THE BROKEN AGRIFOOD SYSTEM: Neoliberal Restructuring, Smallholder Marginalization, and Persistent Hunger in Asia and the Pacific

THE BROKEN AGRIFOOD SYSTEM: Neoliberal Restructuring, Smallholder Marginalization, and Persistent Hunger in Asia and the Pacific

A. Borhan,  S. K. Das

Centre for Social Research (CSR), Dhaka, Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

The Asia-Pacific region currently embodies a profound agricultural paradox: while spearheading a historically unprecedented surge in global production—marked by a 56% expansion in crops and a 47% rise in fisheries—it remains the global epicenter of undernourishment. This abundance has failed to secure the well-being of the 355 million individuals who comprise over half of the world’s hungry, revealing that record-breaking yields do not inherently equate to nutritional security. This paper contends that such persistent deprivation is not a technical failure of aggregate supply, but an inherent structural byproduct of the prevailing capitalist agrifood model. Rooted in colonial-era technocracy and intensified by neoliberal restructuring, this model prioritizes value extraction and corporate consolidation over the human right to food, systematically marginalizing the small-scale farmers and fishers who constitute the foundational pillars of regional food systems.

Through a critical analysis of the post-Green Revolution era, this study documents the “treadmill effect” of industrial agriculture, where stagnating yields are maintained only through escalating chemical and financial inputs. We highlight a disturbing regulatory “double standard” practiced by multinational corporations: EU-headquartered firms continue to market hazardous pesticides and veterinary antibiotics in Asian markets that are strictly prohibited in the West. This practice has directly incubated a “silent pandemic” of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), with the Asia-Pacific projected to account for nearly 94% of global antimicrobial consumption in aquaculture by 2030, threatening both regional health and global ecological stability.

The paper further extends the political economy of agrarian transformation to the “Blue Frontier,” examining the precarious conditions of small-scale fisheries (SSF). While SSF provide 40% of the global catch and support 46 million regional livelihoods, they are increasingly displaced by industrial fleets, coastal mega-projects, and climate-driven ecosystem collapse. We identify pervasive gender and labor inequalities—from the systematic exclusion of women in governance to the “plantation-like” exploitation of migrant fishers—as foundational barriers to regional resilience.

Ultimately, this paper concludes that addressing the regional food crisis requires a fundamental departure from the production-centric, corporate-led paradigm. We advocate for a transformative policy framework grounded in food sovereignty, agroecological practice, and rights-based governance. By recognizing smallholders and fishing communities as essential rights-holders rather than mere labor inputs, the region can move toward a blue-green commons that prioritizes human nutrition and environmental stewardship over the predatory expansion of industrial capital.

1. The Paradox of Agricultural Production in Addressing Hunger and Undernourishment

Over the course of more than two decades, global agricultural output has expanded at a historically unprecedented pace. Primary crop production has risen by 56 per cent, meat by 55 per cent, milk by 61 per cent, and fisheries and aquaculture by 47 per cent (FAO, 2024). Asia has been a central actor in this production surge, even while remaining structurally dependent on the Americas and Europe for a significant share of its cereal supplies. Cereals continue to be the most heavily traded agricultural commodity in the world, with Asia functioning as the principal importing region and the Americas and Europe as the dominant exporters (FAO Statistical Yearbook, 2024). Paradoxically, however, several Asian countries simultaneously rank among the world’s leading rice exporters — most notably China, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Cambodia.

Asia’s aggregate contribution to global agriculture, forestry, and fisheries is immense. The value added by these sectors across the region more than doubled between 2000 and 2022, growing by 66 per cent to reach approximately 2.5 trillion USD, with India and China accounting for the largest shares (FAO, 2024). Yet this spectacular growth in productive output has not translated into food security for the majority of the region’s population. Asia remains home to approximately 52 per cent of the world’s undernourished people — an estimated 355 million individuals, following modest progress recorded in the 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in Asia and the Pacific report, which noted a decline in the prevalence of undernourishment to 6.4 per cent in 2024 (FAO/IFAD/UNEP/WFP/WHO, 2025). Despite this progress, the report cautions that the situation remains deeply uneven, with nearly 80 per cent of food-insecure people concentrated in South Asia.

