In today’s age, where we have our personal trainers, doctors and lawyers, why shouldn’t we have our personal farmer? That was the food for thought offered by Arrut Navaraj, managing director of Sampran Riverside, at the Travelport Live conference in Bangkok earlier this month when he spoke of how he’s starting an Organic Tourism movement in Thailand, and encouraged us to get onboard.

The movement means getting hotels and restaurants in the country to source produce from the collective of 170 farmers that he’s formed so that “you, as the traveller, get to eat directly from the farmers”.

Navaraj said, “We are what we eat and we eat so often that we should care more about what we eat, and know the people who bring us our food. We should know the farmers and when we buy directly from them, we cut out the middlemen and the farmers benefit. “We don’t pay more but the farmers get more.”

Arrut Navaraj on stage at Travelport Live

One third of Thailand’s populations are farmers – around 20 million – and “we should support them,” he told the audience.

In this video, a farmer talks about how she lost her farm due to dwindling margins and being cut out by the middlemen and how the Organic Tourism movement helped her get back the deed to her farm. Hoteliers who have come onboard include Goh Choo Leng, general manager of Le Meridien and Plaza Athenee Bangkok and Marisa Sukosol of Siam Hotels.

Navaraj talked about how he’s trying to get different clusters in Thailand to adopt the Sampran model of facilitating organic tourism between travellers and farmers.

Read the full story here.