Sustainability Assessment of Good Governance of Rubber Industry in Thailand

Abstract

Sustainable investment with social responsibility is the main investment trend in the world market now. The investment value in “Environmental, social, and corporate governance” or ESG is increasing approximately 10 times. in Thailand, the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) developed “Sustainability Index” to be the standard to evaluate sustainable development in each company. For agriculture systems, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) proposed Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) in governance context to address this issue in 5 themes: (1) Corporate Ethics (2) Accountability (3) Participation (4) Rule of Law (5) Holistic Management. The analysis results from this study show that the value of sustainability assessment of food and agriculture systems for rubber industry in Thailand is approximately 4.0 from 5.0 score. The assessment value is quite good because there are industry laws and regulations for basic operation in each factory under same Thai standard. However, the value under classification of the factory size shows that big firms provide greater value than group of small and medium factory approximately 20 % (score 4.4 and 3.7, respectively). This shows the gap between two groups of Thailand industry