- Lack of an integrated risk management system limits regen ag adoption.
- Scaling remains constrained by weak institutional support, financing and farmer aggregation.
- Regulatory barriers remain a key challenge, requiring stronger government action.
Professor Paul Teng, a visiting senior fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, said the ASEAN region has made significant progress, including developing a regional policy framework and implementation plan for regenerative agriculture.
However, he said it still lacks the institutional architecture needed to bring stakeholders together and support large-scale implementation.
He argued that policy alone will not be enough without mechanisms capable of coordinating investment, regulation and risk-sharing across the agricultural system.
“What we’re lacking right now is a kind of risk management architecture that enables all the stakeholders to come together,” Teng said during a regenerative agriculture forum at the World Agri Food Innovation (WAFI) Conference in Pinggu, Beijing, in September.
“It’s a real problem that we’re facing, especially in South East Asia, with individual risk management strategies for specific problems, whether it’s crop loss, insurance and so on, but nothing is integrated.”
The next step?
Even with supportive policies, the challenge now is translating them into action, including identifying financing mechanisms, investment opportunities and pathways to scale adoption beyond pilot projects.
“I think there’s a lot of R&D going on in universities and the corporate sector. But what do you do as the next step? We’re now looking at policies that enable scaling up,” said Teng.
A key obstacle is the structure of SEA’s fragmented agricultural sector, which makes it difficult to reach farmers and scale up effectively.
According to Teng, the region is home to roughly 100 million farmers, a majority of whom are smallholders.
“So what’s an obvious approach? Aggregation. But right now, we don’t see many good examples of policies or even financial incentives to allow aggregation to occur. We need to move from pilots to aggregated systems, either at the landscape level or the ecosystem level. To do that, you need to have all the components in place. First of all, the policy, the instruments, the guidelines, and regulations that allow it,” said Teng.
Regulatory hurdles add to challenges
Teng also identified regulatory barriers as a major obstacle to scaling regenerative agriculture.
For instance, he pointed out that most countries lack regulations to facilitate and govern the use of biological inputs.
“We don’t even have regulations to move fresh farmyard manure across boundaries because it contains living organisms,” said Teng.
Such regulatory constraints illustrate what Teng described as a broader challenge facing regenerative agriculture.
“It’s not a single problem. It’s a mixture of problems.”
Teng believes governments will need to play the leading role in driving the transition towards regenerative agriculture, particularly in developing economies.
“I think government has to be a first mover in this, because in many developing countries, government policy sets the stage for everything else.”