In July, a seaweed farmer in Nusa Lembongan, Bali, watched a week of intense heat undo a season’s work.
The farmer’s crop began to bleach and slip from its ropes. Seaweed that should have weighed 650 grams was coming in at a fraction of that.* The damaged crop could not be saved for seedlings.
For this Indonesian farmer, El Niño was not an ocean pattern on a weather map. It was a lost harvest, lost income, and greater uncertainty for the next one.
Across ASEAN, El Niño is taking different forms.
In Thailand, farmers are experiencing delayed rains, stressed reservoirs and reshaping planting calendars from rising heat. In Vietnam, reservoir levels are falling. In Indonesia and Malaysia, dry conditions are causing seasonal fires to run harder and longer, sending haze through cities and across borders, affecting communities throughout the region.
Further down the chain, the pressure arrives at the dinner table.
Southeast Asia’s rice yields are projected to fall by 8–10% this year. For households where food accounts for a significant share of income, a higher rice price is not an abstract economic indicator. It changes what a family can afford that week.
Agriculture supports more than 90 million people across Southeast Asia and contributes 9.6% of regional GDP. Yet the majority of agricultural workers are uninsured.
When floods, drought or heat damage a crop, many farmers still will first turn to savings, use debt or hope for public assistance that may take time to arrive.
The result is a familiar cycle. A disaster arrives. Crops are damaged. Public budgets are stretched. Farmers wait for relief. Planting is delayed. Supply is constrained. Local economies bear the brunt of the impacts.
The SEADRIF Regional Agricultural Insurance and Sustainable Economies (SEADRIF-RAISE) facility is being developed to address these challenges and change the cycle.
A regionally-owned platform being built by SEADRIF and FAO, RAISE is the response to a request from six ASEAN countries with a vision for enhancing agricultural resilience across the region.
Its purpose is to help countries strengthen the financial resilience of farmers and the agricultural sector, while developing and scaling national crop-insurance and disaster-risk-financing programmes.
The premise is straightforward.
ASEAN countries face many of the same constraints: limited agricultural-risk data, a shortage of specialised technical capacity, insurance products that do not always fit farmers’ needs, and high reinsurance costs.
Addressing each of these challenges country by country is expensive and slow.
A regional facility gives countries greater scale, stronger bargaining power and access to expertise that would otherwise be difficult to sustain.
RAISE provides that shared infrastructure. It helps countries strengthen the foundations of agricultural insurance: better data, more suitable products, stronger delivery channels and the technical skills to manage complex climate risks. These are the less visible parts of resilience, but they matter.
RAISE also creates a route to more sustainable risk financing. By pooling exposure across the region, the facility can make protection more affordable, helping countries access reinsurance and global capital more efficiently.
That enables national programmes to reach further, towards smallholder farmers, rural enterprises and agricultural value chains that currently sit outside the market.
Financial protection works best when it is connected to measures that reduce losses in the first place, such as stronger water management, climate-informed agricultural practices, better infrastructure and more resilient supply chains. The objective is to help farmers recover from a shock while improving their ability to withstand the next one.
As El Niño sharpens the region’s awareness of climate risk, it also underlines the value of having practical arrangements in place before the next difficult season.
SEADRIF-RAISE is designed to make those arrangements possible: bringing together technical assistance, risk financing and resilience support through one regional platform.
Note: As reported by Channel News Asia, September 2026