ASEAN Food Security: Post COVID Policy Strategies

Year 2024, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 47 - 57, 01.01.2025

Siti Mustaqimatud Diyanah , Fathimah Azzahra , Zulfa Azzahroh

Abstract

The food and agriculture sectors are crucial to the ASEAN economy, offering significant employment and income for a large portion of the region's population. It contributes to ensuring national and regional food security and nutrition in ASEAN. Before COVID-19, ASEAN faced unprecedented challenges such as the increase in population, climate change, geopolitical tensions and natural disasters adversely impacting the agriculture and food systems. Recently, COVID-19 caused a major disruption in the food supply chain that affected the agriculture and food system. This paper aims to summarize the impact of COVID-19 on food security in ASEAN and post-COVID-19 policy strategies in ASEAN. COVID-19 affected economic slowdown, trade restrictions policy, and market disruptions that caused price hikes, agriculture input shortage, and other dynamic factors that threaten food security and nutrition in ASEAN. The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population increased far above the pre-COVID-19 level in ASEAN. ASEAN has been concerned about food security issues. ASEAN prepared the policy strategies for the post-COVID-19 and future crises such as the ASEAN Comprehensive Recovery Framework, Leader’s Declarations and Regional Guidelines, AIFS Framework and SPA-FS 2021-2025, which were developed to ensure long-term food security in ASEAN. These documents encourage collaboration on rapid actions in response to crises within ASEAN and related development partners including private sectors, strengthening the function of cooperation agencies in ASEAN, accelerating the transformation of sustainable agriculture and digitalization, enhancing market connectivity, promoting investment in agricultural research and development, and facilitating access to finance.

Keywords

Food Security, COVID-19, ASEAN, Policy Strategy, Agriculture sector

References

• [1] ASEAN CSR. Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture, https://www.asean-csrnetwork.org/c/programs/sustainable-agriculture; 2022 [accessed 14 August 2024].