Thammasat University students are cordially invited to participate in a free Zoom event on a community-based social enterprise committed to sustainable coffee. The presentation is hosted by the Faculty of Social Administration, Thammasat University.
The TU Library collection includes several books on different aspects of coffee production.
The speaker will be Khun Lee Ayu Chuepa, founder of Akha Ama Coffee, a social enterprise based in an Akha village in Chiang Rai Province.
Akha Ama Coffee has helped a rural village boost education rates for inhabitants, as the BBC and the Bangkok Post have reported.
The event will be held on Thursday 17 March 2022 at 5pm Bangkok time.
Students may click on this Zoom link to attend.
Meeting ID: 917 7646 3757
Passcode: spdtu
Khun Lee explained in an online books feature that among the reading that inspired him the most was Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.
The TU Library owns editions of Jonathan Livingston Seagull in English and Thai translation. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a fable in novella form about a seagull that is trying to learn about life and flight. The theme involves perfecting oneself.
Khun Lee stated about Jonathan Livingston Seagull:
I would like to recommend to young people who are looking for dreams or those who found their dreams , but struggling to make it happens. The reason to recommend this book is because every journey you make there is a mark to remember and every curve of experience you involve could shape the future as well. I found the story of seagull is very powerful to encourage myself not to limit my life journey and always dare to dream even-though there are challenges.
Another book praised by Khun Lee is The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. The TU Library collection includes multiple copies of Thai language versions of this book.
Masanobu Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and revegetation of desertified lands. He was an advocate of herbicide and pesticide free cultivation methods from which he created a particular style of agriculture, often referred to as natural farming or do-nothing farming. Among his many international voyages, Fukuoka went to Thailand in 1990 and 1991, visiting farms and collecting seeds for revegetating deserts in India, which he returned to during November and December that year in an attempt to revegetate them.
In his spiritual memoir, his innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects faith in sustainable development. His book is practical and philosophical. As one reviewer noted,
Fukuoka began his career as a plant pathologist with the Japanese government in the 1930s. After a hospitalization due to pneumonia, he experienced an epiphany. The basis of his epiphany sounds nihilistic, as he writes, “In this world there is nothing at all… I felt that I understood nothing.” However, I take this to mean that Fukuoka recognized the insufficiency of intellectual knowledge, and he later expounds, “Science has served only to show how small human knowledge is.” He quit his job and returned to his wealthy father’s land in southern Japan to tend their citrus orchard.
During World War II, Fukuoka again worked for the Japanese government as a plant pathologist, but after eight years, he returned to Shikoku Prefecture and developed his natural farming philosophy. This philosophy has the four basic tenets of no cultivation, no chemical fertilizer or prepared compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicides, and no dependence on chemicals. Fukuoka was prescient in his holistic understanding of ecological systems, organic farming, and permaculture. He provided practical methods for growing rice, barley, rye, vegetables, and citrus while simultaneously creating a philosophy that pertained to much more than just farming.
Trained as a scientist, Fukuoka rejected both modern agribusiness and centuries of agricultural lore. Over the next three decades he perfected his so-called “do-nothing” technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort.
Khun Lee explains about The One-Straw Revolution:
I would like to recommend this book to entrepreneur and especially agricultural entrepreneurs. Fukuoka is a real agriculturalist and he proved with his experiments to apply sustainable agricultural practices to maintain biodiversity and nature. I believe this book could guide entrepreneurs to think about action or career could sustain the beauty of this earth and harvest sustainably. This book was also influenced my social entrepreneurship journey to establish diverse plans and scenarios to improve when I need to face the difficulties such as landscape planing in coffee plantation, providing shady trees (native trees) for creating a biodiversity and agroforestry at the same time.
Still another book valued by Khun Lee is The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat by Charles Clover.
This book is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service. The author, a British journalist, describes how modern fishing is destroying ocean ecosystems. He concludes that current worldwide fish consumption is unsustainable. The book provides details about overfishing in many of the world’s critical ocean habitats, such as the New England fishing grounds, west African coastlines, the European North Atlantic fishing grounds, and the ocean around Japan. The book offers suggestions on how the nations of the world could engage in sustainable ocean fishing.
Khun Lee reports:
This book is quite fascinating! I was born in the village on the mount and had little experiences around ocean. I do really enjoy how important to think about life under the ocean and not just what we could see on the land. I found how meaningful to consume sustainable harvested fishes or seafoods. There are deforestation, chemical usage and monoculture on the land, while in the ocean have over fishing, commercial interest, unsustainable fishing or even using advance technology that exploited beyond to regenerate.
He also observed that he was rereading As The Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez.
The TU Library owns several copies of this book.
Mr. Juan Enriquez was founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School. As the Future Catches You describes political, ethical, economic, and financial issues, showing the impact of the genetic, digital, and knowledge revolutions on human life. Genetics is an essential area of knowledge for understanding future world changes that will affect the global economy.
Asked what books he would most like to read in future, Khun Lee points to the works of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee declared that Dr. Yunus showed that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.
The TU Library offers a selection of books by Dr. Yunus.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)