ASEAN SEEKING FOOD SECURITY AMID SURGE IN GLOBAL PRICES by Fardah

     Jakarta, May 7, 2011 (ANTARA) - The current global food and energy price hikes have concerned President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as this year`s ASEAN Chair, calling for clear and concrete cooperation among ASEAN member countries to secure food supplies for their peoples.
      "Food security will become a great challenge for ASEAN," the Indonesian head of state said in his opening speech at the 18th ASEAN Summit being held in Jakarta, May 7-8, 2011.

       He suggested that one of the steps that ASEAN must immediately take is the implementation of "The ASEAN Integrated Food Security Framework" comprehensively especially in the research and development field, and investment in food.
       The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders adopted the ASEAN Integrated Food Security (AIFS)Framework and the Strategic Plan of Action on ASEAN Food Security (SPA-FS) in the 14th ASEAN Summit in Thailand in 2009.
       The two ASEAN food security deals, which are planned for a five-year period (2009-2013), are formulated to ensure food security and to improve the livelihoods of farmers in the region.
       The AIFS Framework comprises four intertwined components, namely, Food Security and Emergency/Shortage Relief, Sustainable Food Trade Development, Integrated Food Security Information System, and Agricultural Innovation.
       ASEAN, which groups Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, must also pay attention to the formulation of food reserve system that could help farmers out of poverty, according to President Yudhoyono.
    "The competition for energy, food and clean water will become part of the global competition," he said, warning that scarcity of resources of daily needs could occur globally when the world population would grow from seven billion to nine billion by 2045.

"History has shown that food and energy price hikes will directly increase the number of poor people. In the meantime, we really understand and feel that reducing poverty is not as easy as it seems," the head of state said.

Indonesia`s Cabinet Secretary Dipo Alam in Jakarta on May 4 said a World Economic Forum survey entitled Global Risk 2011 put together water, food and security as one of three factors that can cause global risks, apart from macroeconomic imbalances and illegal economies.

The food price index in February 2011 rose 2.2 percent compared to January in the same year.

Food and energy prices were determinant factors for the inflation rate. "If the prices cannot be controlled, they will have a negative impact on people`s purchasing power, especially the poor," Dipo said.

Spiking food price is the biggest challenge facing developing countries nowadays, World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick said in Washington DR, last April 2011.

He contended that the global community should put food safety first, as food volatility hurt the poor and the vulnerable most, transnational media reported.

New World Bank Group numbers released in Washington DC, US, on April 14, 2011, showed that global food prices are 36 percent above their levels a year ago and remain volatile, pushing people deeper into poverty, partly driven by higher fuel costs connected to events in the Middle East and North Africa.

The latest edition of the World Bank`s Food Price Watch revealed that a further 10 percent increase in global prices could drive an additional 10 million people below the $1.25 extreme poverty line. A 30 percent price hike could lead to 34 million more poor.

This is in addition to the 44 million people who have been driven into poverty since last June as a result of the spikes. The World Bank estimates there are about 1.2 billion people living below the poverty line of US$1.25 a day.

As for Indonesia, the bank reminded that despite a bright economic outlook, increases in commodity prices also bring risks for Indonesia.

In the launch of the World Bank`s March 2011 Indonesia Economic Quarterly entitled "2008 Again?", in Jakarta, last March 16, Shubham Chaudhuri, the World Bank`s Indonesia Lead Economist, said that rising commodity prices may bring positive benefits for the country`s GDP as a whole because of Indonesia`s resource wealth.

"However, risks lie for poor households who may be greatly affected by sharp increases in living costs," he warned, adding that rising food price inflation can pose a risk to progress on poverty reduction in Indonesia.

President Yudhoyono had emphasized the importance of establishing cooperation to overcome the worldwide food price hike and energy crisis,

The problems could not be addressed by one country alone, but must be done by a group of countries, for instance in the ASEAN context, Yudhoyono`s special aide for international relations, Teuku Faizasyah, said following a meeting between Yudhoyono and Helen Clerk, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and former prime minister of New Zealand, in Jakarta, on April 28, 2011.

The Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) recently issued a warning that rising food and energy prices could impact the expected growth of the Asian economies.

Overall, economies in Asia were among the first to recover from the global recession and have experienced robust growth. However, with food prices estimated to have increased 10 percent this year and unrest in the Middle East forcing fuel prices higher, the concern is that price inflation will reverse much of the recent gains.

According to the ADB`s chief economist, Changyong Rhee,

"for poor families in developing Asia, who already spend more than 60% of their income on food, higher prices further reduce their ability to pay for medical care and their children`s education."

"Left unchecked, the food crisis will badly undermine recent gains in poverty reduction made in Asia," he said as reported by BBC.

Three Asia`s most populous countries - China, India and Indonesia - are seen as especially vulnerable to a further surge in the price of staples such as rice and wheat.

Rice is the staple food for most ASEAN peoples, therefore Indonesia has called on ASEAN member countries to increase rice reserves to strengthen food resilience amid the climate change impact threat.

"We hope ASEAN member countries would agree to increase food reserves in the region which could be used to assure food resilience as well as for stabilizing the price," Indonesian Minister of Agriculture Suswono said after attending a meeting between the ASEAN Economic Community Council and the European Union Commissioner for Trade in Jakarta, on May 6, 2011.

The minister said, in fact the commitment of ASEAN member countries to maintain food security had become a topic of discussion between ASEAN and three other countries, namely Japan, South Korea and China (ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve/APTERR).

Total reserve that has been agreed upon reaches around 878,000 tons with each country responsible to provide certain amount of it.

The three countries outside ASEAN, namely Japan, China and South Korea would provide more than 200,000 tons with the rest to be provided by each ASEAN member country.

"Indonesia is responsible for providing around 12,000 tons but we have expressed readiness to provide up to 25,000 tons," he said.

He said ASEAN`s readiness to meet the rice reserve was expected to be one of kind of recommendations to be submitted to the ongoing ASEAN summit 2011 and signed at the 33rd ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Agriculture and Forestry (AMAF) to be held in Jakarta in October 2011.

"President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has given directives that Indonesia as the host of AMAF in October must be able to encourage on how the rice reserve could be used not only for anticipating climate change but also stabilizing food price," the minister said. ***2***
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