The FAO–WFP Hunger Hotspots report covering November 2025 to May 2026 paints a sharply deteriorating picture. Acute food insecurity is deepening across 16 countries and territories globally, with Myanmar and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh classified as hotspots and Afghanistan classified as a hotspot of very high concern within the Asia-Pacific region — conditions driven by conflict, recurrent flooding, severe drought exacerbated by the August 2025 earthquake in Afghanistan, and an unprecedented collapse in humanitarian financing. As of late October 2025, only USD 10.55 billion of the USD 29 billion required globally to assist populations most at risk had been received, forcing deep cuts in food rations and the suspension of critical nutrition programmes (FAO/WFP, 2025). The World Food Programme’s 2026 Global Outlook further warns that an estimated 318 million people face acute hunger globally — double pre-pandemic levels — with 41 million at Emergency levels or worse (WFP, 2026).

The situation is especially alarming in South Asia, where approximately 281 million people remain undernourished — nearly 40 per cent of the global total (Global Hunger Index, 2024). The region records the highest rate of child wasting of any GHI region globally. Structural drivers include chronic dietary poverty, macroeconomic instability, severe price inflation in food markets, escalating climate impacts, and the recurrent devastation caused by natural disasters. Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India have each emerged as acute hunger hotspots, marked by intergenerational cycles of malnutrition, persistent micronutrient deficiencies, and a skewed dietary emphasis on staple grains at the expense of nutritional diversity. Gender inequality further compounds food insecurity, with women experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity at substantially higher rates than men — a disparity rooted in structural inequalities in land access, income, and household decision-making power (FAO, 2023).

2. The Dominant Discourse of Hunger and Malnutrition

The prevailing global discourse on hunger and malnutrition consistently frames the problem in terms of insufficient production, diverting analytical attention from the more fundamental drivers of persistent poverty, structural inequality, and the systemic inefficiencies of corporate-led agrifood systems. The Food and Agriculture Organization has repeatedly affirmed that the world currently produces enough food to feed its entire population — a finding that holds even when accounting for the compounding disruptions of conflict and climate change (FAO, 2023). The core problem, therefore, is not one of aggregate supply but of access, distribution, and power.

The scale of food loss and waste offers the most compelling illustration of this structural dysfunction. Approximately one-third of all food produced globally each year — roughly 1.3 billion tonnes — is lost or wasted at a cost of approximately 1 trillion USD annually (FAO/World Food Programme, 2020). This waste occurs across the full length of supply chains, from post-harvest losses on smallholder farms through processing, retail, and consumption. The High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) has estimated that eliminating food loss and waste could improve the nutritional status of approximately 2 billion people currently suffering from micronutrient deficiencies (HLPE, FAO, 2019). The World Wildlife Fund (2021) has similarly projected that if just one-third of currently wasted food could be recovered and distributed, it would be sufficient to provide adequate nutrition to approximately 820 million undernourished people each year.

However, this calculus of potential redistribution conceals a deeper structural reality: those who go hungry are, in significant measure, the very people who produce the world’s food. An estimated 400 million agricultural households — predominantly smallholder farmers cultivating fewer than two hectares — generate the majority of global food supply yet remain among the most food-insecure (Third World Network, 2024). These producers typically earn less than two USD per day (World Bank, 2023) and are systematically excluded from the benefits of the global food economy by a convergence of factors: volatile commodity prices, escalating input costs, lack of market access, and the structural power of corporate intermediaries. As Bernstein (2016) has argued, the persistence of smallholder poverty in the midst of agricultural abundance reflects not a technical failure of production systems but a structural failure of the capitalist agrifood order.

