Shared agricultural realities, shared opportunities
India and the 11 ASEAN member states, including the grouping’s newest member, Timor-Leste, which acceded in October 2025, represent a region of immense agricultural diversity and growth potential. ASEAN’s agriculture, forestry, and fishing sectors support around 93 million jobs, while India’s agriculture and allied sectors engage nearly 46% of its workforce.
Across both regions, farms are predominantly small and fragmented, production remains heavily influenced by monsoons, and shared crops and ecosystems span borders. These range from rice, pulses, fruits, and spices to livestock, fisheries, mangroves, and forests. Both regions also face mounting pressures from climate variability, transboundary animal and plant pests, and persistent post-harvest losses.
These commonalities make agricultural knowledge and technologies particularly transferable, providing a strong foundation for the India-ASEAN Medium-Term Plan of Action 2026-2030. This plan is aligned with ASEAN’s new Food, Agriculture and Forestry Sectoral Plan 2026-2030 and its six strategic thrusts covering sustainability, decarbonisation, food security, trade connectivity, digital innovation, and sustainable forest management.
India’s agricultural knowledge and technology base
India’s contribution to the partnership rests on one of the world’s largest publicly funded agricultural research and extension systems. It comprises 114 research institutes and bureaux under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), 80 agricultural universities, and 731 district-level extension centres (Krishi Vigyan Kendras). Over the past 12 years, this network has released more than 3,800 crop varieties, including roughly 3,100 bred specifically for climate resilience and around 200 with improved nutritional traits. It is also supported by a national gene bank conserving close to 470,000 accessions.The scale of India’s agricultural transformation is reflected in its production gains. Foodgrain production has risen from approximately 252 million tonnes in 2014-15 to an estimated 377 million tonnes in 2025-26, while milk production has increased from around 146 million tonnes to roughly 248 million tonnes over the same period. In fisheries, production has approximately doubled over the past decade to around 20 million tonnes, supporting an estimated 30 million livelihoods, with farming technologies developed for 49 finfish and shellfish species.
This is the expertise India brings to the partnership. Not as a claim of precedence, but as a substantial resource base shaped by agri-ecological conditions that closely resemble those across much of Southeast Asia.
What the cooperation delivers in practice
Beyond the research infrastructure, the partnership’s more tangible contribution has been in building human capital and strengthening field-level extension. The ASEAN-India Fellowship programme enables students from member states to pursue postgraduate studies at leading Indian agricultural universities, exposing them to research and expertise in areas identified as regional priorities.
India’s own extension initiatives also demonstrate the scale at which such cooperation can be translated into practice. The Viksit Krishi Sankalp Abhiyan reached over 1.35 million farmers and identified more than 500 priority issues for research and policy attention. A related outreach initiative ran over 1,34,000 programmes, conducted over 6,650 training sessions and over a 1,00,000 field demonstrations across 728 districts, whiles its digital outreach extended to nearly 50 million stakeholders.
These domestic experiences are relevant to ASEAN not simply because of their scale, but because they offer examples of relatively low-cost, high-reach extension models that could be adapted to smallholder farming systems across the region. The opportunity is to move beyond exchanges between ministries and research institutions and build mechanisms that connect knowledge, technology and training more directly with farmers through institutional cooperation rather than trade instruments alone.
Where the partnership still has ground to cover: From research to field-level impact
An honest assessment is that this cooperation remains concentrated largely within research institutions, universities and ministries, with comparatively limited reach into the cooperative societies, farmer producer organisations, and local extension networks that can carry its benefits to individual farms at scale.
Seven thematic areas currently anchor technical collaboration: food and nutrition security; sustainable forestry and mangrove management; regenerative and climate-resilient agriculture; livestock, dairy, and animal health; fisheries and the blue economy; post-harvest management and value chains; and digital agriculture. Each provides a credible foundation for deeper engagement.
The next step should be stronger institutional follow-through: multi-location trials of stress-tolerant crop varieties under ASEAN conditions, operational joint pest-surveillance protocols, and common methodologies for measuring post-harvest losses to enable meaningful cross-country comparison. Fisheries and forestry communities, whose livelihoods are directly affected by decisions in these sectors, would particularly benefit from cooperation that extends beyond research exchange to practical, field-level support.
Measuring the partnership by what it delivers, not what it declares
The 9th AIMMAF should, therefore, be judged not by the language of its joint statement, but by what happens after the meeting. The stronger test, particularly given the scale of agriculture across India and ASEAN, is whether cooperation delivers measurable outcomes during the 2026-2030 Plan of Action.
This means asking concrete questions: how many Indian crop varieties are trialled and adopted under ASEAN conditions? How many ASEAN fellowship graduates return to strengthen their national agricultural systems? Do joint pest surveillance and post-harvest protocols move beyond agreed frameworks into routine practice? And are proven Indian extension models meaningfully adapted to the ASEAN’s smallholder economies?
These outcomes will not be visible in New Delhi this week. They will emerge over time in farms, laboratories, institutions and, ultimately, in the evidence presented at the 10th AIMMAF. That is where the partnership’s real success should be measured: in the livelihoods, resilience, productivity, and incomes of farmers and rural communities across India and ASEAN.
M.L. Jat is Secretary, DARE, and Director General of ICAR, and Naveen P. Singh is Assistant Director General (International Relations), New Delhi. Views are personal.