Visiting Department of Agriculture’s Open House was like going to a farmer market fun fair. With its objective to showcase new research’s results and recent agriculture production technologies, you might imagine a pile load of documents and mono-colored written text exhibitions for this regular type of the academic open house. However, it only lived there in your imagination.
Over the three-day Department of Agriculture (DoA)’s Open House here at Kasetsart University, Bangkok you would witness from a huge red tractor, large solar cell sheet, boiling lab tubes, golden yellow ripe mango, environmentally-friendly agrifood products, stack of layered mushroom, beansprout condominium, crispy fried banana, smiling watermelon, colorful laboratory orchid and tied and dyed T-shirts to a fashion show with insect decoration, bakery like colored fertilizers, spider and snake, and many more!
ASEAN Sustainable Agrifood Systems project, as partnership of DoA, also presented a newly translated ‘ASEAN Guidelines on the Regulation, Use and Trade of Biological Control Agents (BCA)’ in Thai at the event. These Guidelines created a “regional blueprint for national regulation and implementation strategies, Harmonisation of registration requirements, and ASEAN recommendation for national regulations and policies”, and now available in Cambodia, English, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thai and Vietnam.
This fifth open house running from 22-25 May 2015 showcased the works of over 20 agencies and partners of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives including the GIZ’s ASEAN Sustainable Agrifood systems project.
Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives’s Mr. Amnuay Patise presided over the opening ceremony on 22 May 2015.
He said: “Research is an important mechanism to drive the country’s agriculture sector. With research, agriculture related issues shall be tackled. With research, farmers can develop better agriculture products and entrepreneurs can apply it for a commercial benefit.”
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