• Report warns region is climate hotspot, facing rising temperatures, groundwater depletion
• Says area still has some of the world’s highest malnutrition burdens

ISLAMABAD: South Asian countries should research climate change, digitalisation, and diets and nutrition to support the region in continuing to build sustainable and resilient food systems that nourish more than 2 billion people while delivering equitable and sustainable outcomes, according to the ‘Global Food Policy Report 2025’.

The report, published by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), said in the next 25 years, robust policies and innovations will be needed to tackle climate adaptation and mitigation in the region’s food systems.

It said evidence is needed on the effectiveness of various pilot programmes to address climate threats, as well as on adaptive approaches that combine traditional social protection and livelihood interventions with mechanisms to rapidly address disaster and climate-related shocks.

The report noted that over the last several decades, environmental degradation and climate change, digitalisation in agriculture, and changes in diets and nutrition have emerged as trends that present both challenges to and opportunities for improving food systems in South Asia.

These trends interact with the persistent gender and social equity issues in the region, including low empowerment and participation of women in the labor force, youth employment challenges, and rapidly increasing urbanisation.

In recent decades, South Asia has become a hotspot of climate change, with the region facing significant climate-induced risks that are intensified by existing vulnerabilities.

It has already experienced a rise in temperatures, accelerated rates of glacial melting and ground water depletion, and unpredictable patterns in rainfall and heat, leaving a large portion of the population exposed to climate hazards.

Although both irrigation and fertilisers played a crucial role in increasing agricultural productivity, irrigation subsidies are a major cause of the region’s alarming rate of groundwater depletion — South Asia extracts 25 per cent of global groundwater.

The report said new technologies, and the associated policies were central to the region’s success in increasing productivity, reducing poverty, and transforming its chronic food deficit into a food surplus in less than two decades, although many have since raised concerns over the environmental issues created by these technologies and the uneven distribution of their benefits.

As optimism grows around the potential of AI and digital technologies to help transform food systems, South Asian countries have adopted a range of policies and programmes to incorporate digital technologies into agriculture and food systems. Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan have adopted national governance plans and policies on digital and AI technologies.

The report said policy research is needed to ensure that AI and digital technologies include everyone in South Asia, even the region’s poor.

Barriers to achieving this goal include bottlenecks in institutions and infrastructure, combined with market failures within food systems such as limited digital infrastructure, concentration of market power, and issues with data governance and privacy.

Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2025