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Agroforestry offers Thai rubber farmers a pathway to profit and sustainability

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BANGKOK — Little by little, the canopy of branches and interlocking leaves closes overhead as our vehicle rollicks deeper into the plantation. Pakamart Tongkam points from the driver’s seat into the stark thicket of rubber trees that now surround us: “When I was a child, I slept out there in a small hut while my mum and dad worked in the plantation through the night.” Several years later, as an adolescent, Pakamart helped her parents with their daily rubber tapping. The routine was grueling, she tells Mongabay during a visit to Nathawi district in southern Thailand’s Songkhla province, a heartland of rubber production. Rising at 2 a.m., the family would trek through the humid plantation to strip the bark of hundreds of individual rubber trees to collect the milky latex. Most of all, Pakamart recalls an overriding air of uncertainty: if it rained during the two-hour window of time it took for the latex to drip into the collection bowls, the entire day’s yield would be ruined: “No income for that day,” she says. Relying on a single crop meant such poor harvests were devastating for their livelihood. But despite the precarious conditions, rubber farming is a major source of income for more than a million smallholder farmers in Thailand, who together produce 90% of the country’s sizeable annual yields of natural rubber. Rubber has historically been a major driver of deforestation across Southeast Asia. And with recent studies showing that at least 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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