1. Project description

Peasant Market Team aims to organize educational and campaign actions for promoting native and forest varieties of food as the way toward the urban consumers’ responsible consumption and the peasants’ sustainable production, and for conservation of biodiversity of native and forest food genetic resources. The monthly seminar with peasants as resource persons, contest of food cooked with native and forest varieties of food, native food cooking show and collection of native food recipes. The activities will take place in Peasant Market for 6 months. The Peasant Market is the monthly 1-day market initiated by peasant women to sell their products during COVID19 pandemic in Bangkok, Thailand.

1. Project progress up to now

Impacts of COVID19 pandemic crisis in Thailand and our adjustment

According to our original plan, the Peasant Market will be held in Bangkok every month. However, due to the outbreak of COVID19 pandemic since April 2021, the government started to implement the inter-provincial travel restriction, closing of businesses and markets, and the lockdown measures. Therefore, our peasants cannot travel to Bangkok, and we move our Peasant Market to online platform.

Because of the limitation of the online platform, we have to make adjustment to our activity.

1. The Peasant Market Online is scheduled on every Saturdays of the last or the second last week, on ZOOM and Facebook Live broadcast. It lasts for 2 hours from 13:00-15:00 hrs. The Peasant Market has 3 parts: selling, discussion and campaign.
2. For the planned activity of seminar and contest of recipe, we use the discussion part in the Peasant Market Online as well as our Facebook Page “Peasant Market” as the tools to achieve the objectives of promoting the responsible consumption and production and educating the urban consumers about how to eat and cook the native food.

Project progress

1. From May 2021 until now, we already organize Peasant Market Online 3 times: May 30th, June 26th and July 24th.

1. For the Activity 1 (Seminar to promote responsible consumption and production), we picked up the themes as follows:

May:    Wild mushrooms, the indicators for biodiversity. Our peasant resource persons share knowledge about different types of wild mushroom and their agroforestry and integrated production to protect the ecosystems and biodiversity. It is to celebrate the International Day for Biological Diversity (May 22nd).

June:   Food safety and environment protection. Our peasant resource persons explain about their production of native varieties of produces with the agroecological method which is the sustainable way of production. They also tell the stories of their struggles to keep the ecosystem at the local level and national level as the member of peasant movement. The topic was selected to celebrate the World Environment Day (June 5th) and World Food Safety Day (June 7th)

July:    People’s food system. Our peasant resource persons talked about the local food system from the agroecological production in their farms to the local markets which become more critical to people’s food accessibility during the COVID19 pandemic. The discussion is also a symbolic action to oppose the process toward the United Nations Summit of Food Systems in September that is captured by multinational corporates and marginalized the peasants’ organizations and social movement.

The content of the monthly discussion is summarized and posted in our Facebook pages.

1. For the Activity 2 (Collection and contest of food recipe with native and forest varieties of produces) We received 13 entries from our consumes who cooked their food from the ingredients from our markets. This activity aims to encourage the city people to eat more local food from peasants. The recipes are shared in our Facebook page. They are both traditional recipe and some experiment of new food, snacks and sweets from the native and forest produces.

1. Collaboration with our consumers to fight COVID19.

In early July, the government issued order to close all the construction sites in Bangkok. Workers who stay in the 1,200 construction sites are not allowed to go out. They are in great need of food because there is almost no support from the government. Our several consumers decided to buy fresh vegetables from our Peasant Market and donate to these workers in our area. Our peasant sold the produces at cheap price. Our consumers want these workers to eat fresh and healthy food from peasants instead of canned food products from factories which are normally given out to the affected people.

1. Project plan forward

During August to October, we have the following plan.

1. We will continue to do the planned activities online, because we expect that until the end of 2021 the COVID19 crisis in Thailand might not be improved.
2. We will increase more effort for campaigning via social media platform to achieve the objective of promoting responsible consumption with our urban consumers.
3. We will enhance the capacity of our peasant leaders and peasant sellers in Peasant Market on digital communication skills.