At this year’s Milken Institute #AsiaSummit, our Executive Director Beverley Postma joined Milken Institute Feeding Change Director Natasha Ledlie and regional leaders for a frank conversation about the investment constraints and opportunities for Asia’s #foodsystem transformation, asking “what will it take to close the gap between political ambition and capital re-structuring”
Speakers:
Winfried Wicklein, Director General, Asian Development Bank (ADB)
Beverley Postma, Executive Director, Grow Asia
Ren Hua Ho, CEO, Thai Wah Public Company Limited
Rishi Kalra, Executive Director and CFO, ofi
Three themes stood out.
♦️ The bottleneck is a #DeliveryGap - not a lack of technology: Southeast Asia has invested heavily in #agritech solutions but the delivery infrastructure is lagging. The region lacks the connective architecture needed to reach SMEs at meaningful scale across the region's 100 million+ farm households.
♦️ Capital exists but is poorly structured: Rural SMEs, aggregators, and women-led enterprises form the backbone of last-mile delivery but they are the #missingmiddle. They fall in the gap between traditional bank lending and venture capital. Grow Asia is redesigning blended financial products for their actual cash-flow realities. This is not a niche agenda. It is the central financing bottleneck for Southeast Asia.
♦️ Coordination is structural, not aspirational: food system transformation "is not an agriculture sector issue, but a much larger issue across water, energy, health, and other sectors." Meeting that complexity requires deliberate architecture — public, private, and philanthropic actors structured around data, shared risk and shared accountability — not ad hoc coalitions.
🚀 The 2027 Opportunity:
With #ASEAN, #G20, and #COP31 agendas converging on #foodsecurity, #climatefinance and supply chain volatility, the political window is rare. The question is whether institutions are prepared to invest in the connective architecture and financial restructuring that turns commitments into impact at scale.
Watch the full session: https://lnkd.in/gvZMPyhp
#FoodSystems #BlendedFinance #ASEAN #SDG17 #MIGlobal
9 Octubre 2026 à 02h20
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