3. The Emergence of the Green Revolution Approach and Technology

The intellectual and institutional foundations of the post-World War II Green Revolution were laid within a specific geopolitical context — namely, the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and American anxieties about the political consequences of food insecurity in the developing world. Within this frame, hunger was deliberately recast not as a symptom of colonial dispossession or structural poverty, but as a technical problem of low agricultural productivity on small-scale farms. Influential philanthropic institutions, principally the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, working in close alignment with the United States government and the newly established international agricultural research centres (IARCs) such as CIMMYT and IRRI, promoted a model of agricultural modernization centred on high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, controlled irrigation, and mechanization (Patel, 2013; Shiva, 1991).

While the Green Revolution undeniably produced significant increases in the yields of key staple crops — particularly rice, wheat, maize, and sorghum — its longer-term sustainability, distributional equity, and ecological consequences have been deeply contested. Production gains were real and substantial in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in parts of South and Southeast Asia, but yield growth began to plateau from the 1990s onward, a phenomenon widely described in the agricultural science literature as ‘yield stagnation’ or ‘yield ceiling’ (Cassman, 1999; Lobell et al., 2009). The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD, 2009) — a process involving 400 scientists and endorsed by 58 governments — concluded that the Green Revolution model was not globally replicable or environmentally sustainable, and future agricultural development would require a fundamental reorientation toward agro-ecological approaches.

The ecological consequences of Green Revolution agriculture have been extensively documented. A study from Thailand exemplifies the broader regional pattern: although rice yields increased by 6.5 per cent over a given period, fertilizer application grew by 24 per cent and pesticide use by 53 per cent to sustain those gains (Third World Network, 2009). This dynamic of input intensification reflects a structural feature of HYV-based agriculture — yields are maintained or marginally increased only through ever-greater chemical applications, generating a treadmill effect that progressively raises production costs while diminishing returns per unit of input. Soil health degradation, groundwater contamination, the loss of crop genetic diversity, and the collapse of beneficial insect populations have been widely reported consequences across the Green Revolution heartlands of South and Southeast Asia (Pingali, 2012; Conway, 2012). Punjab, India — once the emblematic success story of the Green Revolution — now confronts severe soil fertility decline, groundwater depletion, and a public health crisis associated with agrochemical contamination (Shiva, 1991; Singh, 2020).

4. The Ongoing Trend of Reliance on External Inputs in the Post-Green Revolution Phase

The liberalization of trade, investment, and capital flows from the late 1980s onward — accelerated by structural adjustment programmes mandated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — transformed the chemical-intensive agriculture of the Green Revolution into a fully corporatized, globally integrated agrifood system. Large transnational agribusiness corporations moved rapidly to capture control over the natural and productive resources underpinning the food system: seeds, agrochemicals, agricultural machinery, post-harvest infrastructure, and commodity trading (ETC Group, 2020; McMichael, 2013). This process of corporate consolidation fundamentally restructured the relationship between smallholder farmers and agricultural markets, embedding smallholders within commodity chains over which they exercise little control while exposing them to the full volatility of global price systems.

The dependence on external inputs — principally synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides — has continued to intensify in the post-Green Revolution phase, even as evidence of their ecological and economic costs accumulates. In 2022, average pesticide application in Asia and the Pacific stood at approximately 2.0 kg per hectare of agricultural land (FAO, 2024). A 2024 report by the Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PANAP) found that the majority of pesticides in use across farming communities in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Laos are either classified as highly hazardous or are banned outright within the European Union. Strikingly, many of these prohibited substances are produced and marketed by EU-headquartered multinational corporations including Syngenta, Bayer, and BASF, who continue to sell in Asian markets what they are legally prohibited from selling at home — a practice that has attracted substantial criticism from civil society organizations and human rights bodies (PANAP, 2024; Inocencio et al., 2023).

