Editor’s Note
by Siu Tzyy Wei, Lead Editor - Maritime Crescent Desk
This week’s spread is not just about food security, it’s about politics, faith and survival. For appetisers, Brunei is working to carve out its place in the agrifood sector, using the stage of the FAO Regional Conference to signal its ambitions for its livelihood beyond oil and gas.
For the entree, Malaysia’s pig farming industry sits on a smoking bed of cultural sensitivities, environmental pressures and recurring disease outbreaks, reminding us how fragile supply chains can be when faith and policy are served simultaneously.
As the last course, ASEAN is working the margins of a system already in decline. With great powers paralysed, the bloc’s value lies in controlling text, shaping safeguards and extracting incremental gains before consensus collapses entirely.
Together, these stories show that Southeast Asia’s future is not guaranteed. Securing a spot at the buffet means navigating crises, balancing tradition with modernization, holding together the systems that keep both supply and stability from unravelling, and ensuring that stomachs are filled not just today, but also tomorrow. There may be no second helpings - except the urgency to get it right from this point forth.
Brunei Darussalam 🇧🇳
Brunei’s Agrifood Push
by Syimah Johari, in Bandar Seri Begawan
From 20th to 24th April 2026, Brunei hosted the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)’s 38th Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific for the first time. As the host, the sultanate sought opportunities to highlight its cultural heritage, local cuisine and progress on the multilateral stage. Beyond its ceremonial significance, the regional conference was also a timely opportunity for the country to position its agrifood sector on that same stage, showcasing not only its active goals and pursuits towards economic diversification, but also proving itself as a capable and reliable regional partner in food security.
Given the country’s ongoing reliance on oil and gas, the agrifood industry has been identified as one of the five key pursuits for its foreseeable economic future - a growing emphasis closely tied to broader concerns around food security. Just like many Southeast Asian countries, Brunei’s food security remains significantly dependent on food imports; however, global disruptions – including pandemics, geopolitical conflicts and supply chain challenges have only exposed the vulnerability of existing systems. For a small state like Brunei, such pressures are immediately and exponentially felt, thus fueling the urgency to secure its agrifood sector as a strategically necessary economic priority. In this context, hosting the FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific places Brunei represents a significant opportunity to achieve what it has set out to achieve.
Brunei’s agrifood sector is not starting from scratch. A sturdy base of local producers and small and medium-sized enterprises reflects ongoing development, alongside increasing recognition of the sector as a national priority in line with broader diversification efforts. This gradual expansion is also evident in continued cross-border trade, with exports to Sabah and Sarawak reaching BND 0.34 million between 2023 and 2025. While arguably modest, this still reflects a sector that has been steadily taking longer runs to achieve its grand goal of economic growth beyond oil and gas.
With food security highlighted as a growing global priority, the conference facilitated greater cooperation among participating countries and reinforced the importance of strengthening agrifood systems in the face of evolving global challenges. For a country whose survival is notoriously reliant on natural resources that many wish to have, Brunei’s growing focus on agrifood reflects a greater urgency to address its finite reality. In a time where supply chains are struggling to withhold the pressures pushed by post-pandemic socioeconomic stratifications and geopolitical crises like the US-Iran war, hosting the FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific is not just about being part of the conversation, but a pursuit of securing long-term survival, stability and prosperity. While Brunei has successfully engineered a platform for such conversations to emerge with greater urgency, the next step lies in ensuring that multilateral conversations do not succumb into yet another political echo chamber, and instead transform into physical, workable solutions for a shared future.
Syimah is a graduate of King’s College London with a BA in International Relations. With a strong focus on diplomacy, regional cooperation, and development policy, she is passionate about contributing to meaningful change through public service. Currently, she is involved in poverty alleviation work through a local NGO.
Malaysia 🇲🇾
Pigs, Pandemics, and Policy
by Edrina Lisa Ozaidi, in WP Kuala Lumpur
In a multicultural Malaysia, the Chinese community have long dominated pig farming to meet domestic pork demand. Today, the industry finds itself intersected between market demands, environmental challenges and deep-rooted cultural sensitivities.
