Pha Pang Community Foundation
LOCATION: Mae Phrik, Lampang
ESTABLISHED: 2010
A COMMUNITY POWERED BY BAMBOOBY BAMBOO
Rangsrith Khunchaimang, Director and Secretary of the Pha Pang Community Foundation, stands in a long line of pioneers who have exploited the unique properties of bamboo. In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Edison developed a carbonized bamboo filament that lasted 1,200 hours and was used in the first commercially available light bulb. An exemplary display of BCG in action, Rangsrith’s enterprises are using this abundant resource as a green energy technology and applying circular economy principles to harness the myriad benefits of bamboo for the betterment of his remote and arid home village.
Rangsrith Khunchaimang hails from Pha Pang, a rural subdistrict that’s over ninety minutes’ drive from the provincial capital, Lampang, and seven hours north of Bangkok. Lying in the rain shadow of the Thanon Thongchai range, which stretches all the way west to
the Burmese border, the subdistrict gets enough water for subsistence agriculture (most years), but not for industrial crops. Many inhabitants have migrated to the cities to find work, leaving mostly children and the elderly to make up the current population of 968 (down from around 1,700 twenty years ago). This number, however, is too low to warrant an Or Bor Tor (subdistrict administrative organization) designation, which makes it difficult for the subdistrict to receive help from central authorities. Meanwhile, civil servants have rotated in and rotated out, but the problems persist.
HAILAND’S BCG TRANSFORMATION : 40 Case Studies on the Bio-Circular-Green Strategy and the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy In Action” page 102 – 105