The situation with inorganic fertilizers is similarly alarming. Usage has increased by up to 56 per cent across the region, contributing to progressive soil health degradation and significantly raising per-unit production costs for smallholder farmers (FAO, 2024). The geopolitical disruption caused by the conflict in Ukraine from 2022 onward produced a particularly severe shock to global fertilizer markets, with prices for nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium fertilizers increasing by between 70 and 300 per cent at peak (World Bank, 2022). For smallholder farmers in Asia — already operating on thin margins — this input cost inflation deepened indebtedness, eroded livelihoods, and in the worst cases, forced productive land abandonment. The seed sector has experienced a parallel process of corporate concentration. Over four decades of mergers, acquisitions, intellectual property litigation, and the strategic deployment of patent regulations and biotechnology licensing requirements, the world’s commercial seed industry has become dominated by a handful of corporations. As the ETC Group (2020) has documented, the Bayer-Monsanto merger alone created an entity controlling approximately 27 per cent of global seed sales and 25 per cent of global pesticide sales — a degree of vertical integration that structurally constrains smallholder farmers’ choices and autonomy. EU-headquartered multinational corporations, documented for selling banned pesticides in Asian markets, are implicated in a parallel double standard regarding veterinary antibiotics: growth-promoting uses banned in the European Union remain permitted and practiced across much of Asia (PANAP, 2024)

5. Eroding the Agrarian Base: Land, Labour, and the Smallholder Crisis

Asia and the Pacific host an estimated 87 per cent of the world’s small farms, making smallholder agriculture the dominant form of food production in the region (FAO, 2021). Yet the structural conditions facing these smallholders have deteriorated markedly over the past two decades under the combined pressures of neoliberal policy reform, corporate expansion, and ecological stress. Average farm sizes in the region have fallen below two hectares — in some South Asian countries, below one hectare — as a consequence of land fragmentation through inheritance, distress land sales, and the displacement of communities by large-scale land acquisitions for agribusiness, infrastructure, and extractive industry projects (UN-Habitat, 2015; Borras and Franco, 2012).

Large numbers of poor rural residents, marginal farmers and tenants, indigenous peoples, and ethnic minority communities remain either landless or possess only marginal land holdings. Land governance systems across the region frequently fail to recognize the customary tenure rights of these groups, leaving them vulnerable to dispossession (UN-Habitat, 2015; FAO, 2022). In 2022, agriculture employed approximately 563 million people in Asia and the Pacific — roughly 30 per cent of the region’s total workforce. However, the long-term trend points toward significant labour displacement: between 2000 and 2022, the number of agricultural workers in the region declined by approximately 192 million, meaning that roughly one in every four agricultural workers exited the sector over this period (ILO, 2022).

The gendered structure of agricultural labour in South Asia is highly significant. Women account for approximately three out of five agricultural workers in the region’s smallholder sector, yet they continue to be systematically denied equal rights to economic resources, land ownership, credit, and agricultural extension services, while simultaneously bearing a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic and care work (ILO, 2022; FAO, 2023). The FAO’s State of Food and Agriculture (2023) has estimated that closing the gender gap in agricultural access could increase agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 per cent and reduce the number of undernourished people by 100 to 150 million.

Youth disengagement from agriculture represents another structural challenge of increasing severity. Young people are exiting agriculture at high rates across the region, driven by a combination of factors: the low and volatile incomes characteristic of smallholder farming, the physically demanding and socially undervalued nature of agricultural labour, and the perceived opportunities available in urban labour markets (ILO, 2022; Asian Development Bank, 2020). Child labour in agriculture remains a deeply troubling dimension of the sector’s labour structure. Agriculture accounts for approximately 60 per cent of all child labour globally (ILO, 2020), with a significant proportion of child agricultural workers engaged in hazardous forms of work including direct handling of pesticides and operation of heavy machinery. Migrant labour constitutes another vulnerable category: in Malaysia, for instance, migrant workers account for nearly one-third of total agricultural employment, concentrated in palm oil and rubber plantations where labour rights violations, including debt bondage, wage theft, and restriction of movement, have been extensively documented (ILO, 2024; Amnesty International, 2016).