Islam is the official religion practised by the majority Malay-Muslim population, making up around 63.5% of Malaysians. In the Holy Quran, Al-Baqarah 2:173 declares pork haram (forbidden) for Muslims; avoiding pork is thus fundamentally viewed as a submission to divine command.
While non-Muslims retain the right to raise, buy and sell pigs as well as consume pork, the religious taboo has shaped public discourse, policy and zoning decisions in ways that affect the entire sector. Current political discourse maintains that issues around pig farming centre on farm management, biosecurity and environmental compliance rather than faith itself.
Amplified media coverage often isolates the issue.
Media coverage often amplifies the industry’s key problems on the grounds of pollution. Compared to other livestock, pigs produce more liquid-like wastewater, causing pipes to churn out pig waste into muddy slurry pits. In the foreground, concrete housing and defunct oil palm plantations line up the blackish river.
These are inherent critiques of pig farming, yet underlying factors — fragmented land use, urban sprawl encroaching on older farms, and inconsistent zoning — receive less attention.
Historical trauma colours much of the narrative.
From 1998 to 1999, the Nipah virus spread from fruit bats to pigs and then to humans, killing 105 people and led to the culling of nearly 40–50% of the national herd at the time.
The drastic measure contained the zoonotic disease, but severely impacted the billion-ringgit industry as a biosecurity scar.
Today, the sector faces a recurring crisis: African Swine Fever (ASF)
Since 2021, ASF has repeated the culling of tens of thousands of pigs, further eroding the supply chain and driving up pork prices, hitting consumers and small operators hardest.
The industry finds itself in a systemic trap.
Small-scale farms, often lacking secure land titles or capital, struggle to afford the shift to “closed-house systems” with advanced wastewater treatment and biosecurity measures.
Setting up even one modern closed-house building can cost around RM1 million, with full modernisation running RM15,000–30,000 per sow - a price that leaves smaller companies vulnerable to the next outbreak and/or regulatory crackdown.
Because Muslim dominant state governments hold primary authority over land zoning and licensing, some are pushing for farm centralisation or mandatory modernisation, while others grapple with proximity issues as residential areas expanding toward existing operations.
Federal efforts, also dominated by political Islam, include incentives like tax breaks for closed systems, but implementation varies and long-term supply chain planning remains fragmented.
A more integrated overhaul is needed.
Malaysia’s pork industry needs to move beyond cycles of crisis and cull.
From clearer zoning that separates farms from sensitive areas, affordable modernisation support for smaller operators, stronger biosecurity infrastructure, to transparent public communication, this is not merely an agricultural story.
A multicultural country navigating increasing religious influence in public life, the future of pig farming tests how Malaysia balances economic livelihoods, environmental sustainability, food security and social harmony.
Edrina is a communications professional with a background in international relations. She holds a degree from the University of Nottingham Malaysia and has worked across public relations and social media for organizations in the development, education, and corporate sectors. Her work focuses on crafting narratives around regional affairs and strengthening media engagement across Southeast Asia.
Indonesia 🇮🇩
The Quiet Leverage Washington Keeps Underestimating
by Hree Putri Samudra, in Jakarta
When Ambassador Do Hung Viet banged the gavel on 27 April to open the Eleventh NPT Review Conference, he walked into the worst room any chair has inherited in the treaty’s fifty-six years. New START lapsed in February and nobody bothered to replace it. Operation Epic Fury had already turned much of Iran’s nuclear estate into gravel, and a withdrawal bill was making the rounds in the Majlis. Paris, never one to read the room, had pulled eight European capitals under its “dissuasion avancée” umbrella, while Riyadh was reportedly being handed enrichment rights in exchange for staying useful. The Secretary-General opened with funeral diction, telling delegates that “arms control is dying”. In that mess, ASEAN’s leverage is not decorative. It is structural, and Washington keeps refusing to see it.
Most Western capitals are reading Vietnam’s presidency as a polite turn at the rostrum, courtesy of a Non-Aligned Movement nomination, which is exactly the misjudgement that costs final documents. With the P5 in pieces, Moscow and Beijing visibly closing ranks against the P3, and not a single P5 consultation paper on the table for the first time anyone in the secretariat can remember, the Vietnamese chair is the only person in the building still holding a working steering wheel. Hanoi’s drafters know it. They can lift paragraphs from the 2022 Chair’s draft on risk reduction and Article VI benchmarks, the ones Moscow signed off on before the Ukraine carve-out detonated the floor, and slip them back into circulation. That is text control, and text control is how these conferences are actually won.
