Chapter 3. High exposure to weather-related risks in ASEAN countries

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.

    

3.1. The increasing exposure of ASEAN countries to agricultural water risks

Southeast Asia is one of the most exposed regions to weather-related disasters (Global Climate Risk Index, 2017). In many of these countries, the agricultural sector is bearing the brunt of the economic impact (FAO, 2015a). Tropical storms can provoke major damage to agriculture by destroying agriculture-related infrastructure or crops in fields. Likewise, flash floods can destroy crops in the field or sweep away livestock. Prolonged flooding can also end up drowning annual and perennial crops. Droughts can have a severe impact on a country's crop production but their impacts are also important on the livestock sector, which suffers nutritional impacts from lack of fodder (FAO, 2015a).

Due to their extended land mass covering several ecological and climatic tropical zones from north to south, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam can all find themselves in a situation where they have to cope at once with both excess water and lack of water, or in short sequence, in different parts of the country.

Climate change is likely to exacerbate the extreme nature of weather-related disasters, with major impact on the agricultural sector in ASEAN. Because of climate change, rainfall patterns will change significantly up to 2040. Tropical storms are likely to intensify by 10 to 20 percentage points from current levels up to 2050. Annual average temperatures in the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam are projected to increase by 4.8°C up to 2100, and the global average sea level could rise by 70 cm because of climate change (Cruz et al., 2007; ADB, 2009). All these local weather effects from climate change are likely to be compounded by the regular El Niño cycles affecting the region (Alano and Lee, 2016; FAO, 2015b). As a result, short-term crop failures and long-term production declines are more likely to occur. Droughts are expected to become more intense and more frequent. Given that droughts currently have the greatest negative effect of all weather-related disasters on ASEAN annual agricultural production, these developments could have a significant negative impact on regional production and farm household incomes. This worrying scenario is analysed in greater detail for the Philippines in Agricultural policies in the Philippines (OECD, 2017a).

This chapter analyses the risk exposure of the selected ASEAN case countries – Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam – to these weather-related events, and the damages and losses suffered in recent years. Table 3.1 presents a summary of data from various sources for a snapshot of the magnitude of the risk exposure of these four countries to weather-related disasters and damages caused to agriculture based on frequency data from the past two decades. It shows that three of the four countries studied have been hit by several disastrous floods every year on average in the past two decades, while Myanmar has had one disastrous flood nearly every year on average during the same period. The Philippines and Viet Nam have also witnessed an especially high frequency of disastrous typhoons in the last two decades. Furthermore, the damages and losses to agriculture from the most recent milestone weather-related disaster in the four countries have been important. In particular, the 2008 Nargis cyclone in Myanmar and the 2011 monsoon floods in Thailand had a significant impact on national rice paddy yields.1

3.2. Agriculture’s exposure and vulnerability to weather-related disasters in Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam

Myanmar suffers from high exposure to flood, cyclone and drought risk, which poses a key threat to the agricultural sector (Raitzer et al., 2015). As a heavy rainfall country, flooding is common (ADRC Myanmar, 2017; FAO, 2009). With its long coastline on the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal, cyclones are also frequent events. “Annually, about ten tropical cyclones and depressions form in the Bay of Bengal and out of them almost five become severe cyclones and cross the coasts of […] Myanmar” (Aye, 2014). Cyclone Nargis in 2008 was particularly severe. These events have negatively impacted the agricultural sector (Table 2.1).

The Philippines’ agricultural sector is also highly exposed to flood, typhoon and drought risk. Situated on the Pacific’s typhoon belt, the Philippines experiences 20 typhoons per year on average, approximately five of which are severe in a given year (ADRC Philippines, 2017). Most recently, Typhoons Haiyan (in 2013) and Ondoy and Pepeng (in 2009) were particularly damaging (FAO, 2015c; World Bank, 2011). “Damage to agricultural production in the Philippines [from such events] is substantial. Between 2006 and 2013, the FAO (2015a) estimates that total damage and loss in the agriculture sector amounted to USD 3.8 billion, arising from 78 natural disasters: two droughts, 24 floods, 50 tropical cyclones or tropical storms, one earthquake and one volcanic eruption. The majority of damage and losses (USD 3.1 billion) occurred in the crop subsector, with over 6 million ha of crops affected (FAO, 2015a)” (OECD, 2017a). High risk exposure is contributing to lower productivity growth in the Philippines’ agricultural sector relative to other countries in the region (OECD, 2017a). “Land use and yields are especially affected by El Niño cycles which are hard to predict and typically last between 14-22 months. La Niña cycles have the opposite effect: conditions are wetter than normal, intensifying monsoon rains and increasing the risk of flooding and mudslides” (OECD, 2017a).

Three agricultural producing regions in Thailand are particularly prone to weather-related disasters. The northeast plateau suffers from regular droughts and flash floods. The central river basin is subject to yearly monsoon floods. The hilly south is hit by typhoons and flooding. Rice is dominant in the country's agriculture, making Thailand a prominent world producer and exporter (Chariyaphan, 2012). It is estimated that over 10% of the country's rice area suffered from natural disasters between 2005 and 2014 (Rattanayod, 2016). Droughts and floods are particularly damaging for the agricultural sector (ADRC Thailand, 2017). A growing trend towards mono-cropping also raises concerns about resilience. In particular, rubber production in the south is prone to erosion in the flood season. Despite the high sensitivity of single-crop rubber plantations to soil erosion, this production system has been commercially successful in the southern region for several years, and has been promoted in other regions like the east and northeastern regions without careful consideration of the environmental risks or of the economic risks from changes in world market prices. Moreover, natural forest in the north (particularly in Nan Province) is being converted to maize production, which is not a particularly resilient crop for this region (EEPSEA, 2017). The 2011 monsoon flood was an extreme disaster for the country and badly affected the agricultural sector (Table 3.1). Drought in the north and northeast is also a regular event. In 2010, Thailand experienced USD 450 million in crop damages due to severe drought (OECD, 2017b).

