By Cai U. Ordinario & Jasper Emmanuel Y. Arcalas
ASEAN should leverage its well-deserved reputation of being the “food bowl of the world” to cut poverty incidence in the region and wipe out hunger, according to analysts.
Ateneo de Manila University EagleWatch Senior Fellow Leonardo A. Lanzona Jr. said Southeast Asia is “blessed with the right environmental conditions” to grow food all year round.
Economist Pablito M. Villegas, president and CEO of agricultural think tank Meganomics Specialist International Inc., agreed with Lanzona, saying the region enjoys geographic advantages that allow farmers to grow on-demand crops.
Lanzona said the region also has the land resources needed to grow various kinds of food, not only rice.
“These are reflected in the relatively lower food prices in the region,” he said.
In the Philippines alone, inflation in the past five years has been benign. The highest average inflation experience by the country was in 2014, at 4.1 percent, while the lowest was in 2015, at 1.4 percent.
Inflation nationwide for Food and Nonalcoholic Beverages averaged 4 percent in March, lower than the 4.1 percent posted
in February.
In the region, based on the 2016 Asean Community in Figures (ACIF), inflation was highest in Indonesia ,at 3.4 percent in 2015; and lowest in Thailand, where there was deflation of 0.9 percent.
Despite this, data from the International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri) showed that some 84.1 million people are considered hungry in Southeast Asia and the Pacific in 2010.
In 2010 Ifpri said there were 32.4 million people who were considered hungry in Indonesia; some 12.9 million in Vietnam; 12.1 million in the Philippines; 10.5 million in Myanmar; 6.2 million in Thailand; and 900,000 in Malaysia.
Data from the Asian Development Bank also showed that apart from Brunei, Singapore and Timor-Leste, which had no available poverty data, the highest poverty incidence was in Myanmar, at 25.6 percent, and the Philippines, at 25.2 percent. This was followed by the poverty incidence in Lao PDR, at 23.2 percent; 13.5 percent in Cambodia; 11.2 percent in Indonesia; 10.9 percent in Thailand; 8.4 percent in Vietnam; and 0.6 percent in Malaysia.
Villegas, who served as an international consultant in various Southeast Asian countries, said the agriculture sector holds a lot of promise for Asean developing member-countries seeking to wipe out poverty and hunger.
“Some Asean countries can consider clustering small holdings and develop them through strategic production zones and strategic fisheries aquaculture zones,” he said.
“For example, the Philippines is behind Thailand in terms of agro-processing, they are more advanced than us. We can improve our production by really going into massive agro-industrialization, by developing the manufacturing and processing sector in relation to our agriculture sector,” Villegas added.
He said this will also allow Asean to increase its exports to other countries and other regions of the world. ACIF data showed extra-Asean trade reached $1.73 trillion in 2015. While this represented a 10.1-percent decline, it accounted for 76.1 percent of Asean trade.
The share of extra-Asean trade to its total trade annually has been on the rise. In 2010 extra-Asean trade accounted for 72.6 percent of total before increasing to 74.9 percent in 2011; 75.7 percent in 2012; 75.8 percent in 2013; and 75.9 percent in 2014. The Asean Summit and Related Meetings began in Pasay City on Wednesday.
On behalf of the Philippine government, the National Food Authority hosted the 37th meeting of the Asean Food Security Reserve Board (AFSRB) in Makati City.
AFSRB is an organization of 10 Asean nations that have committed a specific volume of rice stocks as food-security reserve under the Asean Emergency Rice Reserve system, because rice is a major staple throughout Asia.
The Asean rice-reserve mechanism was created based on an agreement reached among member-countries in Bali, Indonesia, on February 24, 1976.
Members of AFSRB meet every year, hosted by a member-country on an alphabetical basis, to discuss developments about their respective countries’ food-security situation and review the food situation in the Asean region, in general.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes
1 comment
exclude PH food cost too high already