Thailand & South Korea: Supply Chain and Customer Expansion into South East Asia

Rare Earth Global is continuing its expansion into East Asia with a mission that reaches beyond commercial growth: creating meaningful impact for farmers while helping industry transition to lower-carbon supply chains. The company’s work is rooted in a simple but powerful ambition - that sustainable innovation should improve lives at every stage of the value chain, from farm to finished product.

In September 2023, Rare Earth Global was selected by the UK government to extend its activities from Europe into East Asia, exploring how hemp-based products could open new economic opportunities for farmers while also supporting corporate demand for sustainable, low-carbon materials. That journey has since taken the team to Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Thailand, with growing interest emerging from Vietnam, Indonesia and Laos. Across the region, the company has been assessing how regenerative agriculture and scalable processing systems can be aligned with real market demand.

A particularly important moment came recently in northern Thailand, where Rare Earth Global’s Chief Operating Officer met with Khun Rung, an accountant who left her former career to run a hemp farm that now provides jobs for local women living in poverty. For the company, this encounter reinforced the human dimension of its mission and confirmed that lasting impact must be customer-led, commercially viable and locally rooted if it is to create sustainable change.

Over the past 18 months, we have made significant progress in laying the foundations for that model. The company has developed a consortium of large corporate buyers across feed and construction, activated facilities to process raw hemp, onboarded farming partners to scale production and worked with local governments to support industry uptake. Together, these steps represent more than business development; they form the basis of an ecosystem designed to connect rural livelihoods with global demand for climate-positive materials.

For us, success will not be measured only by volumes or markets entered, but by the scale of positive change it can help create. If that change improves life for one farmer, it matters. If it improves life for millions, it will represent the fulfilment of the company’s broader purpose.