Policy Institute

Indonesia faces pronounced land-use challenges. The sprawling archipelagic state must deal with the legacies of short-sighted land conversions, the need to pursue foreign investment, capital growth and employment generation through profitable land intensive industries, and the rising food demands of a growing and increasingly urban population. Moreover, Indonesia must pursue these already daunting objectives without overly compromising its endowment of forest resources; which provide a range of valuable services both domestically and internationally.

The human nutrition calculus has improved markedly in the AsiaPacific over the past half century. Green Revolution technologies and the effectiveness of the high level of priority given to food sector issues during the latter half of the 20th century have brought the region from the precipice of acute food insecurity to levels at which far fewer citizens endemically lack access to sufficient and adequately nutritious foods (Hazell and Haddad, 2001; Hazell, 2009). Asian wheat, rice and maize yields grew at annual rates of 5.43, 3.25 and 4.62 per cent respectively between 1967 and 1982, primarily as the result of the planting of fastergrowing varieties, access to more effective and widely used irrigation systems and greater profitability levels for

Rice is the most politicized agricultural commodity in Southeast Asia. States throughout the region view maintaining security in rice supplies as a strategic imperative, while political actors within these states see opportunities to galvanize support by promising consistently available and affordable rice. Given the varied political and agricultural systems of Southeast Asia, these dynamics play out in multiple and differentiated ways. However, an increasingly binding characteristic of rice management systems throughout the region is a focus on domestic policies and trepidation about being overly vulnerable to external events and decisions. These trends have become more pronounced since the rice price volatilities of 2007-2008, which, despite leading to calls for more open rice trading approaches, have driven countries towards more insular rice policy strategies.

The Singapore National Environment Agency announced in late August that it will implement a range of new measures to improve national air quality standards by 2020. These measures largely concern domestic sources of air pollution such as transportation and industry, but will also address international causes of poor air quality including transboundary haze (NEA, 2012).