International award honours Ling Bhumibol for humanitarian service
Bangkok (AsiaNews) – Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadel received the first ever Dr. Norman E. Borlaug Medallion, awarded by the World Food Prize Foundation in recognition for his “exceptional humanitarian service in reducing hunger and poverty” in Thailand. Named after Norman E. Borlaug, Nobel Prize laureate for 1970, the medallion was presented on July 23 at the Royal Palace in Thailand
Nicknamed the “developer king”, King Bhumibol, who has been on the throne since 1946, has promoted more than 2,000 development projects, especially in farming and in the fight against drug addiction.
His efforts have focused on small scale developments, new technologies, irrigation (like the Bhumibol Reservoir) which collects the waters of the Ping River that flows along the border with Myanmar and provides irrigation to plantations even in times of drought.
The king has also been involved in improving child health care and education, and has also steadfastly supported the fight against opium cultivation and the drug trade.
In nineteenth-century Thailand opium plantations did appear, after hill tribes arrived from southern China, where the drug was a major commodity.
Grown on poor soil at high altitudes and easily transported, it was their most profitable cash crop.
Outlawed in 1959, opium production flourished in the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War.
Since the 1980s, new cash crops, including cabbages, tea, coffee, began replacing poppies grown for opium production.
Fields of these new crops are now a common sight in northern Thailand.
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