Southeast Asia’s Coming Food Crisis |
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Southeast Asia faces spiking food prices, Myanmar’s top general becomes president, the Philippines and Vietnam strike deals with Iran, and deforestation surges in Indonesia.
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Southeast Asia faces spiking food prices, Myanmar’s top general becomes president, the Philippines and Vietnam strike deals with Iran, and deforestation surges in Indonesia.
Southeast Asia’s Coming Food Crisis
While the fuel crisis caused by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran continues to dominate headlines, food will be the next pressure point. The United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) estimates that the conflict in the Middle East means that 45 million more people will suffer from acute hunger in 2026.
In Asia and the Pacific, food insecurity is expected to increase by 24 percent, the biggest relative increase of any region. Southeast Asia is grappling not only with rising oil and fertilizer prices but also with a grim heat wave.
Food prices closely track hikes in oil prices. Yet a reduction in oil prices doesn’t result in proportional reductions in food prices, a WFP representative told Foreign Policy.
The Persian Gulf is a major producer of fertilizer and its components—most notably urea, which is made from natural gas and provides nitrogen, one of three key elements in most fertilizers.
With supplies of both urea and natural gas disrupted, fertilizer prices have risen at least 85 percent since the start of the year, according to data from Fertilizerworks.com.
Faced with the price hikes, some farmers might decide that it is simply not worth planting if crop prices won’t cover their costs. The WFP representative told Foreign Policy that there was already anecdotal evidence of this happening in the region.
To top it all off, a heat wave gripping Southeast Asia might also hit crop yields. In Kedah, Malaysia’s rice bowl, water reserves in dams are running low. The heat is also hitting Thailand’s livestock production.
Timing could not be worse, since the main Asian rice planting season is about to begin. Effects will be felt toward October or November, with analysts ballparking the reduction in crop yields at somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent.
Myanmar is where the human cost will be felt most acutely. The country is ranked fifth in the world for food insecurity, according to the WFP, which estimates that more than 12 million people there will face acute hunger in 2026.
To make matters worse, civil war and a massive earthquake that hit last year have devastated livelihoods.
“It’s increasingly the........