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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...