Enhancing Food Supply Chain Resilience and Food Security in ASEAN with Utilization of Digital Technologies
Background
The agriculture sector in Southeast Asia is an important pillar in contributing to food and nutrition security as well in achieving the achievement of sustainable development goals in the region. The challenges posed by climate change, loss of biodiversity, increase in food prices, inefficient supply chains, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic have made the agriculture sector becoming more knowledge-intensive and innovative in finding solutions.
Advances in technological innovations such as precision agriculture, mobile technologies, remote sensing, drones, and big data analytics are paving the way for a broad digital transformation of agriculture in several countries by improving farmers’ access to information and markets, increasing productivity, streamlining supply chains, reducing operational costs and integrating isolated lines of development into smart, connected agricultural production systems and resilient food value chains. Despite the developments, the digitalization of agriculture poses certain challenges, including data and cybersecurity issues, labor replacement, re-education, and varying knowledge, skills, and capacity of individuals to adopt to new technologies requiring major transformations of farming systems, rural economies and communities, and natural resource management.
While digital technologies and innovations can support the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in transforming to more resilient and sustainable agriculture and food system, the varying capacities among the ASEAN Member States create digital divides in the adoption of digital technologies. Hence, there is a need to develop a guideline on the use of digital technologies that assist ASEAN Member States (AMS) in designing and delivering better productivity, resilience, and sustainable agriculture, thereby ensuring that everyone benefits from the emerging digital technologies.
Needs and Objectives
The project aims to develop a regional guideline that will equip the ASEAN with recommendations and implementation considerations for making an informed decision that will shape the digital transformation of agriculture in the region. More specifically, the guideline will outline conditions and actions needed to make use of digital technologies for agriculture and food system improvements, including interventions to facilitate digital technology uptake in the agriculture and food sector.
Output
ERIA is currently supporting ASEAN to conduct a study on Enhancing Food Supply Chain Resilience and Food Security in ASEAN with the Utilization of Digital Technologies, which aims to consolidate information on the status of digital technologies that have the potential to increase farm productivity and improve the resiliency of the supply value chain. The study is composed of three components focusing on:
Component 1: Macro data analysis: Estimation of the overall impact of COVID-19 on agricultural production and food value chain resilience in ASEAN;
Component 2: Assessment of actual status on the application of digital technology in the food and agriculture sector; and
Component 3: Formulation of a draft guideline on the utilization of digital technologies for the ASEAN food and agriculture sector.
The output of this project will focus mainly on the delivery of Component 3. While the implementation of the three components will be done in parallel, the outcomes of component 3 are not dependent on the results of component 1 and 2, although these will also be utilized to provide insights on the development of the guidelines.