Food Security and Crises in Southeast Asia: Is This Time Different?

Food security is concerned with ensuring that sufficient food is produced, traded, and physically available at affordable prices to meet the consumption requirements of populations. It is a complex issue since, beyond governments, it relies ultimately on decisions by a broad array of stakeholders across supply chains, including farmers and their input providers (who decide on how much food to produce); food processers, traders, local wholesalers, and retailers (who decide on how much to procure and sell, and at what price); and consumers themselves. Food security is further complicated by the negative impacts of climate change on food production alongside declining arable land and labor, which make it difficult to increase production relative to population demand. A stable global food trade system is thus critical in meeting the growing diversity of consumer preferences amid the limited land and resources possessed by countries.

In 1972-74 a global food crisis, which coincided with the oil crisis, was among the driving factors for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to conceive the 1976 Bali Concord, which set the goal of building a united community that could concertedly address food security challenges and other shared existential threats.1 Subsequently, a global food crisis in 2007-8, during which the price of staple food commodities such as rice, maize, wheat, sorghum, and soybeans soared, prompted ASEAN to begin developing integrated frameworks and strategic plans of action for food security from 2009 onward.2 In part, these food crises emerged from the transformations and changing dynamics in the landscape of relevant actors; countries and traders alike played key roles in precipitating speculative price bubbles, destabilizing food security. ASEAN's main regional mechanisms for food security resilience today, in the form of food reserves, information systems, and intraregional trade integration, were thus a response to prevent future food price bubbles.

In recent years, however, several major geopolitical and geoeconomic events inside and outside the region have negatively impacted Southeast Asia's food sector. The first was the Covid-19 pandemic, which began in 2020 and generated a hybrid health-economic-food crisis that highlighted the vulnerability of supply chains in an increasingly integrated world.3 The second was Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, followed by the outbreak of another conflict between Israel and Palestine in October 2023. These crises have upset trade and supply chains. Further disruption has been caused in 2025 by U.S. president Donald Trump's renewed tariff wars and the economic uncertainty they generate. This essay examines how geopolitical crises have affected the complex nature of regional food security and food supply chains in Southeast Asia as well as policies that could help address these challenges.

The Evolving Dynamics of Crises on Staples

Food security in ASEAN has been perennially beset by crisis-induced instability in both supplies and prices. These disruptions, however, have broadly served to push institutional evolution and further regional integration.

Prior to the 2020s, ASEAN was suffering from a slow-onset, supply-side food issue through the negative impacts of climate change on farmers, including extreme weather events. Rice is a staple in regional households, but from 1990 until the late 2010s, the growth in productivity of rice farmers (measured in tonnes of output per hectare) slowed to the point that it was overtaken by the growth rate of the population.' The same trend applied to other commodities, such as potatoes, soybeans, and some fruits and vegetables. Amid constraints on expanding land for agriculture, some countries have had to import more food to meet growing consumption needs. Yet, given the diversity in levels of GDP per capita among consumers in the region, some countries have needed to compete with higher-income countries for food imports, the latter being able to afford higher prices. These supply, demand, and cost dynamics have led to plateauing progress in reducing undernourishment, causing a marked U-turn in undernourishment. The number of undernourished increased by 3 million people for the first time from 2014 to 2016, even though it had trended down since reaching over 101 million in 2005.

By 2022 approximately 36.7% of the ASEAN population was unable to afford a healthy diet-making up over 250 million people.5 The pathway to that situation lies in international food trade dynamics of the 2020s. Over the past five years, Southeast Asian countries have been both recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic and fighting inflation amid the recovery of domestic demand alongside a slower resumption in supply-side economic activity. The pandemic left governments with smaller budgets to subsidize basic commodities for domestic consumers, and they could not simply expand these budgets without risking economic instability. As a result, there have been fewer protections for ASEAN households' falling real incomes during a period of food price inflation. This section examines the influence of geopolitical events on the emergence of this situation, showing how distant events can impact the multifaceted nature of food security.

