Food Reserve Management and Policies in Southeast Asia

Food availability is an important dimension of a country’s food security. At the regional level, the latter requires a balance between food production and trade. In Southeast Asia, “rice security” is generally equated to food security. Hence, rice is a good starting point for analyzing food reserve management and policies in the region. For many millennia, public stockpiling has been a popular strategy adopted for mitigating instability in the food supply. Building up of reserves has been a common component of food policies around the world. This policy paper, which draws substantially from the findings of the research project “Food Reserves: A Comparative Study on Food Reserve Management and Policies in Southeast Asia,” compares the experiences and challenges in public food stockpiling of selected Southeast Asian countries, and provides actions and recommendations on how to make food stockpiling a viable strategy toward achieving food security at the national and regional levels.