ASEAN brings three things to that desk it routinely undersells. The SEANWFZ Treaty remains the only nuclear-weapon-free zone whose protocol the P5 has refused to sign, with the same U.S. reservations on transit and continental shelf and the same French squeamishness on negative security assurances sitting on the table since 1995, despite a 2016 P5 communiqué pledging readiness to sign “at the soonest possible time”. More importantly, the bloc delivered early, disciplined support for the TPNW, with Thailand ratifying on opening day in 2017, without tearing itself in half, a trick the New Agenda Coalition has never quite pulled off. And the Philippine ASEAN chairmanship under “Navigating Our Future, Together” gives Vietnam the political cover to operate in New York without looking exposed.
For ASEAN, the internal mess most outsiders write off as paralysis is the actual point. Jakarta still does activist disarmament, Kuala Lumpur owns the humanitarian file, and Singapore guards safeguards and IAEA technical credibility, even as it stays pointedly outside the TPNW because rules-based pragmatism has its limits when alliance partners are watching. Hanoi works the NAM nomination while keeping back channels warm in every P5 capital, Manila quietly squares EDCA basing with its non-proliferation commitments, and Bangkok keeps ASEANTOM’s plumbing from rusting. That spread is what lets the bloc talk to nuclear-armed states and abolitionists in the same breath without sounding ridiculous to either.
Even so, the ceiling deserves to be named. Phnom Penh will not let through anything Beijing finds inconvenient, and Vientiane will quietly back it up, which means coordinated ASEAN language on AUKUS Pillar I or on a Chinese arsenal moving past six hundred warheads is simply not happening. What ASEAN can do is convert that silence into currency and spend it on the SEANWFZ Protocol and on safeguards.
Naval propulsion is where that trade gets serious. The AUKUS Article 14 arrangement has handed Brasília’s PROSUB programme the template it had been waiting for, and Tehran’s delegation is reading every comma. Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur have already aired their unease in the IAEA Board through successive 2024 governors’ interventions without forcing a vote, and that restraint is exactly the raw material Vietnamese drafting can convert into language tightening Article 14 implementation without naming AUKUS, the only formulation Canberra and Beijing both swallow.
In New York, the DPRK punctuated the week by firing its seventh missile test of the year, cluster-warhead Hwasong-11s arcing east while delegates argued procedure, and Pyongyang’s empty seat is precisely why NNWS unity is hardening into something the P5 cannot wave away. ASEAN cannot move that file. It can still move three others, the P5 ratification timetable for the SEANWFZ Protocol, naval propulsion safeguards language that stops the AUKUS template from being copy-pasted, and a chair’s summary that keeps the disarmament pillar breathing if consensus dies on the floor. Two consecutive failed RevCons have already pushed NNWS unity to its highest pitch since 2003. ASEAN is not here to save the treaty, only to bank what it can before the architecture goes.
Hree is a Policy Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network (APLN) where she leads research and policy interventions on Indo-Pacific nuclear security and AI governance. She previously served as a Research Fellow at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) and has managed multi-country security portfolios across all 10 ASEAN member states. Her work examines the intersection of emerging technologies, strategic stability, and the evolution of regional security architectures. She specializes in institutional risk assessment and the application of open-source intelligence (OSINT) for strategic monitoring. Her current research focuses on how technological shifts such as AI and advanced verification tools reshape escalation dynamics and multilateral cooperation in a multipolar world.
Editorial Deadline 25/04/2026 11:59 PM (UTC +8)
my only reflection from a planning lens, this doesn’t feel like crisis management anymore. it’s more about whether we’re actually building systems that can absorb shocks or still stuck in patchwork mode every time something breaks.
because if supply chains can fall apart over culture + policy tension and regional coordination is getting weaker, then the real question isn’t “can ASEAN survive?” but can it still move fast enough when it really matters?
overall, really strong piece. feels less like a briefing, more like a quiet warning