Russia and Ukraine: Disruptions from the world's "breadbaskets." As warring states, Russia and Ukraine have risen in significance to Southeast Asia's food security. Of interest is the parallel between the war that began in 2022 and the 1972-74 global food crisis: both events involved a significant shortfall in production and international supplies. The earlier crisis was driven by a drought-induced reduction in harvests amid a sudden upsurge in Soviet grain purchases, leading to a grain shortage worldwide of 70 million tonnes." The key difference, however, is that the grain shortage brought about by the Russia-Ukraine war has owed to the damage of storage facilities and blockage of transport routes in the Black Sea. Additionally, unlike the 1972-74 crisis that arose from a natural cause common to many countries (drought), the production and trade impacts of the war in 2022 were concentrated in a region that served hitherto as the world's "breadbasket," making up the largest share of global wheat exports (24%) prior to the war.7

Although the war does not involve any key producers of rice, the most basic food staple in Southeast Asia, it nonetheless affects ASEAN food security. The key dynamic that explains this is the phenomenon of cross-product inflation among grains, which also occurred in the 2007-8 global food crisis. In 2007-8, the grain production shortfall was less significant, yet food prices still rose significantly. Owing to a shortage in wheat, India banned rice exports, since both grains made up the country's total grain reserves, and this in turn triggered a price spiral. This was thus an "artificial" crisis, wherein food prices soared owing to price speculation outside the subregion affecting Southeast Asian food security: in this case, it especially affected the traders and governments of major exporters (Thailand, Vietnam, and India) and a key importer (the Philippines).8 Amid the Russia-Ukraine war, a similar dynamic was observed in the early months after the war broke out-international rice prices rose from an index rate of 101.2 points at the end of January 2022 to 110 points by the end of June 2022.

India: Balancing domestic and international roles. India was already important to Southeast Asia's food security in the previous 2007-8 global food crisis, but it rose further in importance with the 2022 war. As the second-largest wheat producer in the world, India provided stability to global grain supplies and prices by significantly increasing its monthly wheat exports to five times their normal level. On the one hand, this prevented a sudden food crisis owing to a dearth in supplies from Russia and Ukraine to international markets, providing an improvement over the 1972-74 crisis. On the other, it came at the cost of India significantly reducing its wheat reserves. Later in 2022, India suffered a major drought that reduced its wheat harvests to below target levels.9 In combination, these factors drove domestic wheat price inflation and the country's eventual ban on wheat exports to meet its own food security needs. At the same time, India's rice prices started to increase since people were consuming more rice as a cheaper alternative to wheat. Unsurprisingly, India prioritized its national food security requirements by again restricting its rice exports in July 2023.

China: Disruptions from an emerging power. China's importance in the global food market can be seen in its buildups of food stocks over the past decade for the three key grains (rice, maize, and wheat) as well as soybeans. These buildups came amid the rising tensions in the South China sea in 2011-13, the first Trump administration's trade war in 2016, and the lead-up to the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. Available data shows China's food reserves for rice increased fourfold from 42 million tonnes in 2010 to 168 million tonnes in 2022 and for wheat more than threefold from 59 million tonnes in 2010 to 184 million tonnes in 2022. China had an eightfold increase in stocks of maize, which is used for both domestic consumption and animal feed, from 84 million tonnes in 2010 to 763 million tonnes in 2022. It also saw a threefold increase in soybeans (mostly for livestock feed) from 3 million tonnes in 2010 to 9 million tonnes in 2022."

Had it been any other country, the reserve buildup may not have been as relevant. But over the past decade China has comprised 17%-19% of the world's population. Its ability to develop its stocks can be attributed in part to greater negotiating power gained from its ability to purchase in bulk. In fact, state support and guidance likely allowed for a near tripling in food imports from $49 billion in 2013 to $139 billion in 2022.11 China was estimated to have held 69% of global maize reserves, 60% of rice reserves, and 51% of wheat reserves by early 2022.12

Actions such as these effectively force other countries to compete for the remaining grains available, leading to increases in international prices. By the time the Russia-Ukraine war erupted in 2022, countries that relied on imports for meeting their consumption requirements were already in a less stable position regarding national stocks, leading to an increase in monthly year-on-year food prices of 23%-25% for commodities as a whole.

