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The balance of food sustainability and national security of Southeast Asia hangs on a tiny white grain.  Rice is the daily staple of 3.5 billion people globally, providing about one-fifth of their calorie needs. It is the main food crop in Asia, which includes the world’s ...

Southeast Asia was once largely covered in dense rainforests, but intense forest clearing over the past decades has denuded much of the tropical region of its forest cover. On the island of Borneo, for instance, 5.9 million hectares of trees were lost between 2004 and 2017 to logging, ...

Developing Asia’s economy will rebound faster this year than previously estimated, as nations tread diverging recovery paths, according to the Asian Development Bank. Southeast Asia’s forecast was lowered to 4.4% growth this year amid reduced projections for Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The region’s gross domestic product ...

As Myanmar’s dark era of junta rule began winding down in 2011 with the bold reforms initiated by the quiet ex-general, President Thein Sein, other events happening across Southeast Asia gave reformists hope this was not an isolated instance of democratic progress.   That year, Yingluck Shinawatra ...

The border between Thailand and Myanmar is more than 1,500 miles long, much of it thickly forested. Myanmar has suffered runaway transmission of the coronavirus. Thailand, so far, has not. But over the past couple of weeks, at least 19 Covid-19 cases in Thailand have been ...

A study by J Poore and T Nemecek titled, ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers,’ published by the University of Oxford revealed that food production is responsible for 26 percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, contributing to global warming. The study showed ...

Every two years, the World Wide Fund for Nature publishes a report that sums up the state of the world’s wildlife based on the monitoring of its projects around the world. The latest WWF report, titled the “Living Planet Report,” describes stunning declines in biodiversity caused ...

Over the past several weeks, parts of Southeast Asia have been pummeled by severe storms. Widespread flooding across the region, especially in Vietnam, left hundreds of thousands of residents temporarily displaced. In Vietnam alone, at least 90,000 people were forced from their homes during the first several weeks ...

The U.S. government aims to take another bite out of Chinese influence in Southeast Asia with a partnership to aid five countries that traditionally tap Beijing for help, experts in the region say. The Mekong-U.S. Partnership, formed September 11, will give Washington more clout in Cambodia, ...

‘A global reset”, “a sick planet”, “health security” are huge, heavy phrases that have been swirling in the global psyche for most of this Covid-19-marked year. They speak of the “must-do-something” type of issues that weigh on the minds of people everywhere, including in Southeast ...