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- The looming food crisis confronting Malaysia/Southeast Asia cannot be merely understood as spillover effects from supply-side disruptions arising from the war in Iran. Instead, it must be approached as structural food dependencies exacerbated by broader geopolitical and geoeconomic disruptions. This is the main contention of the discussion paper.
- Drawing on a slightly longer historical arc (than the war in Iran), food dependencies in the region are situated within ongoing contestations between the United States (US) and China-a key geoeconomic rivalry at the current historical conjuncture. Shifting dynamics between the US, China and Southeast Asia shape the forms and levels of food dependency in the region, and the war in Iran shows how these dependencies manifest as vulnerabilities that can be exploited in the context of great power competition.
- Breaking from these dependencies requires boosting domestic production, but this should not be conflated with food isolationism/nationalism-cooperation still matters. Our empirical mapping of eight food commodities not only helps to unravel the structures of food dependencies in Southeast Asia but also shows that food self-sufficiency can be pursued in tandem with regional trade and cooperation. Thailand and Vietnam have high self-sufficiency ratios in a broad range of food commodities and play a key role as food exporters in the region, including to Malaysia.
- While intra-regional food trade has provided a buffer against over-reliance on major powers, the war in Iran makes visible agricultural input dependency, whereby input disruptions can cascade rapidly through domestic production systems and chokepoints amplify these cascading disruptions. Feed production remains concentrated in Argentina and Brazil, while fertiliser supply is tied to geopolitically sensitive or resource-dependent regions, with potash imports unavoidable for all four countries.
- Given the temporary buffers of intra-regional food trade and trade rerouting of exports from the Gulf, there is currently no apparent impact on consumer food prices. However, agricultural input dependency suggests that the impact on consumer food prices would be transmitted via the fertiliser-feed-food channel in the coming months. An imminent price increase is indicated by producer prices, notably at the early stage of processing and for perennial crops with more regular fertiliser applications.
- Responses in the region thus far have been nationally driven rather than regionally coordinated. The preference for national over regional mechanisms reflects a form of ASEAN regionalism that has prioritised national policy flexibility over centralised/pooled authority. Such flexible regionalism can be a model for cooperative self-reliance, where self-sufficiency is grounded in regional cooperation rather than food isolationism/nationalism. This is where ASEAN-level mechanisms can be more fully utilised to coordinate national actions that can contribute collectively to regional food security.
