In April 2016, OECD Ministers of Agriculture identified that the agriculture and food sector will not only have to respond to the opportunities of increasing demand for food and agriculture products in a sustainable way, but also have to adapt to climate change. To achieve this goal, agriculture and food policies would need to give farmers the means to develop practices that would at once ensure a greater resilience to risk, as well as to cope with more frequent and unpredictable weather-related shocks.

The exposure and vulnerability of the agricultural sector to weather-related disasters such as storms, droughts, or floods is increasing. Climate change is likely to exacerbate the extreme nature and frequency of such disasters, with potentially catastrophic impacts on the agricultural sector in several countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Four ASEAN countries are ranked among the countries most affected by weather‑related disasters worldwide due to their geographical location within the tropics: Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Their governments have tended to focus on response and recovery from successive disasters, but the recent milestone weather‑related disasters that have inflicted massive damage and losses to their agricultural sector, points to the need for greater prevention, mitigation and preparation measures.

This chapter summarises the findings and recommendations of Managing Weather-Related Disasters in Southeast Asian Agriculture. It emphasises the need for the reviewed countries to improve their disaster risk management institutions, and to strengthen their prevention and mitigation policies to reduce agriculture’s risks to weather-related disasters. It then outlines recommendations to improve preparedness, crisis management and recovery measures in these four countries and identifies three priority actions in each country.

This chapter provides evidence on the high exposure and vulnerability to weather‑related disasters of the agricultural sector of Southeast Asian countries. It then presents the relative importance of the agricultural sector in the economy of these countries. Finally, the chapter summarises the policy analysis framework used to review policy measures managing drought, flood and tropical storm risk in agriculture.

This chapter provides detailed evidence of the high exposure to weather-related risks in the agricultural sector in Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam.

This chapter provides an overview of the legal basis and institutions for disaster risk management and its relevant stakeholders in the four case study countries covered by this study: Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam. Prevention and mitigation measures to reduce risk exposure are reviewed, followed by an evaluation of strategies to anticipate risks that cannot be eliminated. Response measures to reduce the effects of a disaster in the short-term are then analysed. Finally, recovery measures to help the agricultural sector bounce back are reviewed.