Socio-economic Context of BuakTuei Agricultural Cooperative, Royal Project

Abstract

The objectives of this study was to understand background information of the cooperative members’ households, their financial and social contexts, and obstacles preventing the households from increasing incomes, and expanding their opportunities.The study population was 27 members of the cooperative. Questionnaire was used as a data collecting tool. The data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). Procedures used include the descriptive statistics for frequency, percentage, meanand standard deviation.

The study results showed that the majority of BuakTuei agricultural cooperative members were Hmong hill tribe, were working on rose farm, had a high school education as their highest educational attainment, were having steady income all year long from rose farm, had a good living, were able to provide their children good education, had no other debts besides debt on pick-up trucks for transportation of roses. Most of the roses were delivered to the cooperative and markets: Warorot market Chiang Mai, Pak KhlongTalat Bangkok, and online channels for selling roses to individuals. The two main roles of the cooperative were to buy roses from the members, and to be source of loans for its members to buy factors of production like fertilizers and chemical products used in agriculture, for example. However, the amount of roses themembers growing each year was higher than the cooperative can buy, as well as need for loans that was higher than the cooperative can provide.The obstacles in increasing the households’ incomes were mainly droughts and then lack of knowledge and information on career opportunities. The households expanded their opportunities through more economic group enrollments and receiving more supports from Thai government in career promoting, production, funding, education, public health and social services.