Trade Policy Note Final-rev08 - Development

Box 19: Thailand’s “One Tambon, One Product”
Thailand’s “One Tambon, One Product” program, launched in 2003, stands out. The
government has set out to select 60 community products and has upgraded and certif ied their
quality with the intention of expanding, first, their domestic market, followed by exports.
Trade Fairs organized to generate incomes and develop local products at the grassroots in all
the country’s 76 provinces have led to the identification of distinctive fabrics, artistic
creations, processed food and fruit, utensils, wickerwork and fermented liquor that the
government now seeks to promote. It has already begun to pro-actively showcase its famous
produce of Hom Mali rice in big regional markets. 99
This Thai example offers a rural
development example for bottom -up engineering of awareness and action on promoting
traditional community products. The irony, however, is that this rur al development program
has not been overtly linked with the idea of GIs because of insufficient inter-ministry
coordination. This missing link is noteworthy because GIs are the only form of modern IP
that grassroots communities are likely to own. The risk of driving GI awareness with a topdown
legislative decree, possibly triggered only by external treaty obligations, or supplydriven
foreign aid programs is that it may not command enough national ownership for
effective enforcement.
X. THE FTA OPTION
Whilst continuing to participate in the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations,
virtually all developing countries have been caught up in the proliferation of FTAs.
Many countries are actively engaged in sub-regional and regional integration, and at
the same time involved in bilateral FTAs with extra-regional partners, including the
major trading countries. Involvement in multiple trade negotiations at different levels
gives rise to a series of implications for development strategies. Developing countries
are faced with major policy choices, whether to enter into FTAs, if so with which
partners, as well the challenge of undertaking an analysis of costs and benefits of each
potential agreement.
FTAs and the MDGs
FTAs, by definition, reduce policy space to a much greater extent than multilateral
obligations and would seem, at first glance, to be in conflict with MDG8 target 12,
which calls for a non-discriminatory trading system. FTAs are high risk in the sense
that their potential negative impact for the attainment of MDGs can be exacerbated
through the further contraction of policy space. This is likely to be particularly true
for North-South FTAs, where political considerations are often paramount. On the
other hand, FTAs (especially those involving South-South cooperation between
countries at roughly similar stages of development) can provide innovative, prodevelopment
provisions that would be difficult to apply at the multilateral level. The
outcome of FTAs depends largely on the power relationships between the parties and
the extent to which all stakeholders can exert an influence on the negot iating process.
99 Visit www.boi.go.th/thai/focus/prd_03jan13.html#2. The Commerce Minister led a delegation in
December 2002 to promote the sale of Thai Hom Mali rice to China where in 2001, 240,000 tons of
Jasmine rice was exported, compared with 200,000 tons to the US. Another small example of
conscious Thai promotion is gifts of GIs such as 20g boxes of Longan fruits from Lamphun province
on Thai Airways flights during 2003.
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