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Mae Cham district is located only 156 kilometers from the center for Chiang Mai, but the road trip would take at least 3 hours on the meandering mountains road.  The first dirt road that provides access between Mae Cham in Chiang Mai was completed in 1963.   The result of the road network and access to the global market has both positive and negative impacts on the people pf Mae Cham.  The access to Mae Cham has transformed the food production system in Mae Cham from being self sufficient to becoming a part of the national and international food chain.  The crops on the field have changed from rice to cash crops like animal feed corn and from local vegetables to commercial crops like cabbages, to feed into the national and international food chains.  The consumption of local food has been transformed as well.  The local dishes remain the same, while the added ingredient such as monosodium glutamate, fish sauce, seasoning powders that have increase the chance of high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes.

Much of the effort toward building resilience has been directed at identifying appropriate metrics and indicators of system resilience, and from this, interventions to strengthen resilience. An essential ingredient of such resilience-building efforts is to apply public processes of dialogue and diagnosis to identify systems fragility and potential for failure. Social learning processes allow people to take new perspectives in understanding their own and other's interests and values, to identify problems and formulate solutions by focusing on the potential for systemic failure. Diagnosis and dialogue tools used in a participatory process in Northern Thailand included food systems mapping, identifying potential points of failure within systems, and applying a self-assessment tool structured around resilience characteristics. This process proved important for developing stakeholder understanding of systems thinking and of concepts of resilience. Yet it is a process that is not without challenges. We noted the difficulty with defining food system boundaries and the tendency for participants to persist with familiar understandings of problems within their sector, with it taking time to shift to thinking about points of fragility within the whole system. We particularly recognize the participatory process itself as being of value, in addition to the specific outcomes such as risk identification or interventions for resilience.

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