6. The Industrial Agrifood System under the Neoliberal Regime

The imposition of neoliberal economic policies across Asia and the Pacific — through structural adjustment programmes, bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements, and World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements on agriculture — has systematically dismantled local and regional food systems while facilitating the expansion of corporate-controlled industrial agrifood chains. The convergence of financialization, the rapid proliferation of supermarket retail formats (‘supermarketization’), and the industrialization of food processing has fundamentally transformed both the structure of food markets and the terms on which smallholder producers can participate in them (Burch and Lawrence, 2009; Reardon and Timmer, 2012). A landmark study by the University of Cambridge (2020) identified corporate-led industrial agrifood systems as a primary driver of the simultaneous rise in hunger, chronic malnutrition, and diet-related non-communicable diseases including obesity and diabetes across the Global South.

The WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, in force since 1995, has been widely critiqued for enshrining a structurally asymmetric trade regime that obliges developing countries to open their agricultural markets to subsidized imports from wealthy nations while constraining their ability to support domestic smallholder production (Ghosh, 2010; McMichael, 2013; Via Campesina, 2021). The consequences for Asian smallholder farming communities have been severe: exposure to cheap, subsidized commodity imports has depressed domestic producer prices, undermined local food production systems, and accelerated rural poverty and outmigration. UNCTAD (2021) has documented how trade liberalization in agriculture has systematically eroded policy space for developing country governments to pursue food sovereignty-oriented strategies.

Multinational agribusiness corporations have exploited this liberalized regulatory environment to extend their control across every node of the agrifood value chain — from upstream input supply through production, processing, logistics, and retail. The ETC Group (2020) has documented how the global agrifood system is now dominated by a small number of ‘commodity super-platforms’ that exercise near-monopolistic control over key segments of the food economy. Market infrastructure across much of the region is structurally unsuited to the needs of smallholder producers. Contract farming arrangements, frequently promoted as a mechanism for integrating smallholders into value chains, have in practice largely bypassed the poorest and most marginal farmers (Prowse, 2012; FAO, 2022). The ecological costs of the industrial agrifood system — water scarcity, biodiversity loss driven by monoculture expansion and agrochemical use, large-scale deforestation for plantation agriculture, and the pollution of freshwater and coastal ecosystems — are all extensively documented consequences of the industrial model (IPBES, 2019; FAO, 2021). The role of industrial livestock and aquaculture systems in facilitating the emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases — including the SARS, H5N1 avian influenza, and COVID-19 outbreaks — has been recognized by the FAO, the WHO, and UNEP as a structural public health risk requiring systemic reform of the agrifood system (UNEP, 2020; Wallace et al., 2020).

7. Antimicrobial Resistance: A Silent Pandemic Incubated in the Agrifood System

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is a catastrophic byproduct of industrial agrifood systems, claiming an estimated 4.95 million lives annually. The Asia-Pacific region is the global epicenter of this crisis, projected to account for 93.8% of global antimicrobial consumption in aquaculture by 2030. Low- and middle-income countries in the region bear a disproportionate share of the resulting economic and mortality burden.

The agrifood system—specifically industrial livestock and aquaculture—is a primary driver of AMR. The routine, prophylactic use of antibiotics for growth promotion and disease prevention in crowded conditions creates vast reservoirs of resistant bacteria. In aquaculture, drugs are often delivered through medicated feed in open water systems, allowing un-metabolized antibiotics to leak into the environment. This disperses resistance genes across major ecosystems, including the Mekong and Yangtze rivers. This environmental threat is further accelerated by climate change, as warming waters facilitate faster bacterial growth.

The public health implications are severe. Research across Southeast Asia, China, and India has identified high levels of resistance in foodborne pathogens like Salmonella, E. coli, and Vibrio. Of particular concern is the emergence of pathogens resistant to “last-resort” human medicines.

Despite the 2024 UN General Assembly Political Declaration on AMR—which aims to reduce AMR deaths by 10% by 2030—enforcement remains weak. A significant regulatory double standard persists: multinational corporations continue to sell veterinary antibiotics and growth promoters in Asian markets that are strictly banned in the West. By exploiting these regulatory gaps, industrial agricultural practices continue to trade regional health for profit, undermining global efforts to contain the “silent pandemic.”

