22 SEPTEMBER 2012 The following are the challenges I face as a young Burmese woman crab farmer and seafood entrepreneur in Thailand. Market. Because I come from a third-world country and most people think the products coming from Burmese people are cheap. Most buyers offer low prices for my products. It took me a lot of time and effort to find the right market. Investment. I am a young Burmese person so I cannot borrow any money from the bank. Although I showed all my documents and records, I was never able to obtain a bank loan. With limited investment capital, it takes me more time and hard work to maintain my small business. Supply. It was hard to get supplies of wild crabs for stocking my farm because many collectors had been doing it for a long time with established buyers. Unless I paid higher prices to the fishermen, or to suppliers who collected from multiple fishermen, they were not willing to sell to me. It was hard for the suppliers to believe that I would buy consistently from them because I am a young woman and only started my business five years ago. So I had to convince small suppliers to sell to me, even if it was only 20 to 50 kg of crabs. I spent a lot of time looking for suppliers who will sell to me. Languages. Myanmar people who live in Ranong are migrant workers coming from southern Myanmar and they have their own dialect. I came from Yangon so I didn’t fully understand what they were saying. I had to learn the southern Burmese dialect and Thai language at the same time. Being able to speak Burmese, Thai and English has helped me a lot with my business and made it easier for me to get crabs because most suppliers were Burmese. I was able to find markets in different parts of Thailand and, eventually, international markets. Human Resource Management. These were my most difficult challenges. Most of my employees were male and I was a young female, so I needed to show them a good example and that I was serious about what I was doing. Inasmuch as most of my employees were Burmese living in Thailand, I had to deal with all the personal issues of employees getting married, having children, sending money back to Myanmar to support family, getting work permits and various health issues, which required my acting as interpreter for doctors at the health clinic. None of us had farming experience before so we all worked hard and I involved them in most of the decisions I made. Isolation. I could not find any young people who were interested in crab farming. I think I was the youngest among all of the farmers in Ranong. It is a small town and hard to find friends. As the result, I saved more money and thought about work all the time. Initial Racial Prejudice. Ninety percent of Burmese people living in Ranong, Thailand are manual workers, so it was hard for many Thai people to accept me at the beginning. Some of the other soft-shell crab farmers did not appreciate a new competitor. The following are my coping strategies for dealing with all of these problems and challenges. Awareness of Opportunities. Although I have a market for my products, I am always aware of other market opportunities. Everywhere I go I try to talk to new people and go to the market to find out what seafood people are interested in eating these days; what are the market prices, what other seafood products I could sell and who are the reliable buyers. As the farm began producing soft-shell crabs for sale, I was delivering a few dozen per day to a nearby processing plant, barely enough to pay for gasoline and a couple of farm helpers, Crew stocking cages with crabs for grow-out. First farm with crab cages and bridge, started with 40,000 crabs. Red tilapia pens in polyculture pond.
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