Smallholder farmers generally have difficulty accessing regional and global markets, as they often receive limited information that helps them make key decisions like setting a fair price for their crops. They don’t have access to the markets to sell their products too,” Unahalekhaka said. They have to resort to loan sharks, who charge them 200% more than banks every year. It is very hard for farmers to get any loan from commercial banks, as most of them do not have income statements or monthly salary. “Without any innovations, farmers are most vulnerable when it comes to climate-related issues such as rainfall and drought. There are multiple forces working against the farmers of Thailand, some natural, others humanmade. Courtesy of Ricult.Īlthough over 30% of Thailand’s total labor force is employed in the agriculture sector, this labor only accounts for 10% of Thailand’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to data from the United Nations, while about 40% of farming households earn an annual income below the country’s poverty line of THB 32,000 (USD 1,069). Aukrit Unahalekhaka, Ricult’s co-founder and CEO. They are getting older and older, which becomes a structural issue that affects almost half of the country’s population,” Unahalekhaka said to KrASIA. “Most farmers make a loss every season, and they don’t know they are making a loss, as most of them are very old. Growing up in a family that runs agriculture businesses in Thailand, Unahalekhaka has seen how smallholder farmers have long been plagued with issues like low productivity, high fragmentation in the supply chain, absence of financing, a lack of access to the market, and exploitation by middlemen. In 2014, Aukrit Unahalekhaka, a 24-year-old graduate student of engineering and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pitched the idea of developing mobile tools to ramp up the income of small farmers in his native Thailand during a Development Ventures class.
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