8. Small-Scale Ocean and Sea Fishing Communities: Marginalization at the Blue Frontier

The precarious state of small-scale fisheries (SSF) is often overshadowed by terrestrial agriculture, yet its role in food security is vital. Globally, SSF account for 40% of fisheries catches and support the livelihoods of 1 in 12 people (Franz et al., 2025). In the Asia-Pacific specifically, SSF sustain 46 million people and provide half the region’s fish catch, with a landed value of $53.3 billion. This sector remains a critical pillar for regional nutrition, cultural heritage, and environmental stability (FAO, 2025).

Despite these immense contributions, small-scale coastal and ocean fishing communities in Asia and the Pacific face a deepening constellation of structural threats. The industrial expansion of commercial fishing fleets — frequently operating under distant-water fishing arrangements and benefiting from state subsidies — has depleted coastal fish stocks upon which small-scale fishers depend, while simultaneously encroaching on traditional fishing grounds through practices ranging from illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing to legitimate but ecologically destructive bottom-trawling. In Southeast Asian coastal communities, declining fish biomass driven by overfishing and habitat degradation has directly undermined household food security and income, with a political economy analysis of the region’s coastal transitions revealing how newer maritime zone developments — including industrial aquaculture, land reclamation, special economic zones, and tourism infrastructure — are systematically displacing traditional fishing livelihoods (Bennett et al., 2022). In Thailand, overfishing and illegal practices have depleted coastal fish populations even as communities confront destructive industrial mega-projects; across Sri Lanka and India, repeated maritime incidents have caused severe environmental damage and long-term social and economic distress (Greenpeace, 2025).

Climate change presents an escalating structural threat to the region’s small-scale marine fishing communities. Environmental stressors—including sea-level rise, ocean warming, and reef degradation—are destabilizing the ecosystems essential for food security and livelihoods. In the Pacific Islands, where fishing is central to cultural identity, these disruptions pose an existential threat to both nutrition and cultural survival (SPC FAME, 2023). National strategies must urgently integrate small-scale fisheries by prioritizing co-management, customary rights, and climate adaptation measures (FAO/SEAFDEC, 2025).

Gender inequality is a structural cornerstone of the small-scale fisheries (SSF) sector. While women comprise 40% of the Asia-Pacific SSF workforce—primarily in post-harvest roles—they are systematically excluded from governance and financial resources (FAO, 2025). In the Pacific, subsistence fishing generates double the community income of commercial sectors, yet remains marginalized in policy frameworks (ICES, 2023). Approximately two-thirds of catch from small-scale fisheries in surveyed countries comes from fishers with no formal rights to participate in resource management and decision-making processes, a governance deficit that leaves communities structurally vulnerable to displacement by industrial and commercial interests (Franz et al., 2025). The conditions of migrant fishers — particularly those employed on distant-water and industrial vessels — frequently include forced labour, debt bondage, and severe restriction of movement, echoing the exploitation documented in plantation agriculture (ILO, 2024). Confronting the food security crisis of Asia and the Pacific therefore requires extending the political economy of agrarian transformation to the blue economy, ensuring that small-scale fishing communities are recognized as rights-holders in coastal and marine governance, and protected from the predatory expansion of industrial fishing capital

9. Conclusion

The evidence assembled in this article makes clear that persistent hunger and food insecurity in Asia and the Pacific are not the result of insufficient agricultural production. They are the product of a deeply unjust agrifood system — one shaped by colonial dispossession, Green Revolution technocracy, neoliberal restructuring, corporate capture, and the systematic marginalization of those who produce the region’s food. Smallholder farmers, small-scale fishing communities, women, youth, and migrant workers collectively bear the costs of a system organized to extract value upward to transnational agribusiness while transferring risk downward to the most vulnerable. The emerging crises of antimicrobial resistance and ocean ecosystem degradation — both substantially products of industrial agriculture and industrial fishing — add urgent new dimensions to a food security challenge already of historic proportions.

