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Guest Column

ASEAN's existing mechanisms need to be strengthened and complemented with new coordination approaches to effectively balance national sovereignty with regional cooperation in preparing for future food crises; this calls for a revisit of the principle of collective self-resilience as a foundational framework for regional food security.

Regional Challenges and “Non-Cooperative” Responses

Food security was a critical concern for Southeast Asia even before the COVID-19 pandemic, or the Russia-Ukraine war. A regression could already be observed in achieving the second Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger, particularly, a “U-turn” in addressing undernourishment. Whereas undernourishment used to follow a downward trend from 101.7 million people in 2005 to 60.6 million in 2014, it eventually reversed into an upward trend to 63.6 million in 2016. This owed to climate impacts that led to slowing land productivity growth in the recent three decades (1990–2020), which were at half the growth rates of the earlier three decades spurred by the Green Revolution (1960–1990).

Apart from this longer-term trend, the region has also been prone to abrupt disruptions in food supplies owing to “non-cooperative behaviour” in food trade. This trend surfaced earlier during the 2008–2009 global food crisis, where the key exporters of rice as a staple (Thailand and Vietnam) restricted their exports with the hopes of reaping larger export prices, alongside India. Adding to this, the key importer (Philippines) bid to purchase rice at significantly higher prices than those in the markets, thus enabling the upward spiral in prices to double-to-triple the pre-crisis price levels. Export restrictions could also be observed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar restricted their exports of rice, and Thailand banned egg exports. During the Russia-Ukraine war, Indonesia restricted its oil palm exports, twice.

Both sudden onset and long-term challenges are interrelated as they both relate to the explicit goal of states to ensure the food security of their constituents. When supply chain disruptions from outside the region emerge, their effects worsen the underlying long-term challenges, thus prompting such “non-cooperative” behaviours among regional actors.

Problem Framing: Double Mandate of ASEAN States and Collective Self-Resilience

On one hand, export restrictions represent attempts by these ASEAN member states to guarantee the food security of their constituents, guarding against domestic shortages that drive inflation up. At the same time, they effectively “export” their domestic food price inflation to the rest of the region, and the world over, in doing so.

This leads to a valid question on what the ideal mode of behaviour of ASEAN member states should be amidst disruptions, in light of their “dual mandates” to contribute to regional food security while protecting their own domestic constituents from food related existential threats as part of their sovereign responsibilities.

It is helpful at this point to recall the principle of “collective self-reliance,” enshrined in the Agreement on an ASEAN Food Security Reserve which envisions that an economically resilient region is one that builds on each country’s own national resilience. This assigns not only individual responsibility, but also common responsibility, to all ASEAN member countries in the “assurance of food security in the ASEAN region,” combining a balance of solidarity (common regional goal) but also subsidiarity (individual country accountability) in achieving the objective of a food secure region.

Collective Self-Resilience in Action

Having framed the issue thus, we now explore what the available ASEAN mechanisms today are that would allow for addressing regional food insecurity without imperilling domestic food security amidst crises or disruptions from beyond the region. The argument can be made at this point that ASEAN’s regional resilience can be improved by helping each state to realise their individual self-resilience, in particular, by upgrading their respective agricultural sectors. Initiatives such as the digitalisation of the food sector enable climate smart agricultural practices for improving agricultural productivity, for instance.

The notion of collective self-resilience can be the better starting point for regional collaboration to achieve greater food security resilience to disruptions. Consider that the existing chief mechanism in Southeast Asia for preventing price spirals is the ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve (APTERR) for supply stabilisation. This mechanism focuses currently on food supply stabilisation for countries in emergencies, but it could very well be leveraged and expanded to be used for regional supply stabilisation as well.

A further step to upgrading APTERR is to move beyond reserves and to develop a coordination mechanism for production as well. This should focus on rice procurement, since this allows for providing farmers with consistent price and demand signals to improve their productivity. Providing this type of constant demand will nudge greater technology adoption, since then these farmers will be nudged economically to increase their production if the incentive is high enough.

This support is already adopted in other geographical settings whether at the country level (India) or regional level (EU) through its Common Agricultural Policy as a means of securitising regional food production. It is even more critical now that ASEAN countries, and ASEAN as a whole, are seeing significant structural transformation away from agriculture and into higher value-added manufacturing activities.

Dr Jose Ma Luis Montesclaros is a full-time Research Fellow with the Centre of Non-Traditional Security Studies (NTS Centre), S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy or the National University of Singapore.

Image Credit: istock/Kuntalee Rangnoi

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