New Delhi and the 10-nation bloc chart a food-security roadmap through 2030, but a modest track record raises questions about whether the pledges will reach the smallholders they name.
NEW DELHI— India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations concluded the 9th ASEAN-India Ministerial Meeting on Agriculture and Forestry on September 9, setting the stage for a new five-year cooperation plan that commits both sides to “supporting smallholders and vulnerable groups” against a backdrop of climate shocks and volatile input prices.
The meeting, co-chaired by the Philippines Agriculture Secretary Francisco P. Tiu Laurel and India’s Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, following a technical working group meeting the previous day, looked ahead to the formal adoption of the ASEAN-India Medium-Term Plan of Action for Cooperation in Agriculture and Forestry 2026–2030. Agricultural cooperation now sits within the ASEAN-India Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, the highest tier of ties between the two sides since India’s engagement with the bloc began as a sectoral dialogue partnership in 1992.
Officials flagged a familiar list of pressures squeezing farm households on both sides: climate extremes, geopolitical tensions, and volatility in fertiliser, seed and energy prices. Chouhan, writing on the sidelines of the meeting, framed the stakes in personal terms: “farmers from India and ASEAN can easily understand each other’s challenges.” He pointed to small landholdings, costly machinery, erratic weather, weak market access, and young people turning away from farming as concerns shared across the region. It echoes remarks he made three months earlier, chairing a BRICS agriculture ministers’ meeting in Indore, where he argued that if small farmers become stronger, global food security follows — a formulation now repeated in a different regional forum. In India, government data put small and marginal holdings at nearly 87 percent of all farms. This scale helps explain why the “smallholder” language is more than just diplomatic boilerplate.
The new plan builds on a 2021–2025 programme whose tangible output was modest relative to that scale: a joint leaders’ statement on strengthening food security and nutrition in response to crises, two ASEAN-India Millets Festivals in Jakarta and New Delhi in 2023 promoting climate-resilient crops, and a fellowship scheme launched in 2024 offering 50 Master’s scholarships over five years to students from ASEAN’s member states. Peer-reviewed research published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems has found that Southeast Asian smallholders remain structurally more exposed to climate shocks than larger producers, owing to limited access to resources and adaptive capacity — a gap between stated intent and delivered support that recurs across such frameworks.
The proposed 2026–2030 plan organises cooperation around four pillars: policy dialogue and resilient value chains; institutional and digital innovation; joint research and capacity building; and farmer exchanges with inclusive rural enterprise. Artificial intelligence and Internet of Things tools are proposed for weather advisories, pest surveillance and precision farming. Independent research on the region’s smallholders has repeatedly flagged the risk that such tools favour better-resourced farms: limited connectivity, digital literacy and local-language support can leave the very farmers the plan names as priorities least able to use it.
The economic backdrop is significant: ASEAN-India goods trade reached $128 billion in the 2025–26 fiscal year, according to ASEAN Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn, who, in pre-recorded remarks, called for the partnership to deliver practical benefits for farmers and communities. On the sidelines, Chouhan held separate talks with Malaysia, Timor-Leste and Myanmar: the Myanmar talks yielded movement on a dairy and agricultural education agreement and trade in pulses and cotton.
At the same time, Timor-Leste — ASEAN’s newest and least-developed member — asked India to depute technical and scientific experts to help build its own agricultural research capacity. Senior officials must now convert the new plan into a detailed work programme with assigned agencies, timelines and funding sources. Whether that process turns Wednesday’s smallholder language into measurable change — rather than repeating a modest fellowship-and-festival record — will only be clear when ministers reconvene for the 10th AIMMAF in 2028.
Clear Cut Climate Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: September 11, 2026 19:30 IST
Written By: Yatharth Pathak
