Art Exhibition and Workshop Discussion “Tawan Om Khao”

The Agricultural and Food Marketing Association for Asia and the Pacific, together with the Rice Science Center, Kasetsart University, Kamphaeng Saen, and Riceberry Social Enterprise Co., Ltd., jointly opened the art exhibition and workshop discussion “Tawan Om Khao” (the sun skirting the rice)

The Agricultural and Food Marketing Association for Asia and the Pacific (AFMA), an agency of the FAO under the United Nations (UN), together with the Rice Science Center, Kasetsart University, Kamphaeng Saen, and Riceberry Social Enterprise Co., Ltd., jointly opened the art exhibition “Tawan Om Khao”, with Captain M.L. Panadda Diskul honoring the event as chair of the opening.

Participants also listened to a discussion by Mr. Teeraphap Lohitkul, National Artist in Literature (non-fiction), together with Prof. Dr. Apichart Vanavichit, Director of the Rice Science Center, Kasetsart University, Kamphaeng Saen.

Dr. Apichart Vanavichit, Director of the Rice Science Center, Kasetsart University, Kamphaeng Saen, said that rice has been bound to the Thai people and Thai land for every generation, the staple food that sustains all Thai lives, and also sustains the world's population, giving rise to rice culture across more than half of life on earth.

Rice is important both for its nutritional value in ending world hunger under the Sustainable Development Goals, and socially through the rice culture of the Chao Phraya basin nations, where rice and fish are signs of abundance, as the saying goes, “There are fish in the water and rice in the fields”, and there is a term for the time of year when new rice and fat fish are in season: Tawan Om Khao.

When rice in the field is pregnant, even the sun shows respect to the rice indirectly through the pregnant rice, and in the rice-blessing ceremonies of farmers in many regions. Rice also has value for the environment, because rice farming in the past supported all life in the fields, shrimp, shellfish, crabs, fish, birds and insects, making the land with rice plants fertile, and sustaining the farmers and every life that values the rice grain.”

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Thanks to the source and photos: www.Thainewsvision.com News and photos: Pharfan Pinthong