Meet Mongkon (Mong) Tianponkrang.
He is a Programme Coordinator with the Thai Education Foundation (TEF), a non-profit organisation working to improve education in Thailand at all levels, especially using non-formal methods.
I met Mong earlier this month during our regional workshop on communication capacity building under TVE Asia Pacific‘s Saving the Planet project.
TEF’s School and Community Farmland Biodiversity Conservation project is one of six stories that was chosen from among dozens of public nominations to be featured in the Asian regional TV series we are working on, titled Saving the Planet.
Saving the Planet will feature remarkable initiatives from South and Southeast Asia by educational, civil society and community groups engaged in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).
Mong was a live wire during our 5-day workshop in Khao Lak, Thailand. We encouraged everyone to share experiences in communicating with their respective audiences, using whatever communication methods and means (media or non-media).
At one point, Mong started describing how he and his team have been using a video film called Toxic Trail that takes a critical look at the use of pesticides in crop cultivation in Thailand and neighbouring countries.
He described how they’d found the film’s Thai version very useful in their work with farmers, housewives and other community members.
This was a fine coincidence: he didn’t know until then that we at TVE Asia Pacific had been involved in versioning Toxic Trails, originally produced in English, into half a dozen Asian languages including Thai. That was back in 2002.
Toxic Trail is a two part documentary that was produced in early 2001, directed by a long-time friend and colleague Janet Boston (who today heads the Thomson Foundation, which has a 40-year track record in training journalists in the developing world). It was first broadcast on BBC World in April 2001.
It followed Russell Dilts, an expert working with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as he investigated the pesticide industry in South East Asia. The trail begins in Thailand, moving to Cambodia and ending in Indonesia. The main focus, however, is on Cambodia, where Dilts uncovers major problems in the misuse of pesticides.
Dilts makes stark and horrifying findings: the mass use of pesticides is progressively destroying delicate local ecosystems, as well as causing many health problems to farmers and their families involved. Eventually, everybody is affected by consuming agricultural produce with high levels of pesticide residues.
Read TVEAP website feature on Toxic Trail (Aug 2002).
Read key issues raised by Toxic Trail films
Interesting things happened following the release of Toxic Trail in 2001. First, the FAO came under intense pressure from pesticide companies for having supported an investigative film that probed the reality of product stewardship that these companies claimed existed.
Stated simply, Product Stewardship is when companies take the responsibility for their products. It includes the monitoring of the distribution of products with regard to choice of outlet and method of sale. Toxic Trail questioned how this concept was being practised in developing countries such as Thailand and Cambodia.
Clearly, the companies didn’t like what was disclosed with tangible, visual evidence. In the weeks that followed the film’s release, and its high profile broadcast on BBC World, at least three heads rolled at FAO’s Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programme for Asia.
But by then the genie was out of the bottle. The BBC broadcast may have been watched by a handful of officials, diplomats and businessmen who walk the corridors of power. But a much larger Asian audience was reached by our versioning the films into Bahasa Indonesia, Hindi, Khmer, Mandarin, Sinhala and Thai — which, between them, are spoken by close to two billion people. These versions have been broadcast and narrowcast through numerous outlets ever since.
And as Mong reminded us earlier this month, the films are still in good use, several years after their production and versioning.
One clear lesson: it’s not just enough to produce a good TV film. How much it is seen and used depends on the amount of promotion, local adaptation and subsidised or free distribution that goes with it.
In the case of Toxic Trail, there was a network of promoters for IPM and sustainable agriculture who picked it up and ran with it — and continue to spread the word.
Meanwhile, we should be releasing more such ‘genies’ out of their bottles…
Visit Community IPM website
Look up more online resources on integrated pest management
Photos of Mongkon Tianponkrang by Indika Wanniarachchi of TVEAP
Other images courtesy Toxic Trail website
Open Minds! 
interesting piece. but you forgot to mention that the film was produced by a uk based charity called tve. it was broadcast as part of earth report series which has won many awards. ms boston was engaged by tve, not bbc.