New Perspective on Agricultural Machinery Industry and Sustainable Development

IMPACT Exhibition Organizer and COMEXPOSIUM introduce upcoming Southeast Asian agricultural business show, “SIMA ASEAN Thailand 2015”, by arranging “SIMA ASEAN Thailand 2015 Industry Forum” event. The purpose of the event is to be the stage for agri-business sector. The organizers invited Thailand agriculture specialists in various fields; cane and sugar, agricultural machinery and livestock as honorable speakers under the topic “The Innovation of Agriculture for Better Tomorrow.”

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On the talk, the honorable speakers, Mr. Somphon Rattanaphibal, the Deputy Secretary General of Office of the Cane and Sugar Board; Mr. Narong Sakulsirirat, the Vice President of Thai Machinery Association; Mr. Anuwat Ruthaiyanont, the Vice President of Thai Tapioca Starch Association; Dr. Krailas Kiewthong, the Technical Expert of Department of Livestock Development and the moderator Mr. Dolmanus Gaje President of Agricultural Mass Media Association of Thailand shared their perspectives and visions on the importance of Thailand economic crops such as cane, sugar, cassava and also agricultural machinery. They agreed that Thailand’s major problem is that the county is lack of efficient agricultural technology which causes high budget, low productivity and unnecessary use of labors. They also introduced that the efficient agricultural machinery is needed for solving the problem.

For Thailand cane and sugar sector, Mr. Somphon Rattanaphibal, the Deputy Secretary General of Office of the Cane and Sugar Board guided the trend of producing sugar for export by given his statement that “According to the prediction of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in five years the need of sugar will increase to 8 million tons and this is the chance for our future. We are trying to improve farm model that is able to use sugarcane and sugarcane harvester which will help reducing time and increasing productivity. It is our opportunity to develop machinery and innovative technology.”

As well as cassava market, Mr. Anuwat Ruthaiyanont, the Vice President of Thai Tapioca Starch Association pointed the importance of agricultural machinery that ‘To manage sustainable cassava export, we have to find machinery that suit to harvesting instead of manpower. This can help farmers harvest faster, use less worker and gain better profit. We have to support them to use technology, if they are rich, we all will be happy. If they stop farming, it will cause problem. So we have to help them lower the cost so that they will have better living and continue doing farming they will be lifelong agricultural product to support the country.”

Also, Dr. Krailas Kiewthong, the Technical Expert of Department of Livestock Development talked about planting Napier grass for livestock that "New technology and innovation are also used in planting Napier grass. To increase productivities, we use this harvest machine produced in Thailand. We find that the efficiency is lower than foreign countries. In harvesting, Thai machines can harvest about 3 tons per hour while imported German machine can harvest 50 tons per hour. Therefore we have to accelerate the development of more efficient technology and machinery.”

Lastly, Mr. Narong Sakulsirirat, the Vice President of Thai Machinery Association gave his vision on agricultural machinery industry market. He emphasized the importance of agricultural machinery “All of Thailand important crops need machinery but most part of this industry don’t have enough basic machinery such as agricultural machinery lathe, milling, drilling and processing handlers. These machineries are the real key. Therefore, if we don’t develop this situation seriously, we will be far behind other countries. The machinery companies like Kubota and Yanmar are not manufactured in Thai but we produce some parts of the machinery equipment for their brand. If you ask about the country’s agricultural industry that do we really need machinery? The answer would be definitely yes but the problem on this issue is that the government doesn’t have enough budgets to support. Also for private sector, we are trying to form them as a group to cooperate and fix this issue.”