Project Agroecology and Safe Food System Transitions in Southeast Asia (ASSET)

The Agroecology and Safe food System Transitions (ASSET) project is a regional project funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the European Union (EU), and the Fonds Français pour l’Environnement Mondial (FFEM) over five years from 2020 to 2025 in four targeted countries: Cambodia, Laos PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam. The project aims at developing and promoting a shared vision of the agroecological and safe food system transitions at South East Asian level. The project is coordinated by GRET in a strong articulation with CIRAD, in charge of the scientific coordination, the project will mobilize the expertise of 27 national, European and International partners, from research institutions, universities, NGOs, UN agencies, Ministries of Agriculture of the four countries. The project acts within the three overlapping spheres of influence, namely the societal sphere (citizen awareness and possible demands for safe agro-ecological products), the policy sphere (enabling environment at local, national and regional levels), and the technical and economic spheres (agroecological and safe food system innovations at territorial level in flagship sites).

The overall objective is to make food and agricultural systems in Southeast Asia more sustainable, safer, and inclusive through harnessing the potential of agroecology to transform them. This will be achieved through synergizing initiatives contributing to ASSET from local to regional levels.

The project will build upon:

• Research for development processes in synergy with the regional research platforms, ASEAand MALICA
• The Agroecology Learning Alliance in Southeast Asia (ALiSEA)
• The ASEAN Lao facilitated Initiative for a regional Coaching of Agroecological transition in South East Asia (LICA)

It will engage with governments, civil society and the private sector (including small producers) to generate and transform knowledge into sustainable innovation processes and transformative policies, sensitive to youth and gender equality.

To achieve this, the project pursues the following specific operational goals

Impact-oriented stakeholder engagement into agroecology and safe food system transitions

• Strengthen ALiSEA through networking and sharing a common vision of the ASSET at national and regional levels
• Transform ALiSEA multimedia into a Knowledge Hub that serves as a major resource at regional level
• Raise awareness and build capacity through multimedia communication to a wide range of targeted audience

Scaling up agroecological and safe food innovations from local to regional levels

• Co-design action research processes with local actors and support innovations at territorial level, considering youth and gender needs
• Design a common broad-based methodological framework for assessing performances and impacts of ASSET pathways
• Foster policy dialogues on agriculture, food, health and trade at national and regional levels

PIN, through the competencies of the researchers of LEAAR Laboratory, Prof. Giovanni Belletti and Prof. Andrea Marescotti, contributes to the elaboration of indicators and assessment methods (SC2.2), support the flagship programs (SC2.1) on issues of agricultural economics, market innovations and rural development, and involve in the capacity building development program by providing trainings to ASSET implementing organizations and ALiSEA members (SC1.3). PIN has collaborated with CIRAD in EU projects for a long time and have worldwide experiences on territorial innovation processes and origin-based quality and market dynamics.