AJAD Volume 21 20th Anniversary Issue October 2024

This special 20th Anniversary Issue with the theme, “Asian Agriculture and Development in a Dynamic and Volatile Landscape of Demands, Peoples, and Risks,” features articles from three senior members of our Editorial Board, namely C. Peter Timmer, James Roumasset, and David Dawe, who take both a retrospective and forward-looking view at agriculture in Asia. Five more articles mainly authored by renowned experts complete the lineup in this special issue, tackling pressing issues that beset the agriculture and development landscape.

All together, the eight articles are hoped to provide our readers and subscribers an engaging variety of relevant, useful and even practical knowledge to students, educators, researchers, practitioners, advocates, and policymakers alike. As AJAD looks to its next 20 years, we aim to cast an even wider net across the region to gather and share broader and deeper perspectives toward building a stronger knowledge base to propel agriculture and rural development in Asia and beyond, for the benefit of all.
 

This retrospective essay examines six decades of work on rice price stabilization and food security in Asia, emphasizing the critical role of stable rice prices in promoting pro-poor growth, economic development, and political stability. Based on extensive policy engagement in countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and China, the analysis highlights the limitations of standard economic models that discourage government intervention in food markets.

A macroeconomic and behavioral framework is proposed as a more appropriate basis for understanding food price dynamics. Historical episodes, including the 2007/08 and 2022 food crises, illustrate how strategic grain reserves, trade policies, and targeted subsidies can effectively reduce volatility and avert social and political unrest.

Food price stability is presented as both an economic necessity and a behavioral imperative, grounded in psychological preferences for predictability and security. The concept of a “behavioral political economy” is advanced to guide policy design that prioritizes citizen welfare. Drawing from decades of empirical experience and scholarship, the essay offers actionable insights for addressing contemporary challenges in global food systems.

In the last four decades of the 20th century, the world rice market was highly unstable, with price volatility greater than that on world wheat and maize markets. In the 21st century, however, new dynamics (a thicker world rice market, more irrigation, milder export restrictions) have contributed to a reduction in price volatility that is now lower than that on world wheat and maize markets. In addition, the El Niño events that are responsible for many shocks to the world rice market are largely predictable several months in advance. The reduced volatility on the world rice market and the predictability of El Niño events make it easier to use international trade as an instrument for food security. The recent experience with rice trade liberalization by Asian rice importers has been largely positive, helping to improve food security and the affordability of healthy diets, with little impact on domestic price volatility.
 

The Philippine economy’s growth has accelerated since 2010, outperforming its Asian peers in the current decade. However, poverty reduction is comparatively weak in response to growth, suggesting that growth has been less inclusive than expected. Poverty in the Philippines is still largely a rural phenomenon despite the country’s rapid urbanization. Our primary objective is to reexamine how much the national food policy has influenced the poverty-reducing effects of economic growth using the more recent national household-level data from 2000 to 2021. The longer-term data, including a period of mobility relaxation following long lockdowns upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, allow us to revisit the growth-poverty conundrum in the Philippines. We focus on the more recent decade of relatively sustained growth compared to earlier studies on the subject. We use Engel food shares as a proxy for household welfare and consider the differential welfare effects of food price changes across segments of the population. We show that economic growth in recent years would have been strongly pro-poor if not for the misguided set of policy tools chosen to achieve the food self-sufficiency goal. The government’s move to dismantle the quantitative restriction regime on rice imports in favor of tariffs is a step in the right direction.  

With the world population anticipated to reach over nine billion in 2050, and the majority of whom will live in cities, feeding a predominantly urban population will pose additional challenges to a predominantly rural-based agrifood system. Further, with the focus of economic activity being centered in cities, a development question is whether agriculture in cities should be an integral part of national planning. This is particularly when food insecurity is expected to challenge the poor in cities much more than in the countryside. Urban and peri-urban agriculture has been practiced in many parts of the world through activities ranging from community gardens to commercial farms of varying sizes. A major change, accelerated by supply chain disruptions and the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020s, has been the rapid development of technologies (digital, physical, biotechnological) that increases food production capabilities in urban areas and provide economic opportunity for entrepreneurship. Additionally, sizable investments from private equity have seen sophisticated food production facilities—such as indoor vertical vegetable and fish farms and precision fermentation factories—produce novel food such as alternative proteins in city spaces. Apart from the economic and food security benefits arising from urban agriculture, environmental and social benefits have also been demonstrated in cities that have adopted a clear mandate to become “green” and reduce their carbon footprints. This paper provides a background on urban farming, its justification as a worthwhile activity, and the rationale for explicitly including urban agriculture in national planning.

