Bandar Seri Begawan, 16 October 2019: The 41st ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Agriculture and Forestry (AMAF) and associated meetings were held in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam from 12 to 17 October 2019.

A delegation of researchers from the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) participated in the 19th AMAF Plus Three Meeting that was held on 16 October 2019 where they presented three reports from ERIA’s agriculture development project ‘Policy Recommendations to ASEAN Countries on Realization of Higher Value Added of Agriculture Products’. The project was conducted with the support of the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fishery (MAFF) of Japan and produced the following reports: Overview of Agri-food Industries in ASEAN: Basic Information on the Food Value Chain, Food Value Chain in ASEAN: Case Studies Focusing on Local Producers, and The Cold Chain for Agri-food Products in ASEAN.

Prof Hidetoshi Nishimura, President of ERIA, delivered a presentation to explain several key points of these three reports. ‘In the country review, ERIA analysed the exports of each agriculture and food product toward ASEAN Member States, and based on the list of competitiveness of each product we can obtain the evaluation of individual products which give rise to the question of how to efficiently increase productivity in the context of economic integration in the region,’ said Prof. Nishimura.

Prof Nishimura went on to briefly explain the findings of the Food Value Chain in ASEAN: Case Studies Focusing on Local Producers regarding high-quality rice in Viet Nam. ‘We found that cooperatives play major roles of not only the phase of harvesting, but also food processing and sales. We also found that cooperatives have multiple functions such as investing the development of new products and processing machines, as well as guiding distribution management methods for each farmer,’ he said.

Regarding The Cold Chain for Agri-food Products in ASEAN, Prof Nishimura presented estimates of the rapid increase of demand for cold chain products based on total prices and quantities of chilled and frozen products of agriculture, livestock, and fisheries according to each country’s data.

Lastly, Prof Nishimura announced that ERIA is going to start a new project to assess the infrastructure of food value chains in the ASEAN region, which will be supported by MAFF, Japan. Prof Nishimura asked the Ministers to support the project.