Opening the Green Box: How Organic became the standard for alternative agriculture in Thailand 1 Peter Vandergeest York University, Toronto Prepared for the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics April 17, 2009 This discussion paper explores how a conceptual framework drawing on political ecology and science studies might contribute to understanding trends and tensions in alternative agriculture in Thailand, and by extension, other global south sites. The paper is drawn from a collaborative writing project on alternative agriculture, organic food, and agrofood standards in Southeast Asia, which is in turn part of a larger project on agrarian transitions in Southeast Asia. Much of the current literature on alternative agriculture has been oriented around agriculture and food in North America, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand. Reframing it as sustainable agriculture, however, brings into view how alternative agriculture participates in a larger field that includes the activities of development organizations in the global south under an array of acronyms: IPM (Integrated Pest Management), SRI (System of Rice Intensification), LEISA (Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture), and more. Although there may not be agreement about whether the sustainable agriculture movement will fundamentally reshape industrial agriculture, it has enlisted enough support to justify calling it a New Green Revolution. Within this broader field, Thailand has become one of the global hotspots. Activists and NGOs in Thailand have worked under the term alternative agriculture since the mid-1980s. Within the broader field, it is organic agriculture and food has drawn most attention in recent years. Although it is often assumed that organic food is produced primarily for export, the domestic 1 Atchara Rakyutidharm provided invaluable assistance in collecting and interpreting information for this paper. The research was funded through an MCRI grant provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, entitled The Challenges of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia (Chatsea)