Table 3.1. The exposure of the agricultural sector to weather-related disasters in selected ASEAN countries
	Myanmar	Philippines	Thailand	Viet Nam
Frequency of disastrous drought1	0%	20%	20%	25%
Frequency of disastrous flood2	95%	100% (on average 4.7 disastrous f loods per year)	100% (on average 2.65 disastrous floods per year)	100% (on average 3.05 disastrous floods per year)
Frequency of disastrous storm3	35%	100% (on average 7.65 disastrous storms per year)	75%	100% (on average 2.95 disastrous storms per year)
Recent milestone weather-related disaster	Cyclone Nargis 2 May 2008	Typhoon Haiyan 8 November 2013	Monsoon flood 25 July 2011 to 16 January 2012	Mekong River Delta, South Central and Central Highlands drought 2015-2017
Annual paddy yield around milestone weather-related disaster4				Not available
Estimated damages and losses to the agricultural sector from milestone weather-related disaster	783 220 ha (63%) of paddy fields submerged; 707 500 t of stored paddy and milled rice destroyed; 85% of seed stocks lost; some 3 000 power tillers and thousands of tilling equipment lost; 37% of orchard crops and 70% of backyard gardening destroyed; 50% of buffaloes and 25% of cattle lost in the 11 most affected townships alone (FAO, 2009)	USD 700 mln in damages to the agricultural sector; 600 000 ha of farmland (crops, orchards, plantations) affected; 44 mln coconut trees damaged or destroyed; 1.1 mln tonnes of crops lost (FAO, 2015c)	USD 1.1 tln in damages and losses to food crops; USD 138 mln in damages and losses to perennial crops; USD 104 mln in damages and losses to livestock (Ministry of Finance and World Bank, 2012)	Local rice yield dropped by 99% and by 76% for vegetables in the Mekong delta; local maize yield dropped by 92% in the South Central region; local coffee yield dropped by 81 percentage points and by 80% for cashew nuts in the Central Highlands; 45% of chicken lost in the Mekong delta; 50% of cattle and buffalo reported sick (FAO, 2016)5
← 1. Probability of a year having a disastrous drought. Calculations based on EM-DAT data 1997-2016.
← 2. Probability of a year having a disastrous flood. Calculations based on EM-DAT data 1997-2016.
← 3. Probability of a year having a disastrous storm. Calculations based on EM-DAT data 1997-2016.
← 4. Source: FAOSTAT http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home. The short-term trend using national data is not the best indicator to represent the impact of the disasters at the local level. These trends do not imply a direct relationship between the weather-related disaster mentioned in this table and national rice yields, which can be impacted by several other parameters. In particular, typhoon Haiyan struck in the Central Visayas of the Philippines without affecting the main rice production areas in Luzon so it seems not to have had an impact on the national rice yield. Haiyan was more damaging to other crops and livestock in the affected areas (FAO, 2015c).
← 5. This FAO agricultural post-disaster needs assessment was based on focus group discussions in highly affected villages so the numbers are not representative for the overall region or country. More robust post-disaster needs assessments are needed to evaluate the damages and losses from the recent drought.

Viet Nam's location on the tropical typhoon belt makes it a particularly hazard-prone country. Weather-related disasters together with landslides were responsible for losses equal to 1.5% of annual GDP between 2001 and 2010. Despite strong investment in poverty reduction over the past 20 years, the country's poorer populations are now concentrated mostly in rural areas and are highly dependent on climate-sensitive livelihoods like agriculture. With 80% of Vietnamese farmers growing rice on 45% of the country's agricultural land, weather-related disasters can have a very strong impact on the country's food security and could destabilise international markets given the country's leading export status. Production losses due to these risks could total 9.1 million tonnes annually by 2050 (USAID, 2017). Other food and cash crops are also vulnerable to weather-related disasters. Sea level rise due to climate change and land subsidence due to increased groundwater pumping for irrigation (Minderhoud et al., 2017) have added an additional threat with higher risk of sea water intrusion and increased soil salinisation in the Mekong Delta, which produces 13% of the world's rice. Although water is abundant in the country, it is not evenly distributed. The recent 2016 drought in the Mekong River basin was the worst recorded in the past 90 years (FAO, 2016).

Given that the agricultural sector in these four Southeast Asian countries has been regularly subject to droughts, floods and tropical storms, farmers, their communities and governments have adopted practices and institutions that have slowly contributed to increase their resilience. The next section elaborates on actions taken by governments to address these risks.

References

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Note

← 1. It is important to note that the data on frequency of disasters presented in Table 3.1 provide an aggregated national snapshot. However, the risks linked to weather-related disasters are – in reality – more geographically specific, with certain areas affected by floods and tropical storms every year and other areas more prone to drought, as briefly presented in the country-specific paragraphs that follow