Assertions of pervasive inefficiency in the behavior and organization of developing agriculture are found to be based on unsound methodologies. Models apparently based on expected utility theory are theoretically flawed and use highly restrictive assumptions that make them largely irrelevant for explaining actual decisions. When a more appropriate model is applied to the case of the Green Revolution in the Philippines, the hypothesis that loss aversion impedes adoption of new technology is rejected. 

Common assertions about the inefficiency of agricultural institutions are also found wanting. The risk-bearing theory of share-tenancy, which is thought to imply inefficiency, cannot explain observed tenant shares. Once the disadvantages of fixed-lease contracts are recognized, sharing is plausibly second-best efficient. The purported inefficiency implied by the inverse relationship between farm size and yield per hectare also dissipates once the endogeneity of farm size is accounted for. 

Inasmuch as efficiency can explain the stylized facts of behavior and organization in developing agriculture, policy recommendations based on inappropriate theory and misplaced exogeneity should be viewed with skepticism. 
 

Transforming the Philippine food system is essential to achieving AmBisyon Natin 2040 and addressing persistent malnutrition. This paper focuses on youth engagement as a pathway to reform by exploring how to inspire interest in agriculture, improve dietary quality, and integrate nutrition into policy. Despite education reforms, agriculture remains undervalued in the school curriculum, often viewed as vocational rather than scientific. Negative perceptions, limited resources, and weak teacher training hinder student interest and career uptake.

Stunting among preschoolers remains high, especially among low-income households, due to poor maternal diets and limited access to nutrient-rich foods. Addressing this requires long-term strategies to raise agricultural productivity and incomes, and short-term solutions like biofortification and lowering the cost of nonstaple nutritious foods. Youth can be catalysts for food system transformation by shaping food choices, participating in agripreneurship, and leading innovation. Strategic policy reforms, improved education, and targeted investments are needed to build a resilient, nutrition-sensitive food system.

Feeding the growing global population and reducing poverty require innovative approaches in agriculture and food systems to sustain the planet’s health and food requirements. Sustainable development can be achieved by generating new knowledge and translating them into use through innovation process. A customer-oriented technology readiness level (COTRL) tool is presented to re-engineer agricultural innovation by systematically assessing new agricultural technologies with customer input and ensuring that the early design of the scientific research already has the end-products in mind. The COTRL methodology will integrate research, prototyping, and commercialization efforts and facilitate a disciplined and impactful innovation process. It will guide researchers and scientists, research managers and coordinators, funding agency program managers, policymakers, and other personnel involved in bringing scientific discoveries to market for societal impact. The COTRL framework can be used to strengthen the collaboration among academia, research institutions, networks of excellence, and the private sector in the ASEAN to create an effective ecosystem for manpower and structural capability development, knowledge sharing, and business development within and across member states.

Flooding remains one of the most destructive and recurring natural hazards in the Philippines, exacerbated by climate change and intensified weather events. To address this challenge, the University of the Philippines Resilience Institute (UPRI), through its NOAH Center, developed an impact-based flood forecasting system rooted in anticipatory action (AA). Unlike traditional early warning systems, this automated platform predicts localized flooding a day in advance by combining globally calibrated rainfall forecasts, 100-year rain return maps, and population exposure data. The system is seamlessly integrated into the NOAH website, enabling local government units and humanitarian actors to prioritize resources and respond efficiently to emerging flood threats. Developed using open-source technologies, the tool emphasizes transparency, stakeholder collaboration, and citizen engagement. Validation efforts, including social media monitoring and community feedback, affirm the model’s accuracy. By leveraging digital innovation, open data principles, and capacity-building initiatives, the platform strengthens disaster resilience at the barangay level, empowers communities, and informs evidence-based governance. Its flexible design also enables integration with forecast-based financing (FbF) mechanisms, offering potential applications in agriculture and disaster insurance. This proactive, science-based system marks a significant advancement in disaster risk reduction in the Philippines.