Impact of EU-ASEAN trade liberalisation on food security in ASEAN

This thesis aims at estimating empirically the impact of EU-ASEAN trade liberalisation on food security in ASEAN with a specific focus on people who live below the international poverty line. The contributions obtained from this study are that this study investigates the projected food security situation in ASEAN countries after the EU-ASEAN trade liberalisation is implemented, taking the effects of non-tariff barrier elimination into account in order to compare the effects between the elimination of TBs only and the elimination of both TBs and NTBs for each ASEAN country. In addition, the combination of the GTAP model and the Food Security Assessment model is first introduced in this study. The results from the GTAP model indicate that the EU-ASEAN trade liberalisation can create production expansion for net food exporting countries such as Thailand and Vietnam while net food importing countries such as Malaysia and the Philippines are estimated to encounter contraction in food production and to depend on more imports. In addition, the elimination of both TBs and NTBs is expected to result in more positive effects than that of TBs elimination only; however, after both TBs and NTBs are eliminated, the Philippines is projected to experience negative effects due to a large decrease in rice imports. Another important issue is the low nutritional energy level obtained from food consumption by ASEAN people who live below the poverty line. This potential threat to food security generally occurring in the lower-income countries results from income inequality. In the Philippines and the group of other ASEAN countries including Brunei, Cambodia, Laos PDR and Myanmar, poverty rates are at the highest level, accounting for 26.5 and 26 percent respectively. These results translate into low purchasing power for lower income households. As a result, nutritional energy has been consumed by those people at a level below the minimum dietary energy requirement (MDER). Even though the free trade agreement is expected to increase their food consumption, the nutritional energy consumption level just rises over the MDER and it is still far from reaching the average dietary energy requirement (ADER). In other word, the consumption gap between people with good livelihoods and those in poverty is still wide.