This project helps disadvantaged rural families in Thailand start sustainable organic farming as an alternative to poaching wildlife and illegal logging in protected areas.
There are hundreds of poor rural villages in close proximity to Central Thailand’s Dong Phayayen - Khao Yai Forest Complex, which is home to endangered tigers, elephants, hornbills, bears, gibbons, and many other wild animals. The few opportunities for employment pay low wages, barely enough to subsist on. Communities rely on the forest in many ways, but unsustainable poaching is damaging the environment and threatening legitimate livelihoods, such as farming.
This project helps rural families escape poverty and crime on a path that reduces pressures on nearby ecosystems and wildlife, by providing training and establishment support for their own low-impact, sustainable organic farming businesses.
The organic farming businesses this project helps establish are sustainable and have been shown to reduce poaching by up to 70%. Villages reached become models for surrounding villages to copy, magnifying the impact and allowing wildlife to rebound.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
