Thai Village Fund encourages Thais to support local products and income distribution for villagers
The Thai Village Fund will help to boost the rural economies and support local products with better income distribution during the Covid-19 crisis, from total villages of over 79,000 nationwide translating into over 12.9 million membership household in the Village Fund, according to Rakpong Sengcharoen, Head of National Village and Urban Community Fund Office.
Speaking at last week's seminar, "Restart Thailand” organized by www.77kaoded.com under a topic namely “Community power revitalises the grass root economy”, he encourages Thais to barter trade and domestic community tourism in view that the community membership accounts for 30-40 million people (assuming 3 persons per household) which can be both producers and consumers simultenously and become powerful sources of income distribution.
The Village Fund aims to stimulate and support village members to exchange and do barter trades between one another and income distribution to the community. One example is the Village Fund’s community located in Roi-ed province with scarcity of dried seafoods will purchase them from the community located in Chumporn province which are abundant with seafood products. Chumporn’s community can procure rice products from Roi-ed which are abundant with rice. At the end, the community’s barter trades will reduce those goods purchased from large producers and to gain sustainability.
Another promotional activities including the community tourism which the Village Fund has been encouraging the villagers to adjust and adapt the tourism design by pushing the villagers to welcome all tourists with local lifestyle and agriculture-based tourism to gain alternative income, apart from main income from agriculture products sales. Program activities and places are varied depending on each location. Group tourist of at least 10 persons is suggested with individual price of Baht 200 per half-day trip or Baht 500 per full day trip.
Earlier, the Cabinet approved Baht 144 billion stimulus measures to beef up Thai local economy, of which up to Baht 99 billion is set to be channeled to Thai Village Fund or approximately Baht 200,000 per village. Thai Village Fund’s purpose is set up with the following 6 factors
- Social cost of each individuals in the community
- Culture cost leads to the community’s lifestyles which are inter-linked to environments
- Ethical cost means the fact of cohabitation such as empathy, trust, and belief, honesty, sacrifice.
- Resources cost includes soil, water, forest, weather, farms which are conserved fairly and sustainably.
- Intellectual cost means shared learning, knowledges in the community and external ones to come up with synthetized knowledge and management for human living, human and nature, community and outsiders.
- Financial cost includes savings and financial management
