crop varieties with greater tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses are developed and introduced to the farmers. Rice with flash flooding tolerance and rice with blast and pest stress are good examples. In addition, agricultural practices, such as integrated pest control, irrigation system, and fertilization management, are applied to increase the efficiency of management. Looking forward to the future, crop production will face extreme weather, resource scarcity and environmental degradation. Existing applied technologies will not be good enough for the changes. Thus, technology development and technology transfer on the efficient use of resources are necessary to for the agricultural sector to cope with climate change, to increase productivity, as well as to meet the sustainable productivity goal of the country.
Support Provided
The primary objective of the CTCN assistance in this context is to enhance the capacities of Thai stakeholders in the knowledge and application of agricultural technologies that will help better manage the allocation of resources required for optimal crop productivity. The CTCN assistance comprised of two main activities:
- Conducting a capacity building workshop with a range of in-country stakeholders on topics relevant to improving resource use efficiency through technological interventions.
- Design of a pilot project to demonstrate real-time application of agricultural technologies for resources management.
Relevant Technologies and Approaches
- Crop diversification and new varieties
- Biotechnology for climate change adaptation of crops
- Irrigation
- Agricultural biotechnology (rice)
- Remote sensing & GIS
- Precision agriculture
- Irrigation efficiency and information systems
Expected Benefits
- The agriculture sector contributes around 53 Million Tonnes of CO2 (2011 data) of GHG emissions. Precision farming technologies, as targeted in this assistance, lower fuel and energy use leading to less carbon dioxide production. It also involves optimizing nitrogen fertilizer use, thereby helping to reduce the amount of nitrous oxide released from the soil. This technical assistance has a special emphasis on cassava production. Scientific studies indicate that the estimated total GHG emissions of cassava starch production per year in Thailand are approximately 10,500 MtCO2 eq. Precision farming technologies have the potential to reduce these by half to 5,250 MtCO2 eq.
- 40% of Thailand’s labour force is engaged in agriculture, amounting to around 22 Million people. Successful scaling up of this TA has the potential to help these people to adapt to climate change. Around 500,000 farmers cultivate cassava in Thailand. It can be estimated that one-fourth of them can start using precision farming amounting to 125,000 people.
Gender Mainstreaming
Twenty female researchers were involved in the project out of 56 participants. 100% of female participants indicated that they had significantly increased their capacities as a result of the training with regard to precision agriculture and resource-use efficiency.
Lessons Learnt
Lessons Learnt for this technical assistance
- The technical assistance implementation faced hurdles from time to time because of lack of clarity on the proponent’s side with regards to some of the activities. It is important to flesh these out in detail as early as possible, and stick to these. Recommendation: The role of the point of contact from the proponent’s side is very crucial to ensure that the technical assistance proceeds smoothly. Careful thought must be put into identifying this person.
Lessons Learnt for related to climate technology transfer
- With a wide gamut of available technologies, it is important to identify the most appropriate technology (even if the most suitable is not the most elaborate or accurate. Recommendation: Remember that technology is a tool. In some contexts, simple technologies are more useful than sophisticated ones.
- One way to facilitate the sustainability of the technical assistance outputs is to link it with a GCF proposal. Recommendation: It will be worthwhile to link each technical assistance to a funding proposal.
Lessons Learnt related to the CTCN technical assistance process
- The timelines for the technical assistance are heavily dependent on in-country processes and activities carried out by local stakeholders. Recommendation: The CTCN should factor in the delay caused by in-country stakeholders in order to arrive at feasible dates of completion.
