Country Statement of Thailand
to the 27th session of IFAD Governing Council
Rome, 18-19 February 2004

Mr Chairman,
Mr President,
Distinguished Governors,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is an honour for me to be here on behalf of the Governor of Thailand, Mr Banphot Hongthong, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives of Thailand, and to represent the Royal Thai Government to the 27th Session of IFAD Governing Council.

The purpose of my brief intervention is to share with you the policy of my Prime Minister, Dr. Thaksin Shinawatra, in the fight against poverty.

“War on poverty” is one of the priority policies of the Government of Thailand. Our goal would be to eradicate poverty from our country within six years.

Poverty in our country is concentrated in rural areas where landlessness is still a critical agrarian issue.

The lack of land ownership results in insecurity of land tenure, lack of opportunities to access to capital and incidence of rural poverty.

In order to enable Thai rural poor to overcome their poverty, the Thai Government recently initiated the “Asset Conversion Programme” with the aim to facilitate access to capital to farmers.

Under this Programme, millions of poor farmers can gain legal access to Government-owned land and use it to generate sufficient capital required to support their agricultural activities.

The Government plans to permit bank loans to be made on five new types of assets.

The assets that farmers may in future use as collateral security to obtain Government loans will be: limited rights to land, rental rights, intellectual property rights based on local wisdom, machinery rights and rental rights to public land.

State banks will play the leading role in the project, however, commercial banks are expected to follow.

This programme is intended to allow greater land use and wealth creation capacities. It is expected to become operational by the first half of 2004. The central office to coordinate the process has already been established with the name of “Bureau of Assets Capitalization” at the Office of the Prime Minister of Thailand.

Under this programme agriculture continues to be a major source of revenue generation and this is very important to Thailand since agriculture has traditionally been the mainstay of life, work and income for the majority of the Thai people.

Thank you