Strategic Plan to Enhance the Ability of Chiang Mai Groups of Agriculturists in Asean Community

Abstract

This research aims to study the issues and potential impact of the agriculturists’ communities in Chiang Mai under the framework of ASEAN community. Ongoing research three years, which is qualitative research and quantitative analysis of primary data collected from the participating communities, with a voluntary eleven communities. Participatory action research and SWOT analysis were research methods, including descriptive analysis, namely mean, percentage and standard deviation. The results of study revealed that the agriculturist groups lacked in both knowledge of the market of agricultural products and suitable production planning, appropriate to the market, especially the markets in ASEAN. The study found that the capacity of the agriculturists’ communities in a strength is the agriculture administrative organizations have a three-year plan of agriculture as well as a proactive management, but the weakness is that they lack a drive on the part of the implementation process and operational experience. Their opportunities are that agriculturists have an intention to develop their communities and have a large supply of agricultural raw materials to be processed and exported to ASEAN market while the treat of the agricultural production in the communities is the product price determined by middlemen. As a result, three strategies are proposed to raise the potentiality of ASEAN communities; 1) turnaround strategy, Local administrative organization should prepare a strategic plan and project plan for the development of agricultural community to concretely reach ASEAN standard; 2) aggressive strategy, the local administrative organizations should set up an effective agricultural management and 3) stability strategy, local administrative organizations should seek for agricultural markets in local communities in order to sell the qualified product and satisfied people in the communities.