About
The ASEAN Food Import Bill Tracker is a free, interactive dashboard by SEAFIC. It shows how much five ASEAN economies spend on importing food, what they buy, and where it comes from. The five economies are Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The food import bill covers 18 chapters of the Harmonized System (HS): chapters 02 to 04, 07 to 12, and 15 to 23.
Users can look at each country on its own or at the five together, and see which trading partners supply each commodity. The interactive charts show:
- Import trends by value (US$).
- How the five countries compare in what they import and how much they depend on it.
- Which commodities each country depends on most, where it buys them from, and how those suppliers have shifted over the years.
- Self-sufficiency and import dependency ratios for different food groups.
- An outlook to 2035, if current policies and trends continue with no major shocks.
All data comes from open sources: UN Comtrade for trade flows, FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets for self-sufficiency, and the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook for projections to 2035.
What You Can Expect
A shared fact base. Policymakers, businesses, journalists and researchers can work from the same numbers when they talk about food security.
A clear view of concentration. The tracker shows where a country relies heavily on one or two suppliers. That is where a single drought, export ban or shipping disruption can hit hardest.
A link between trade and the dinner table. By setting imports beside domestic production and consumption, it shows how much of what people eat depends on other countries.
What’s Ahead
For a long time, food security in ASEAN was discussed mainly as a question of farming: how much rice a country grows, and how close it is to feeding itself. While that question still matters, it is no longer enough on its own.
When a country buys a large share of its food from abroad, what reaches the plate also depends on what happens beyond its borders. A supplier announces an export ban. A conflict disrupts a shipping lane. A drought hits a major grower. A trading partner changes its tariffs.
Each of these can raise prices or empty shelves in ASEAN, even when nothing has gone wrong at home. The next conversation on food security is also a conversation about geopolitics, climate, trade rules and shipping routes.
The tracker is the first public output of a larger SEAFIC study: From Port to Plate: How ASEAN's Food Supply Holds, Bends, and Breaks.
Part one will be published in November 2026. It follows the three largest food imports of the five countries combined (cereals, animal feed, and fruits and nuts) along their supply chains, from the countries that grow them to the ports of the five ASEAN economies. For each commodity, it looks at:
- The global market and the five countries' import profile.
- The chokepoints: climate, geopolitics, regulations, tariffs and shipping routes.
- A past shock that hit the region, and what it revealed.
