The Regional Office for Asia and Pacific and the Policy Assistance Division are pleased to express on behalf of FAO profound gratitude to the many senior officials of governments who collaborated with us in this work; to the authors of the national country studies and the resource persons and referees. We also take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Government of Republic of Korea which funded the Seoul Workshop. Among its own staff, FAO acknowledges the leading role played by the Policy Assistance Branch for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok, in particular Purushottam Mudbhary who organized and coordinated the preparation of country studies by the authors and inputs of resource persons and the workshop in Seoul, and Saifullah Syed, who launched the study and organized the first review workshop in Bangkok. Effective contributions from FAO headquarters involved many officers, and in particular Neela Gangadharan and Carlos Santana of the Policy Assistance Division.
The country studies in this volume are principally the work of national experts and their collaborators. The country study for Republic of Korea was prepared by JooHo Song, Senior Researcher at Korea Rural Economic Institute. The Thailand study was authored by Nipon Poapongsakorn, Dean of the Faculty of Economics at Thammasat University, with the assistance of Chaiyasit Anuchitworawong, Research Specialist, and Sake Mathrsuraruk of Sectoral Economics Programme, Thailand Development Research Institute. The country study for Viet Nam was prepared by Dang Kim Son, Director-General, Nguyen Ngoc Que, Vice-Director, Pham Quang Dieu, Acting-Director and Truong Thi Thu Trang, Researcher of the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development (IPSARD) at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), and Melanie Beresford, Associate Dean of Research and Associate Professor, Division of Economic and Financial Studies, Macquarie University, Australia.
Individual country studies benefited from the comments and suggestions received from a number of senior government officials and resource persons who participated in the workshops in Bangkok (June 2005) and Seoul (December 2005), as listed in Appendices 1 and 2 of Volume 1, and referees who reviewed the draft country studies. This distinguished group included Ammar Siamwalla (Thailand), Arsenio Balisacan (Philippines), VS. Vyas, Y.K. Alagh, S.S. Acharya and Rajiv Mehta (India), Debapriya Bhattacharya (Bangladesh), Hari K. Upadhyaya (Nepal), Melanie Beresford (Australia) and Ganesh Thapa (International Fund for Agricultural Development). The FAO team in Rome (Neela Gangadharan and Carlos Santana) and Bangkok (Purushottam Mudbhary) and Randy Barker, consultant, provided comments and suggestions on various drafts. Robin Leslie provided editorial assistance in the preparation of this volume.