The tariff wars. Amid the tariff rate increases imposed by the United States in early 2025 on China's exports, one of China's responses was to place additional tariffs on $21 billion worth of U.S. agricultural products. These retaliatory tariffs imply an additional 10% in tariffs for soybeans, beef, sorghum, aquatic products, pork, fruits, dairy, and vegetables and 15% on wheat, corn/maize, and chicken from the United States. China is unlikely to lift these soon, given the unfruitful trade talks with the United States as of this writing in May 2025.13

Given these tariffs, U.S. traders will undoubtedly export less to China. In turn, China, will seek alternative, non-U.S. sources to meet its food security requirements. An analysis using a tariff simulator reveals that to replace these imports China will need to source 752,000 tonnes of wheat exports, 628,000 tonnes of maize, and 1.13 million tonnes of soybeans from non-U.S. providers.14

The impacts on Southeast Asian countries are likely to be increased import competition that will raise import prices, lower supplies, or both. For these staples, China is projected to turn to Canada and Australia to make up 82% of the wheat import gap, Ukraine and Myanmar for 81% of the maize gap, and Brazil for 80% of the soybean gap. Yet, these sources are also shared by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Thus, the tariff war can be expected to heighten the risks to the food security of these impacted ASEAN states.

Further Up the Supply Chain: Fertilizer Supplies and Prices

Fertilizer supply and price fluctuations show the impact of disruptions higher up on the regional food security supply chain. The availability of fertilizers in international markets plays a critical role in the ability of smallholder farmers to boost their agricultural productivity. Disruptions to these markets reduce supply relative to demand, leading to localized increases in fertilizer prices. However, farmers cannot simply raise prices to transfer the increased production costs to consumers since they could lose market share as a result. The net effect is a reduction in fertilizer use intensity in affected countries and, in turn, a smaller quantity of crops produced.

The Russia-Ukraine war: The Black Sea. An indirect impact of the war in Ukraine has been disruptions in the supplies and prices of fertilizers, which are key inputs to agricultural production. Russia is the top exporter of nitrogen fertilizers, accounting for 15% of global exports, and is the third-largest exporter of phosphate. Russia and its ally Belarus are the secondand third-largest exporters of potash fertilizer nutrients, respectively.15

Before the war started, Southeast Asia depended on imports for nearly 60% of its total fertilizer supplies. In particular, the region was 38% import-dependent for nitrogen (which is the most intensively used by farmers), 60% for phosphate, and 96% for potash.16 With the war, regional fertilizer imports fell significantly: by 24% for nitrogen, 15% for phosphate, and 26% for potash. While there was a ramp-up in regional fertilizer production, it was not sufficient to compensate for the reduced exports, leading to a fall in total supplies by 5% for nitrogen fertilizers, 2% for phosphate, and 23% for potash.17 By July 2023, Russia had pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal that had guaranteed safe passage to ships delivering food and other products during the war.

The Hamas-Israel conflict and the Red Sea. Further disruptions to fertilizer supply in 2023 were caused by pirate attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen in the Red Sea in response to the war between the Hamas militant group and Israel. These attacks disrupted supplies of the two fertilizers on which ASEAN was most import-dependent (potash and phosphate), although only 7% and 5% of global trade in these fertilizers, respectively, pass through the sea.18

The timing of these disruptions was especially challenging. In November 2023, one month after the Hamas missile strikes on Israel, El Niño began, causing droughts. Together with increased piracy events, this caused a 42% reduction in ship transit along the Suez Canal and a 67% drop in container ship transits via the Panama Canal.19 By early December, spot freight rates (i.e., shipping costs) had increased by 122% (for those from Shanghai), 256% (for those going to Europe), and 162% (for those going to the United States). Ships reportedly needed to travel faster to avoid piracy, raising shipping costs even more.

Imperatives Moving Forward

ASEAN's approaches to food security have evolved in the face of disruptions. After the 2007-8 global food price crisis, ASEAN launched its Integrated Food Security Framework in 2009. This includes the promotion of unfettered trade through the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement. In partnership with China, Japan, and South Korea, ASEAN also formalized the ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve mechanism in 2013 and the ASEAN Food Security Information System, which became a permanent mechanism in 2012.

