ASEAN Agriculture and Food beyond 2015: Cooperation and Investment for Sustainable Agriculture

CropLife Asia’s Executive Director, Dr Tan Siang Hee, said, "One of opportunities for ASEAN to create great leaps in developing sustainable agriculture. That is a harmonised legal institutional framework for plant protection products.”

 

Mr Juan Farinati, Vice President of Monsanto Asia Pacific, agreed that innovation and creativity will help ASEAN farmers, agricultural chains and food chains to improve the livelihoods of farmers. Output will be at least 15 percent more than the current output.

 

Dr Vu Tien Loc, President of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), agreed that there is a need to find out new production methods to raise productivity and quality of agricultural products and improve livelihoods of farmers on the one hand and reduce waste and impacts from agricultural environment. Businesses will act as nuclei to accelerate sustainable agricultural development by applying initiatives, production models and agricultural businesses, adopting high-tech agriculture, and consolidating farmer relations in value links.

 

VCCI is currently coordinating with the UN Global Compact to develop and deploy the Integrated Sustainable Agriculture Programme (ISAP) in September 2015. In this programme, VCCI will mobilise and support farmers and small agribusinesses in Vietnam to apply the Food and Agriculture Business (FAB) Principles of the UN Global Compact to expand sustainable farming and agribusiness models.

 

At the forum, some participants produced actionable recommendations for increasing the supply of sustainably-produced tea, rice, coffee, aquaculture, dairy and maize, and discussed innovative approaches and collaboration to help improve agricultural productivity which employs up to 40 percent of the workforce.