1. Poverty Eradication Policy

Mr. President,

The Government will implement policies and measures to eradicate poverty from the country by improving the entire system of the administration, mobilizing not only individuals, but also communities and the whole nation to achieve poverty alleviation and build mechanisms to enable the poor to utilize assets and resources efficiently and in a sustainable manner.

At the grass-roots level, the Government will focus on expanding opportunities, creating income, reducing expenditure, as well as providing access to capital, including money, land ownership and knowledge by accelerating land ownership distribution, expanding the opportunities to gain capital access through Assets Capitalization and promoting cooperative systems and the learning process in new theories of agriculture. In this connection, the Government will proactively solve the poverty problem by founding mobile units known as, “Poverty Eradication Caravan” to cope with the problem, giving advice and services for professional development and providing additional skills training.

At the community level, the Government will strengthen the local community process and enable the poor in local communities to gain advantages from favorable external circumstances. The Government will develop agricultural infrastructure in the community, such as local mills,

local organic fertilizer buildings in every district and basic agricultural machinery cooperatives, and create logistic systems for agricultural products and an effective marketing system for the “One Tambon One Product (OTOP)” outputs. Furthermore, the Government will improve the financial system to support grass-root economies, ranging from the well-prepared Village Fund to the Village Bank which offers sustainable access to capital sources. The Government perceives that the strength of the community is one of the most important powers to fight against poverty. Therefore, the Government will allocate the budget according to the population of all villages and communities under the Small Medium Large (SML) Scheme to enable them to solve their own problems.

At the national level, the Government will facilitate all farmers to have sufficient ownership of land in order to increase long-term agricultural productivity to maximize the utilization of land alongside the improvement of soil quality. The Government will increase efficiency of water resource management; allocate water in accordance with the respective areas and the demand of the farmers’ production system; establish the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) to manage production, processing, marketing and capital resources to reduce risk for farmers; and establish a system to manage each individual agricultural product to stabilize the price of agricultural products, which will yield a fair return to farmers. The Government will also extend social welfare benefits to illegal laborers and laborers in the agricultural sector.