Confronting hunger in Asia requires dismantling the production-centric, corporate-led paradigm and building a political economy of transformation grounded in food sovereignty, agroecological practice, equitable land and water rights, democratic governance of the global agrifood system, and recognition of the rights of small-scale fishing communities as stewards of the blue commons. It requires enforceable international standards on agrochemicals, veterinary antibiotics, and fishing practices that close the double standards currently exploited by transnational corporations operating in regulatory environments far weaker than those in their home countries. And it requires, above all, the political will to address the structural drivers of hunger — inequality, poverty, dispossession, and the concentration of corporate power — rather than retreating endlessly to technical fixes that leave the underlying architecture of injustice intact.

References

Amnesty International. (2016). The great palm oil scandal: Labour abuses behind big brand names. Amnesty International.

Asian Development Bank. (2020). The future of rural youth in Asia and the Pacific. ADB.

Bennett, N. J., et al. (2022). Coastal transitions: Small-scale fisheries, livelihoods, and maritime zone developments in Southeast Asia. Ocean & Coastal Management, 220, 106080.

Bernstein, H. (2016). Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism. Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3), 611–647.

Borras, S. M., & Franco, J. C. (2012). Global land grabbing and trajectories of agrarian change. Journal of Agrarian Change, 12(1), 34–59.

Burch, D., & Lawrence, G. (2009). Towards a third food regime. Agriculture and Human Values, 26(4), 267–279.

Cassman, K. G. (1999). Ecological intensification of cereal production systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96(11), 5952–5959.

Conway, G. (2012). One billion hungry: Can we feed the world? Cornell University Press.

ETC Group. (2020). Who will feed us? The industrial food chain vs. the peasant food web. ETC Group.

FAO. (2021). The state of the world’s land and water resources. FAO.

FAO. (2022). Contract farming and inclusive value chains. FAO.

FAO. (2023). The state of food and agriculture 2023: Revealing the true cost of food. FAO.

FAO. (2024). FAO statistical yearbook 2024: World food and agriculture. FAO.

FAO. (2024). Tackling antimicrobial resistance in food and agriculture. FAO.

FAO. (2025). Antimicrobial Resistance Action Plan. FAO. https://www.fao.org/antimicrobial-resistance/en/

FAO/IFAD/UNEP/WFP/WHO. (2025). The state of food security and nutrition in Asia and the Pacific 2025: Accelerating agrifood systems transformation for food security and better nutrition. FAO.

FAO/IFAD/WFP. (2023). The state of food insecurity in the world 2023. FAO.

FAO/SEAFDEC. (2025). Regional workshop on the ten-year anniversary of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries: Bangkok, March 2025. FAO.

FAO/WFP. (2025). Hunger Hotspots: FAO–WFP early warnings on acute food insecurity, November 2025 to May 2026 outlook. FAO/WFP. https://doi.org/10.4060/cd7310en

Franz, N., et al. (Illuminating Hidden Harvests Initiative). (2025). Illuminating the multidimensional contributions of small-scale fisheries. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08448-z

Ghosh, J. (2010). The unnatural coupling: Food and global finance. Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(1), 72–86.

Global Hunger Index. (2024). Global hunger index report 2024. Welthungerhilfe & Concern Worldwide.

GRAIN. (2021). Corporate control over seeds and food systems. GRAIN Briefing.

Greenpeace Southeast Asia. (2025). World Fisheries Day: Championing the communities who keep our oceans alive. Greenpeace.

High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE). (2019). Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems. FAO.

IAASTD. (2009). Agriculture at a crossroads: Global report. Island Press.

ICES Journal of Marine Science. (2023). Decadal characteristics of small-scale fishing livelihoods in 13 Pacific Island countries and territories. ICES.

IFPRI. (2023). Global food policy report 2023. International Food Policy Research Institute.

