Southeast Asia is set to experience rapid demographic and economic shifts. Amid changing consumption and production dynamics, food consumption is expected to increase by 40% by 2050, further intensifying demand for agricultural products.
However, the agri-food system in Southeast Asia remains fragile. Faced with fragmentation of smallholder farms, outdated farming practices, environmental degradation and volatility brought upon by climate change, there is a need to address the issue urgently.
The Centre for Impact Investing and Practices (CIIP) has partnered with Wavemaker Impact, supported by Philanthropy Asia Alliance (PAA), to publish the Seeding the Future: Transforming Smallholder Farms for a Sustainable Tomorrow report.
More than 30 organisations contributed their insights to the report, including impact investors and philanthropies, solution providers, development programme owners and regional and international organisations.
Key takeaways from the report include:
Solutions need to be right-sized, right-priced, and targeted well: There are many immediate interventions that are being driven by forward-thinking practitioners. For meaningful change to be enacted, these solutions must be targeted to have tangible and scalable impact.
More investment needs to go toward the agriculture, food, and land use sectors: Over the last decade, about 70% of investments in Southeast Asia went into the mobility sector, which accounts for only 13% of emissions. In contrast, sectors like agriculture, food, and land use, which contribute more than a third of the region's emissions, continue to be overlooked. Though impactful solutions for agriculture already exist, more must be done to ensure that efforts and resources are directed toward these high-impact areas.
Impact should be at the core of all investing decisions: Beyond identifying where to invest, the fundamental consideration for deployment of capital is to ensure that there is a clearly defined mandate and an intention for impact. It is important to develop a structured and validated Impact Measurement and Management framework to fully assess potential returns in both financial and impact terms.
Cross-sector collaborations are crucial to break the cycle: There is strong demand for practices and models that are good for the triple bottom lines of people, planet, and profit. There are many ways in which private and philanthropic funders can partner with public organisations to finance the regeneration of our agri-food systems and build smallholder farmer resilience.
CIIP and PAA are part of the Temasek Trust ecosystem. CIIP is a non-profit entity established by Temasek Trust in 2022 to foster impact investing and practices in Asia and beyond. PAA is a Temasek Trust initiative dedicated to catalysing collaborative philanthropy in Asia through dynamic multi-sector partnerships.
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