Member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) play a major role in the global rice market. In this paper, lead author Eric Wailes, agricultural economics and agribusiness professor at the University of Arkansas, presents the current and projected status of the rice economies in ASEAN countries until 2022. The baseline situation of the rice market is generated using the Arkansas Global Rice Model, a multi-country statistical simulation. The global rice outlook is also discussed with particular attention to other Asian nations with which ASEAN as a regional association has developed official relationships—India, Japan, Pakistan, the People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of Korea. The outlook estimates are not predictions but provide a framework to analyze the direction of supply and demand, and the management of rice price volatility risks and their causes. Through the rice model, the paper presents a useful tool to assess intermediate and longer term challenges for the ASEAN region and to determine alternative pathways for designing policy actions for sustainable rice trade.
The ASEAN and Global Rice Situation and Outlook is one of four working papers presented at the ASEAN Rice Trade Forum in Cambodia in June 2012. The Forum, organized by the ASEAN Food Security Reserve Board, the ASEAN Secretariat and ADB, brought together various stakeholders to share and analyze market information as well as to coordinate policy responses to help avoid the repeat of the rice price crisis of 2007–2008. The crisis, triggered partly by the export restrictions of key rice exporting countries and the panic-buying of major rice importers, plunged close to a billion people worldwide into greater hunger and poverty.