Industries seek help after ftas

However, the ministry has only Bt95 million remaining for support this year. The Foreign Trade Department has this year earmarked a Bt140-million budget for the operation of the FTA fund and has already distributed Bt45 million for nine projects.

The ministry will carefully select the industries that will definitely be affected by trade liberalisation, said a senior commercial source at the ministry.

The source said the ministry's subcommittee for the FTA Fund's operation would next month make a final decision to allocate the remaining budget for winning projects.

The ministry will ask for Cabinet approval to set aside Bt500 million for next year's FTA Fund.

The 20 projects that have asked for assistance from this fund plan mainly to increase their competitiveness and efficiency, in order to ensure that they survive within a limited period once tariffs are eliminated.

Those projects include registering drug and herb patents among Asean countries next year, because the Asean FTA includes an obligation to require medicines in all countries to register for patents before being distributed for commercial use.

Thailand is Asean's largest exporter of medicines, followed by Malaysia and Indonesia.

Other projects are the development of dairy and cattle farming, to ensure that Thai enterprises are competitive under FTAs with Australia and New Zealand; and boosting agriculture, in particular for winter fruits under pacts with China, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

So far, the Bt45 million the ministry has already allocated has gone for projects establishing electronic- and electrical-appliance standards, increasing the efficiency of leather-goods manufacturing, developing food-sanitation standards for powdered fish, increasing orange-planting efficiency in Chiang Mai province, increasing the number of staff in the pharmaceutical industry, increasing beef-feeder competitiveness, campaigning for more beef consumption in Thailand and boosting the freshwater-fish industry.