ILO. (2020). Child labour: Global estimates 2020, trends and the road forward. ILO.

ILO. (2022). World employment and social outlook: Trends 2022. ILO.

ILO. (2024). Labour migration in Asia: Trends and policy issues. ILO.

Inocencio, A., et al. (2023). Double standards: EU pesticide exports and their impacts in Asia. PANAP/PAN Europe.

IPBES. (2019). Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services. IPBES Secretariat.

Lobell, D. B., et al. (2009). Prioritizing climate change adaptation needs for food security in 2030. Science, 319(5863), 607–610.

McMichael, P. (2013). Food regimes and agrarian questions. Fernwood Publishing.

Naghavi, M., et al. (2024). Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance 1990–2021: a systematic analysis with forecasts to 2050. The Lancet, 404(10459), 1199–1226.

PANAP (Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific). (2024). Highly hazardous pesticides in Asian farming communities. PANAP.

Patel, R. (2013). The long green revolution. Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1), 1–63.

Pingali, P. L. (2012). Green revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(31), 12302–12308.

Prowse, M. (2012). Contract farming in developing countries: A review. Agence Française de Développement.

Reardon, T., & Timmer, C. P. (2012). The economics of the food system revolution. Annual Review of Resource Economics, 4, 225–264.

ReAct. (2026). Antibiotic resistance and aquaculture: Why it matters for One Health. ReAct Group. https://www.reactgroup.org

Reverter, M., et al. (2020). Aquaculture at the crossroads of global warming and antimicrobial resistance. Nature Communications, 11, 1870.

Schar, D., et al. (2020). Global trends in antimicrobial use in aquaculture. Scientific Reports, 10, 21878.

Schar, D., et al. (2021). Twenty-year trends in antimicrobial resistance from aquaculture and fisheries in Asia. Nature Communications, 12, 5393.

Shiva, V. (1991). The violence of the green revolution. Zed Books.

Singh, S. (2020). Agricultural crisis in Punjab: A critical review. Economic and Political Weekly, 55(12), 34–42.

SPC FAME Division. (2023). Livelihoods and food security in Pacific small-scale fisheries. Pacific Community.

Suyamud, B., et al. (2024). Antimicrobial resistance in aquaculture: Occurrence and strategies in Southeast Asia. Science of the Total Environment.

Third World Network. (2009). Pesticide use and rice yields in Thailand. TWN Briefing Paper.

Third World Network. (2024). Smallholder farmers and global food systems: A structural analysis. TWN.

UN-Habitat. (2015). Land and housing rights in Asia and the Pacific. UN-Habitat.

UNCTAD. (2021). Trade and development report 2021: From recovery to resilience. UNCTAD.

UNEP. (2020). Preventing the next pandemic: Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission. UNEP.

UNGA. (2024). Political declaration of the high-level meeting on antimicrobial resistance — resolution A/79/L.5. United Nations General Assembly.

Van Boeckel, T. P., et al. (2015). Global trends in antimicrobial use in food animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(18), 5649–5654.

Via Campesina. (2021). Food sovereignty: A manifesto for the future of our planet. Via Campesina International.

Wallace, R. G., et al. (2020). Did neoliberal globalization create the conditions for the COVID-19 pandemic? Monthly Review, 72(1).

WHO/FAO/UNEP/WOAH (Quadripartite). (2022). Implementing the global action plan on antimicrobial resistance: First quadripartite biennial report. WHO.

WOAH. (2025). World AMR Awareness Week 2025: Asia-Pacific activities. World Organisation for Animal Health. https://rr-asia.woah.org

World Bank. (2022). Fertilizer markets and the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. World Bank Group.

World Bank. (2023). Poverty and inequality platform report 2023. World Bank.

World Food Programme. (2020). The state of food security and nutrition in the world 2020. WFP.

WFP. (2026). WFP 2026 Global Outlook. Rome: WFP.

World Wildlife Fund. (2021). Driven to waste: The global impact of food loss and waste on farms. WWF.