Polycrisis, food security, and Asean
The Philippines, like the rest of the world, faces a situation of multiple simultaneous crises unprecedented in modern history. We’re in a perfect storm of geopolitical conflicts, climate shocks, disruptive trade restrictions, volatile food and energy costs, lingering health threats, financial uncertainties, internal political and governance breakdowns, and simmering social tensions that have already broken out in Europe and elsewhere. These are not isolated events but interact and feed on one another, which is what makes it a polycrisis as defined by those who originally coined the word. And with massive nuclear arsenals under the control of egocentric leaders with questionable capacity for sound judgment, the existential threat of an all-out conflagration is not far-fetched. We live in dangerous times indeed.
For a nation already weighed down by various weaknesses of our own making, our vulnerability to the polycrisis is even worse than need be. Fragile ecosystems from years of neglect, a fractured social fabric weakened by stark inequalities, a structurally flawed economy debilitated by decades of misguided governance and unbridled rent-seeking, and deep social fissures heightened by a highly polarized politics of personalities rather than of principles—all these unnecessarily weaken our defenses against the multiple onslaughts we face. We can neither withstand nor overcome the tremendous pressures on our own, but must draw on the collective strength that membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) provides. The same holds true even for our stronger Asean neighbors. Now, more than ever, the value of the 11-nation-strong alliance has come to the fore, at this time of simultaneous severe internal and external challenges.
Possibly the most basic challenge the polycrisis poses is the threat of food insecurity. Dr. Paul Teng, an internationally recognized expert in tropical agrifood systems and agricultural technology from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, points out that the food security challenge is no longer just about producing enough food. In a new article in the Asian Journal of Agriculture and Development, he defines the challenge for food systems as maintaining availability, physical and economic access, utilization, and stability in the face of multiple stresses. The mutually reinforcing crises in the food system can be seen in how a climatic event like El Niño reduces harvests at the same time that wars raise fuel and fertilizer prices. In turn, higher production and transport costs reduce households’ purchasing power, pressuring governments to subsidize food and farm inputs just when public finances are stressed. One disturbance amplifies another.
Teng argues that Asean and its individual member states must “move beyond a predominantly production-centered conception of food security … toward a resilience-centered paradigm to manage multiple crises.” While attention to production remains essential, particularly for rice and other staples,” the region’s next policy frontier is the management of interdependence: among the member-states, between food and agricultural inputs, between climate and water, between food prices and household incomes, and between national policies and regional markets.” This interdependence comes out of widely varying food systems across Asean. Thailand and Vietnam are major agricultural exporters. Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have substantial domestic production, but must still import key food products. Brunei and Singapore heavily depend on imports, but purchasing power is ample with their high average incomes. Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Timor-Leste face varying combinations of production, infrastructure, income, and institutional constraints.
Asean should prepare better not just for the next El Niño, export ban, or fertilizer shock, but for times when all happen together. Its fundamental advantage is complementarity: some members enjoy food surpluses, while others possess the capital, technology, research capacity, logistics, or large markets. Regional resilience comes from connecting these assets before a crisis happens, not scrambling once it’s there. In this era of polycrisis, food security will depend less on whether countries can stand alone, and more on whether the regional system can continue functioning when besieged by multiple pressures.
Many of us hope the US midterm election results will help ease some of the crises. The shift in its domestic balance of power could affect the war in the Middle East and the Trump tariffs that have upset world commodity prices and global trade patterns, and ultimately, domestic economic welfare in the US. But the polycrisis remains nonetheless, and Asean must step up to the challenge of a collective, coordinated response if the region is to exhibit true resilience.
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