Food Security

The stability of rice, a food staple for nearly 690 million Southeast Asians, faces considerable challenges amid recent international conflicts, evolving trade policies, and climate change. Factors including an intensified El Niño, the conflict in Ukraine, as well as growing trade restrictions across Asia have collectively led to a deficit in the global supply of rice, constricting the availability of rice and posing significant threats to public health within Southeast Asia.

In the last few years Asia’s food security has suffered a series of crises induced by conflict, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, causing great disruptions to food supply systems and increasing  the number of people experiencing food insecurity. Now, pressure at four global ‘food chokepoints’—in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal due to geopolitical unrest, and the Panama Canal and the Mississippi River due to drought—are threatening Asia’s food security even more.

Asia is home to 55% of the people in the world affected by hunger—more than 400 million—and faces continuing threats to food security. The crises of recent years—including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, and climate-related shocks—have disrupted Asia’s food supply chains as they have around the world. Currently, rising temperatures, unpredictable weather patterns, and floods pose threats to the production of rice and wheat, key staple crops in the region.