Ministry to sign deal with Shopee in bid to make farmers tap e-commerce platform

Agriculture and Cooperatives Minister Chalermchai Sreeon said that the Covid-19 outbreak had increased the popularity of online shopping.

Shopee is a large well-known e-commerce platform, so this is an opportunity to promote Thai farmers to sell products online and increase marketing channels in order to enable consumers to buy products with high quality and reasonable prices directly from farmers, he said.

"We will organise training courses to enable farmers to sell agricultural products via online channels," he said. "We aim to train approximately 1,000 farmers this year, while expecting product sales via Shopee platform would increase by approximately 30 per cent, or approximately Bt3 billion."

He explained that the cooperation with Lazada Thailand, a leading online shopping platform, to promote Thai farmers to sell products online since the beginning of this year, had been successful and had gained attention from several farmers.

"After farmers opened 113 online stores on Lazada to sell products for four months, 30 per cent of online stores had generated sales of over 30 per cent, while another 70 per cent of online stores had generated sales below 30 per cent," he said.

"We aim to train 500 farmers to sell products via the Lazada platform this year."

He added that the ministry will inquire farmers who are unable to achieve the sales target about problems and obstacles to improve their potential.