Despite ASEAN's existing policies, its member countries remain vulnerable to food supply chain disruptions beyond the region, as observed during recent geopolitical events. At the top of the agenda to improving regional resilience should be a re-examination of the notion of security within food supply chains. To improve the security and stability of prices and supplies, ASEAN's food and agricultural sector could take a page from practices in other economic sectors, such as friendshoring (diverting trade toward geopolitical allies), diversification (increasing the spread of import sources), and nearshoring (increasing reliance on neighboring countries).20

Regional supply chain collaboration is a variant of all three strategies: friendshoring, since the ASEAN member states are part of a closely knit community of countries; nearshoring, owing to their geographic proximity to one another; and diversification toward intraregional sources. Essentially, ASEAN should explore ways of enhancing intraregional trade in critical food commodities as well as in related input industries, such as fertilizers.

A further way forward is to revisit the notion of "collective selfreliance" enshrined in the ASEAN Food Security Reserve Agreement, which recognized that each member country is accountable both in solidarity to committing to regional goals and in subsidiarity to improving food security within its borders. A worrying trend to arrest is, for instance, the declining rate of agricultural productivity growth in recent decades to roughly half of rates in the 1960s through 1990s, owing to capital deficiencies in investing in climate-smart agricultural technologies.21 This problem is intensified by the declining and rapidly aging agricultural workforce of each country and the growing contributions of agriculture to greenhouse gas emissions.

Economic support will be needed from states to empower agriculture to better serve national and regional food, employment, and sustainability needs. This support should go beyond simply meeting the needs of the market, given that some individuals in a society are typically excluded from market mechanisms owing to their smaller purchasing power and that there are gaps in social protection in financially constrained states. Additionally, market mechanisms today are not yet sufficiently geared for including the value of sustainability in pricing. Likewise, not all consumers are willing or able to contribute to such goals, as shown by the modest growth rates in the consumption of more environmentally friendly meat substitutes.

Providing agricultural support is politically contentious if viewed through a purely market lens, since such forms of assistance can be considered deviations from free trade. However, even the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has already made a shift from the Washington Consensus of outwardly rejecting agricultural support policies to proposing that such support be purposed toward shaping healthier and more sustainable farmer and consumer behaviors.22

To avoid the pitfall of a protectionist approach, a compromise could be to follow Singapore's model of technology-based support, which does not subsidize the actual production targets by farmers but only farmers' adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies. Greater support through investment thus enables larger production levels. Such an approach, if applied to ASEAN as whole, would be a strategic reorientation that could allow for an equalization of the playing field that would boost regional producers' productivity levels and, in the longer-term, their cost competitiveness in international trade. In this manner, the objective of food security would be fulfilled alongside the objective of free and open intraregional trade across food commodities.

Digital technologies present a strategic area for technology deepening and cooperation across the ASEAN member states, given that these are generally more portable and encourage smart farming practices without massive infrastructure investments.23 These can also complement the existing ASEAN Food Security Information System program, which is currently limited both in that it mostly applies to only rice, maize, sugar, soybeans, and cassava and in that the most frequent reporting is just monthly. Such technologies, by contrast, allow for continuous monitoring of field production that can alert farmers of pestilence and provide recommendations on maximizing farm productivity in a sustainable manner.

Nonetheless, the question of whether states can play a stronger role in influencing production targets-within their country or for the region as a whole-remains important. This is in light of the pattern of structural transformation that accompanies the economic development of countries, whereby economic incentives (in terms of higher and more regular wages) skew away from agriculture toward other industries. States can potentially provide economic support so that mechanisms can be developed to better align food production targets with the actual needs of the region, rather than just being guided by prices alone, and incentivize developing more reliable physical grain reserves for supply stabilization purposes.

These strategies can complement the existing regional mechanism of maintaining food reserves, which is limited in that it only focuses on rice stocks and does not feed into the rice procurement targets for farmers. Government-provided incentives and investment could further be applied to strengthening supply chains for agricultural inputs, especially fertilizers. However, these policies will only be effective if developed and implemented through collaboration with actors across the supply chain and with associations and cooperatives as well, so that the technologies developed by scientific communities can be taken up by farmers on the ground. Beyond these, it is still conceivable to develop and upgrade ASEAN fertilizer production capacities and reserves as a buffer against future geopolitical disruptions amid a changing global order.

