Betagro

On Wednesday evening I went out exploring for a restaurant to have dinner. As I walked down the very busy street that my hotel is on I came upon an elephant. Elephants were historically used as labor in the timber industry and other industries in Thailand. Now they are out of work and some are reduced to having their owners beg tourists to pay to feed them. I have no idea where this young elephant lives the rest of the day, as this is a very congested part of Bangkok.

On Thursday morning I went to meet Dr. Arayan Trangarn at the Betagro headquarters. Betagro is a privately owned company that is also involved in the poultry and hog integration industry here in Thailand. They also have some operations in China, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The owner of the company is a Chinese gentleman who immigrated to Thailand many years ago and started with nothing. He first started a feed mill and then expanded into the poultry and swine industries. They are involved in many of the same operations as the CP Group but they don’t really seem to have a competitive relationship. Betagro actually benefits from some of the lobbying activities and influence that CP Group has. We first met with the CEO of the company and then we traveled to Lopburi Province to their Food Complex 1. They chose this location because it is near the corn production area of Thailand but they still have to import a lot of their feed ingredients from other countries. They are now considering locating any new plants they build closer to the port because of the increase in transportation costs. When the Avian Influenza outbreak occurred in Thailand they were impacted and had a cull a large number of birds. Since then there have been many changes to their operations. In hindsight Dr. Trangarn thinks it has been a positive thing for the company. In addition to instituting more advanced practices and more security on their farms, they have also had to build new plants to further process their chicken thus adding value to their products. They currently export these cooked products to the EU and Japan. They were the first company to use an electronic traceability program in Thailand. It is all computerized and is quite impressive in the detail that they can access. Consumers can not access it over the internet yet but they do have what they call “Spy on Me” terminals in some domestic supermarkets where some of the information can be accessed. These terminals also give recipes for how to cook the products, which consumers seem to be more interested in than the traceability information. The traceability system at this plant requires 20 full-time employees and costs more than 1 million Baht per year and that number would at least double if it included all of the other parts of the production process. We toured the further processing plant and it was a very sanitary facility and I had to put on a lot more protective clothing and wash my hands many more times than I would to tour a plant in the U.S. The major difference that I noticed was that they were doing a lot of hand slicing and cubing of the product. Labor here is cheap and so they can do this kind of time consuming processing. However there is a shortage of labor and they would like to open another plant to produce more skewered products for the Japanese market but they aren’t sure they can find the workforce. Even though labor costs are low the cost of feed still makes producing chicken in Thailand more expensive than in the U.S. so they are not sure that they would support a Free Trade Agreement. As always no photos were allowed in the plant.

On the way back to Bangkok we made an unscheduled stop at a huge wholesale market. This one was much cleaner than the one I saw in China with the Oklahoma Agricultural Leadership Program Group. The meat section still wouldn’t meet U.S. standards. Below is a picture of one of the poultry vendors and another of a fruit stand. The bottom picture is of some of the fruits that Dr. Trangarn bought for me to try. Clockwise they are a Rose Apple, a Rambutan, a Mangosteen, Lychees and Longans.