Assessing the economic and environmental impact of jasmine rice production: Life cycle assessment and Life Cycle Costs analysis

Climate change is a threat to food security that has compelled government around the globe to adopt concrete measures to explore sustainable farming practices. This study, therefore, is focused on assessing the environmental and economic impacts of activities linked to jasmine rice production. The study compares organic and conventional jasmine rice production to promote sustainable farming alternatives. Purposive and snowball sampling was chosen to identify the sample and forty-nine face-to-face interviews were conducted with local farmers engaged in the rice production in Thung Kula Rong Hai, a north-eastern region in Thailand. We applied the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to measure the environmental impact. In addition, Life Cycle Costs (LCC) was used to study jasmine rice production costs. The study found that even though the Green-House-Gas (GHG) emissions of organically cultivated areas was higher than the conventional cultivated areas, this was due to the higher absorption of organic matter in the soil. This is beneficial in the long run as our findings show that organic jasmine rice paddy resulted in higher yields. Therefore, economically organic rice production emerged as a better alternative than the conventional method when compared between yield, costs and profits of jasmine rice production. Our results also demonstrate how post-harvest management is an important hotspot in sustainable farming practices. Thus, our findings promote sustainable agriculture practices in Thailand that can help them to cope up with climate change issues (e.g. droughts) and ultimately contributing to the food security goals.