Author: Suchetana Choudhuri

Managing the transition – From cheap food to resilient, quality-driven systems For decades, Asia’s economic rise was underpinned by affordable food. Incomes grew, urbanisation accelerated, and households spent a shrinking share of their budgets on staples. However, in 2025, the structural foundations of cheap food began to erode. Across the region, consumers are paying more for food—not just because prices spike temporarily, but because the underlying economics of production, distribution, and risk have shifted. The era when food inflation was a short-lived headline has given way to a new normal where price pressures are persistent, uneven, and politically consequential. Food…

A 2025 Asia round-up on regulation, capital and the re-ordering of the world’s most contested commodity For decades, the ascendancy of palm oil within the pantheon of global vegetable oils seemed nothing short of immutable. Its unmatched land efficiency, coupled with unparalleled versatility, rendered it indispensable—fueling industrial food systems, underpinning the edifice of consumer goods, and more recently, energising biofuel markets. Southeast Asia constructed entire developmental paradigms around this verdant monoculture; India and China wove it seamlessly into their consumption matrices. Multinational corporations, with canny acumen, capitalised on the scale, reaping profits that seemed both inexorable and inexhaustible. Yet, as…

In 2025, Asian seafood exporters operated in an increasingly complex global trade architecture. The combined effects of tariffs imposed by the United States and European Union, alongside emerging free trade agreements such as CEPA and CETA, created both constraints and opportunities for the region’s leading producers. Unlike previous periods of growth, which relied primarily on volume expansion, the defining feature of 2025 was strategic adjustment. Exporters leveraged certification, vertical integration, and market diversification to sustain revenue and stabilize margins. This article examines the quantitative and structural underpinnings of Asian seafood performance in 2025, with a focus on India, Vietnam, Indonesia,…

2025 marked a pivotal year for agriculture across Asia. Headlines captured extreme weather events, AI-driven agritech deployments, and climate-smart policy initiatives, yet beneath the surface, the region’s agricultural landscape quietly evolved. The sector is moving from reactive interventions to embedding resilience across systems, blending technology, policy innovation, and climate-smart practices to withstand unprecedented uncertainty. Across Asia, nearly half of agricultural production remains exposed to climate hazards. Cyclones, floods, and prolonged droughts disrupted key farming regions, from the rice belts of Southeast Asia to rainfed areas in South Asia. Cyclone Ditwah, for example, struck Sri Lanka in late 2025, devastating hundreds…

By the end of 2025, Asia’s agricultural economy is no longer being shaped primarily by climate cycles, productivity gains, or technology adoption. It has been being shaped by policy—and more specifically, by tariffs wielded as instruments of economic power. What distinguished 2025 from earlier episodes of protectionism was not merely escalation, but intent. Tariffs were no longer episodic responses to domestic political pressure or trade imbalances. They became systemic tools of statecraft, used to discipline trading partners, signal geopolitical alignment, manage inflation, and re-engineer supply chains. Agriculture and agri-food—once treated as sensitive sectors to be insulated from trade wars—were pulled…

From AI-guided seeds in China to microbial fertilisers in Southeast Asia and desert farming systems in West Asia, 2025 marked the moment agricultural technology in Asia-Pacific stopped being experimental — and became strategic. In 2025, Asia-Pacific agriculture crossed a quiet but consequential threshold. For years, agri-tech across the region had been framed as a future promise: pilots, proofs of concept, donor-funded trials, and glossy demonstrations that rarely survived the realities of fragmented landholdings, thin rural credit, and conservative farmer behaviour. This year, that framing collapsed. Climate volatility sharpened, fertiliser geopolitics resurfaced, export markets hardened residue and traceability standards, and governments…

In an exclusive AgroSpectrum interview, Dev Garg, Vice President of the Indian Rice Exporters Federation (IREF), pushes back against U.S. allegations of dumping as tariffs on Indian rice rise sharply, asserting that India’s exports are fundamentally demand-driven, not subsidy-fueled. Garg explains that Indian basmati and select non-basmati varieties cater to distinct cultural and culinary segments in the U.S., making them non-substitutable by domestically grown American rice. He notes that despite tariffs increasing from 10 per cent to 50 per cent, demand has remained resilient, with higher costs largely absorbed by U.S. consumers due to basmati’s irreplaceable qualities and relatively low…

In an exclusive AgroSpectrum interview, Nnyaladzi Madzikigwa, Author and Director of Saffenergy Initiatives, Botswana, explains why safflower is emerging as a strategic resilience crop rather than a speculative diversification bet. Nnyaladzi argues that safflower’s real advantage lies in income stability, low input dependence, and multi-stream value creation—qualities that make it economically superior to high-yield but volatile dryland staples under climate stress. By rejecting bulk commodity markets and anchoring safflower in cooperative-owned processing, traceability, and ethical origin branding, Botswana is positioning the crop as an identity-based export for nutraceutical, cosmetic, and wellness markets. Crucially, the model integrates biodiversity stewardship, women- and…

In an exclusive AgroSpectrum interview, Sanjaya Mariwala, Executive Chairman and Managing Director of OmniActive Health Technologies, argues that India’s Biodiversity Act is quietly evolving from a policing statute into a potential industrial policy lever for plant-based innovation. He credits the 2023 amendments for easing compliance, aligning approvals with innovation cycles, and legitimising cultivated crops and traditional knowledge—but warns that fragmented state-level ABS practices still deter scale and global investment. Mariwala makes the case for a national ABS code, digital single-window compliance, and reward-linked reductions for companies investing in cultivation and conservation, shifting biodiversity from a cost centre to a competitive…

In an exclusive interview with AgroSpectrum, Romina Boccia, Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy at the Cato Institute, reinforced the core argument of her recent paper, “The SNAP Loophole That Lets Millionaires Receive Food Stamps”: that Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility (BBCE) has fundamentally eroded SNAP’s policy safeguards by allowing states to sidestep federal income and asset limits. Citing evidence that 43 states and DC have adopted BBCE—most eliminating asset tests entirely—she noted that the loophole now enables millions of households with significant financial resources to qualify for SNAP, including more than 5 million participants whose assets exceed federal thresholds. While sensational…