DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2022.136
title: Successful multimodal transportation of block rubber in Thailand

description: Agricultural production is essential to the economic growth of Thailand. For decades, Thailand remains a strong agricultural competitor as it is one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural products. However, the strong competitors, such as Indonesia and Malaysia have come up with the plan for competing with cheaper price. In order to move ahead with sustainable growth, the country has embarked on the Free Trade Agreements policy with several countries, thus, bringing the preferential tariffs that lead to a growth in bilateral trade and export opportunities. In this regard, the country must produce better quality of agricultural products, and deliver to the doors in competitive prices to maintain its competitiveness.In the past, transportation of agricultural products in Thailand relied mainly on road because of its extensive network and convenience. However, with the limited loads, traffic congestion, air pollution problem, and higher fuel prices, this transportation mode becomes less effective. In general, agricultural products has low selling price per unit and low value. The most effective transportation mode for them is the mode that can carry in large volume which is multimodal transportation. The government, then, attempts to develop and promote multimodal transportation, especially rail and water modes, to reduce the costs and increase the transportation network efficiency.To promote the use of multimodal transportation, it is necessary to understand key factors influencing the multimodal transportation effectiveness. These factors also have influences on each other, making it hard to plan for the long–term plans. Thus, it is necessary to summarize key challenges and limitations of multimodal transportation. Moreover, relationships among those criteria must be examined, so that the effective development plan could be established. This study, therefore, examines key factors influencing the multimodal transportation of agricultural products in Thailand, as well as their interrelationships.Based on a number of literatures, five key factors influencing multimodal transportation of agricultural products in Thailand are hypothesized, together with 20 associated items, including Multimodal Transportation, Operation, Multimodal Service Provider, Market, and Road Constraints. A questionnaire survey is, then, developed to collect data. The collected data are screened and performed by Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to confirm key factors influencing multimodal transportation of agricultural products in Thailand with their associated items. The five key factors are then performed with the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to examine interrelationships among them. The results reveal that an increase in road transportation issues grow a preference of transport service providers on multimodal transportation. When the transport service providers take their interests in multimodal transportation, the operation in multimodal service is also improved to fully utilized company resources and maximize efficiency. These lead to reduction in logistics costs and enhancement of company's green image, thus, increase of companies’ competitiveness. Government may also support the multimodal transportation by improving multimodal transportation infrastructure to minimize resources and modal shift processes. The government policies will, in turn, stimulate the transport service providers in using multimodal transportation. This will, eventually, turns to a dynamic cycle of multimodal transportation overtime through continuous improvement in factors influencing multimodal transportation. These dynamic relationships can be further studied by constructing the simulation model to compare costs of multimodal transportation and road transportation.As mentioned above, Thailand is one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural products. Specifically, the growth of world natural rubbers demand increases by 3% in 2019 which leads to the growth in natural rubbers production and export in Thailand as it is also the world’s leading natural rubbers exporter. The major exported type of natural rubber is block rubber as it is the main material for automobile production industry in China. Additionally, China has imposed a policy to stimulate domestic automobile market, leading to rise in demand for block rubber. Thus, this study, then, develops a dynamic model of multimodal transportation of block rubber transportation in Thailand by using System Dynamics (SD) modeling. In this study, the block rubber demand and supply, transportation-related costs and capacity, as well as the government and company policies in multimodal transportation development, have been placed in the simulation model to introduce alternative modes of transportation and compare costs between road transportation and multimodal transportation usages. The sensitivity analysis and policy analysis are, then, performed to ensure that the uncertainty will not significantly affect the overall behavior of the model, as well as explain how to change policy to receive the satisfactory and optimized results in a specific time. The results show that a focus on multimodal transportation development will give company a competitive edge over road-only transportation with the optimization of logistics and transportation costs. However, with the limited capacity of each mode, all modes are still needed in order to complete the transportation of total demand amount. The results also reveal that the road transportation is a good alternative when only using as a support transportation mode for multimodal transportation. Regarding the government policies, the results show that the current multimodal transportation development policies is already fit with the block rubber demand and market situation for next 20 years. It can be seen that the use of multimodal transportation can save up to one time the logistics cost of the traditional mode. The government, therefore, should support the use of multimodal transportation in the long term to achieve the highest benefit for the industry and the country as a whole. The support could be in various areas, such as infrastructure development and R&D of agricultural product transportation. These may lead to market competitiveness and market enhancement in the global scale.