coll. - Managing weather-related disasters in Southeast Asian agriculture

In April 2016, OECD Ministers of Agriculture identified that the agriculture and food sector will not only have to respond to the opportunities of increasing demand for food and agriculture products in a sustainable way, but also have to adapt to climate change. To achieve this goal, agriculture and food policies would need to give farmers the means to develop practices that would at once ensure a greater resilience to risk, as well as to cope with more frequent and unpredictable weather-related shocks.

The OECD has made efforts to support such policies by developing recommendations to enable the adaptation of agriculture to climate change and the management of agriculture water risks. In particular, the report Mitigating Droughts and Floods in Agriculture: Policy Lessons and Approaches (2016), proposed a comprehensive analysis and key recommendations on policy approaches to the sustainable management of droughts and floods in a sustainable way.

Concurrently, the OECD has taken steps to broaden its expertise in offering robust evidence-based policy advice to emerging partner economies. In the field of food and agriculture, it has developed a partnership with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its member countries to review the policy environments in this region. Born from this collaboration, the report Building Food Security and Managing Risks in Southeast Asia (2017), explored effective policy solutions to current and future challenges related to food security in ASEAN countries.

The present work is a follow-up to these two reports. It reviews the policies related to droughts, floods and tropical storms in the agricultural sector for selected ASEAN countries by adapting the general policy framework proposed in Mitigating Droughts and Floods in Agriculture to the local ASEAN context.

The present report was declassified by the OECD Working Group on Agricultural Policies and Markets in December 2017. The report was made possible by a financial contribution from Australia.