A growing need for transformative innovations

The East Asia region’s agriculture and food systems have come under growing pressure to address the economic, environmental, and health-related weaknesses associated with expanding and intensifying production. With economic change, the region’s agri-food systems face increasing pressure to meet demand for more food—focusing on nutrition, safety, and convenience. A long-standing emphasis on raising production has had negative effects on the environment, however, contributing to lower agricultural productivity, environmental degradation, zoonoses, and impairment of human health. The COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis, with its widespread effects on lives and livelihoods, food security, and agri-food system trade, is a hard reminder of the prevailing demand- and supply-side constraints affecting the region’s food systems. Several policy and institutional shortcomings, as described in the report and summarized below, limit the sector’s ability to invest in and innovate for improved productivity, safety, and sustainability.

Harnessing a new generation of agricultural innovation will be critical to transforming agri-food systems in developing East Asia. Although increased productivity remains an important goal, several transformative innovations, as discussed in the report, hold great potential to deliver a “triple win,” that is, to enhance productivity, increase food safety and nutrition, and improve environmental sustainability.

• Innovations supporting agricultural production—for example, biotechnology, urban farming, precision agriculture, climate-smart agriculture, along with e-services—have already demonstrated great potential not only to improve productivity but also to increase agri-food systems’ sustainability and resilience to external shocks. • Innovations along the food chain, including food safety diagnostics, blockchain, the Internet of Things, and e-commerce, have the potential to increase efficiency and food safety and improve health outcomes through improved traceability, reduced food loss and waste, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

• Innovations related to food consumption and nutrition, including alternative food sources, can improve health outcomes and, in some cases, enhance environmental sustainability and efficiency.

However, the feasibility of adopting transformative innovations is highly context specific, both across and within countries. The ability of farmers and firms to adopt such innovations is affected by the policy incentives that influence the cost of technology, access to finance, land ownership, information and communication technology (ICT) connectivity, and the level of farmers’ and firms’ knowledge and skills.

Developing East Asian countries exhibit different levels of preparedness for adopting or creating transformative innovations. The ability to adapt, utilize, or create new transformative innovations varies by each country’s level of science, technology, and innovation (STI) capacity, as well as by the ease with which the innovations can be adopted in a given agri-food system context. The frontrunners in nearly all aspects of transformative innovation are the region’s uppermiddle-income countries—China, Malaysia, and Thailand—which have relatively high STI and adoption capacity. Several large lower-middle-income countries, including Indonesia, the philippines, and Vietnam, are well positioned to develop or adopt traditional and new innovations (for example, e-services, climate-smart agriculture, and genetically modified [gM] crops), although their capacity to address traceability, food safety, and sophisticated nutrition innovations is still relatively underdeveloped. Other countries in the region still need to build their STI capacity, but they have the capacity in the short term to increase adoption of some traditional and existing transformative innovations, such as less advanced and less costly e-services, urban agriculture, and precision agriculture.

An agricultural innovation systems (AIS) approach can be instrumental in building countries’ STI capacity and farmers’ and firms’ ability to adopt and implement transformative innovations. An AIS approach can support existing efforts to transform agri-food systems by facilitating more integrated approaches, which can help policy makers identify key constraints to innovation across the agri-food system, as well as the policies and resources needed to alleviate them. It can enable them to combine traditional interventions (support for mostly public research and development [r&D], extension, and education) more effectively with complementary interventions—such as professional skills, co-innovation, private sector innovation, and policy, regulatory, and institutional conditions—needed to support greater innovation. promoting innovations in the agri-food sector requires both short- and longer-term measures to strengthen each country’s AIS. In the short term, it will be important to reform policies and institutional arrangements to strengthen the enabling environment for agri-food sector innovation and to guide longer-term investments in innovation capacity. Where countries face resource or capacity constraints, short-term measures can begin selectively, focusing on strengthening innovation capacity in specific segments of the agri-food sector or on specific value chains. Selective measures could include, for example, training for firms and farms on produce quality and food safety standards, facilitation of public-private partnerships (ppps) for applied r&D and e-extension, and targeted infrastructure investments. longer-term measures to build AIS to enable transformative innovations will require strengthening human capital across the agri-food system. The short- and long-term strategies can be enacted in parallel and should complement each other. For instance, targeted short-term