Public Launch & Forum: ASEAN Integration Report 2025

ASEAN’s Vision 2045 places inclusive participation at the centre of regional growth, recognizing that regional prosperity depends heavily on the strong contribution of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), particularly within the strategic Food and Beverage (F&B) sector central to food security and supply chains. However, as policy challenges grow more complex, the regulatory environment for this heavily controlled sector has become increasingly fragmented and uneven across countries, with legitimate priorities around safety and quality resulting in overlapping standards for food safety, halal certification, labelling, and logistics. This situation has made compliance burdensome, especially for MSMEs, and therefore, streamlining these regional processes without compromising essential safeguards will be key to reducing red tape and enabling broader participation.

The ASEAN Integration Report 2025 builds on research published last year, developed under the ASEAN Prosperity Initiative (API), exploring how emerging regulatory and digital challenges are shaping ASEAN’s food trade. The analysis finds that regional integration in the F&B sector remains limited reflecting structural issues such as overlapping production profiles, weak intermediate trade linkages, and uneven logistics and cold-chain capacity across member states. The event will launch the report and present its key findings, followed by a panel discussion to explore how ASEAN can improve regulatory alignment, harness digital tools and strengthen inclusive participation for MSMEs in regional food trade.