Agricultural Development and Technical Cooperation Toward Green and Inclusive Growth in East Asian APEC Economies

Abstract

East Asian APEC economies should expand cooperation, as they have common goals to achieve greater food self-sufficiency and food security by 2020. In Asia, the issues of undernourished (particularly China), small-scale farming due to limited farmland and consequently low levels of mechanization, aging and feminizing farm workforce are crucial. These problems will be exacerbated to be solved due to increasingly open markets through the proliferation of free trade agreements. To tackle these challenges, through increasing agricultural productivity and production, and adequate agricultural trade development, economies should improve food security and tackle related social issues. In this regard, agricultural technical cooperation among East Asian APEC economies has advantages: they share relatively common problems of and approaches to agricultural labour force and agricultural economy; in addition, agricultural trade among APEC Asian economies is growing faster than any other region. They can form collective responses while sharing best practices and experiences, technical and financial assistance, common responses to environmental and climate change issues, development of data infrastructure, minimizing the negative impact from agricultural open market. Concretely, East Asian APEC member economies can better gather and share alternative indicators that measure emerging contemporary agricultural issues by including them into statistical systems. Through this, they can build more adequate policies. It is also necessary to create collective solutions for transition of agricultural labour force, especially small-scale farmers, into higher-value and ecological farming or productive non-farm sector through skills development and for better coping with consequent shocks and adjustments from increasing free trade agreements. In order to do so, they need to bring up collective commitment to agricultural development and investment for the long term. Achieving such cooperation will require strong, effective, and well-resourced driving agents. Despite the limitations of APEC's current institutional bodies on agricultural technical cooperation, if APEC is committed to the Food Security Road Map of improving food security by 2020, then it must extend its cooperative efforts such as the Agricultural Technical Cooperation Working Group (ATCWG) and Policy Partnership on Food Security (PPFS) to be increasingly focused and include a wider range of actors, including farmers – the true agents of change in any agricultural system.