Footnote

1 ASEAN, "The Declaration of ASEAN Concord, Bali, Indonesia, 24 February 1976," May 14, 2012 = https://asean.org/the-declaration-of-asean-concord-bali-indonesia-24-february-1976.

2 For the first of these, see ASEAN, "ASEAN Integrated Food Security (AIFS) Framework and Strategic Plan of Action on Food Security in the ASEAN Region (SPA-FS), 2009-2013," March 9, 2009 - https://asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/42-AIFS-Framework-SPAFS-Final-13-July-2020.pdf.

3 Jose Ma. Luis Montesclaros, "Has Southeast Asia Reached a New Normal in Food Security? Dissecting the Impacts of Covid-19 as a Hybrid Health-Economic Crisis," in Non-Traditional Security Issues in the New Normal, RSIS Monograph, no. 36, ed. Jose Ma. Luis Montesclaros and Mely Caballero- Anthony (Singapore: RSIS, 2022), 13-24.

4 Jose Ma. Luis Montesclaros and Paul S. Teng, "Agri-Food Supply Chains and Food Security in Asia," in Frontiers in Agri-Food Supply Chains: Frameworks and Case Studies, ed. Sander de Leeuw, Renzo Akkerman, and Rodrigo Romero Silva (Cambridge: Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing, 2024).

5 "Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet (CoAHD)," UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), FAOSTAT - https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/CAHD.

6 C. Peter Timmer, "Reflections on Food Crises Past," Food Policy 35, по. 1 (2010): 1-11.

7 Jose M.L. Montesclaros and Mely Caballero-Anthony, "Ukraine War and Food Security: How Should ASEAN Respond?" RSIS, RSIS Commentary, no. 53, May 25, 2022. For further info, see "Trade Map," International Trade Centre, 2025 - https://www.trademap.org/Index.aspx.

8 Timmer, "Reflections on Food Crises Past?

9 Denise Chow, "2022 Was the Year of Drought," NBC News, December 31, 2022.

10 Estimates based on an analysis of the FAOSTAT database for stock buildups and U.S. Department of Agriculture data for beginning stock levels.

11 Liang Jun and Hongyu, "China Becomes World's Largest Food Importer," Peoples Daily, December 4, 2023.

12 Shin Watanabe and Aiko Munakata, "China Hoards over Half the Worlds Grain, Pushing Up Global Prices? Nikkei Asia, December 23, 2021.

13 Jose Ma. Luis Montesclaros and Kayven Tan, "Collateral Effects of the Tariff War on Southeast Asias Food Security" RSIS, RSIS Commentary, no. 075, April 10, 2025.

14 Analysis was conducted using the Observatory of Economic Complexity's tariff simulator. See Viktor Stojkoski et al., OEC Tariff Simulator - https://oec.world/en/tariff-simulator.

15 "Fertilizers by Nutrients," FAO, FAOSTAT = https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RFN.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 "Red Sea Disruptions and the Geopolitical Premium; Bangkok Post, February 7, 2024.

19 "Disruptions in Key Global Shipping Route- Suez Canal, Panama Canal, and Black Sea-Signal Unprecedented Challenges for Global Trade Affecting Millions of People in Every Region," UN Trade and Development, Press Release, no. 2024/003, February 22, 2024.

20 Jose Ma. Luis P. Montesclaros, "Food Security as Supply Security: Geopolitical Implications for ASEAN, RSIS, Annual Review, January 2025.

21 Montesclaros and Teng, "Agri-Food Supply Chains and Food Security in Asia."

22 FAO, UN Development Programme, and the UN Environment Programme, A Multi-Billion-Dollar Opportunity: Repurposing Agricultural Support to Transform Food Systems (Rome: FAO, 2023).

23 Jose Ma. Luis Montesclaros, Paul Teng, and Mely Caballero-Anthony, "Digital Technology Utilization in the Agriculture Sector for Enhancing Food Supply Chain Resilience in ASEAN: Current Status and Potential Solutions," RSIS and the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia, 2023.