DRIFTING OFF COURSE: With only four years left, ASEAN’s SDG voyage veers away

G.H. Villagracia

Long before it was stamped on thousands of posters for ASEAN Philippines 2026, precolonial communities crossed waters through these wooden boats carried by seafarers moving in rhythm. Every paddler mattered, for one side pulling harder than the other could tilt the vessel off course. Yet on the morning of May eighth, the balangay came as a reminder of a region rowing unevenly, drifting away from its route toward sustainable development for all.

By the time the conversation reached youth involvement, the Monte Carlo Ballroom of Mövenpick Hotel had already spent nearly two hours discussing poverty, inequality, disease, hunger, war, and disasters.

This is because the first session of the ASEAN Community Town Hall, “SDGs in ASEAN: Progress, Gaps, and the Way Forward,” gathered diplomats, academics, and policy experts not to celebrate Southeast Asia’s progress for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but rather to reveal how it greatly lags behind amidst a deadline just less than four years away.

According to the forum’s opening presentation, only around 35% of the 17 SDGs across the region are currently on track or are making modest gains. The remaining goals, such as those tied to no poverty, zero hunger, and good health and well-being, remain unfelt.

The issue, however, lay not in ASEAN moving too slowly. It continues to move unequally, especially across its rural and disadvantaged areas.

Uneven weight of progress

Ambassador Nelson Santos, senior adviser to the President of Timor-Leste on international relations, opened the discussion by stripping the SDGs away from their usual language of numbers and data, because, according to him, development lapses are seen and felt by people through the scarcity or absence of everyday necessities.

“We are often discussing SDGs in terms of targets and indicators, but for many communities, these gaps are experienced in very concrete ways,” Santos stressed. “We are really talking about lived experience.”

Across ASEAN’s over 700 million people, that lived experience continues to grow across its borders as food prices soar high while climate-related disasters intensify each year. At the same time, rapid urbanization places pressure on cities already struggling to provide basic services.

Moreover, for the Timorese ambassador, Southeast Asia’s development story is often misleading because national averages tend to conceal local disparities. He pointed out that despite decades of poverty reduction across the region, millions remain unemployed or underemployed and vulnerable, particularly in rural areas.

Santos also narrowed down his discussion by reflecting on how these contradictions take form in his country. While electricity access has broadened across Timor-Leste, reliability and accessibility remain inconsistent in rural areas where more than half of the population lives.

“This highlights an important point that progress is real but uneven,” he said. “ The increasing challenge is not only about growth but about how that growth is distributed.”

Nevertheless, he added that these contradictions can be seen as useful reference points to guide policymakers to more grounded and responsive policy design that reflects actual conditions on the ground.

Burdened in health and well-being

The conversation became even more urgent when Dr. Phyu Phyu Thin Zaw, an epidemiologist and lecturer from the School of Public Health of the University of Hong Kong, shifted the discussion toward how the burdens of health and well-being continue to be carried by ASEAN communities.

She argued that ASEAN must first be brave enough to admit how severely behind it truly is. She said the failures of the SDGs are already visible in families living in poverty, children unable to attend school, and mothers dying from preventable complications simply because skilled healthcare remains inaccessible.

“Pregnancy is a natural process. Whenever a mother dies in our region, it is our fault, it is the policy maker’s fault,” Dr. Phyu Phyu emphasized. “Because pregnancy is natural. Mothers should not be dying because of pregnancies.”

Moreover, she warned that development efforts have become buried beneath documents and plans while governments continue avoiding the realities in the grassroots, and many of their responses remain fragmented, with problems handled in silos rather than through interconnected solutions.

She also questioned whether policymakers are truly willing to confront difficult issues with the public, especially as conflicts and crises, such as in West Asia, continue to create ripple effects across the region through economic instability, displacement, and public health risks.

The epidemiologist then emphasized that effective public health responses must begin with prevention, followed by early detection and response. However, according to her, governments disregard preventive measures because they tend to prioritize immediate and tangible outcomes.

“We really have to invest in prevention, but policymakers do not like to invest in prevention,” the Public Health lecturer said. “Do you know why? Because prevention takes time.”

Using Myanmar’s military coup during the pandemic as an example, Dr. Phyu Phyu doubted whether governments can genuinely claim commitment to the SDGs when political interests continue taking priority over public welfare even during crises.

She called for full community involvement in policymaking and urged citizens to question leaders and demand accountability whenever public welfare is neglected.

“We have to address our communities with honesty, with integrity, and with empowerment,” she stressed. “We have to let the people know that this is your problem, our problem. So the only way is to question your superiors, question your policy makers, question them, be brave.”

Hunger from the farms and across borders

When the microphone reached Dr. Jose Maria Luis Montesclaros, a research fellow of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore, the discussion on food security exposed the interconnected realities of conflicts, rising prices, unstable economies, and farming.

According to Montesclaros, around one in ten people in ASEAN do not have enough food to eat on a daily basis, a quarter of the population experience inconsistent food accessibility, while 36 percent still cannot afford a healthy diet.

Families, according to him, are squeezed between recovering incomes and increasingly expensive food prices. He emphasized that even as household incomes slowly recovered from a five percent fall to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, food prices continued rising by around six percent annually.

The pressure, however, does not stop within Southeast Asia’s borders. At the 2022 onset of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, Dr. Montesclaros explained how a conflict thousands of kilometers away still disrupted ASEAN kitchens.

“Russia and Ukraine are the bread baskets of the world. They are the source of wheat,” Dr. Montesclaros remarked. “And without wheat, we don’t have Indomi. In this case, we don’t have Lucky Me.”

Moreover, he warned that new conflicts, such as in the Strait of Hormuz, now threaten fuel, energy, and fertilizer prices as well as food supply across the region.

Yet for the RSIS researcher fellow, the deeper crisis lies in the people who toil to keep the food systems alive. He stressed that while ASEAN needs to strengthen its local production base, nowadays farmers continue to receive little support, while younger generations abandon the sector entirely.

He then argued that other countries have already transformed farming into a field driven by entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation.

“This is the kind of transformation that we need moving forward so that the youth will see farming as a viable job,” he said. “Not as a secondary job to industry, secondary to services, but as a primary sector to work in.”

Furthermore, he pointed out that farmers must be taught to speak the language of business, while businessmen themselves must learn the science and complexities behind farming in order to bridge the growing disconnect between the agriculture and business sectors.

Beyond poverty, inequality, health, and hunger

At the latter part of the first session, the discourse on SDGs turned toward the young people expected to inherit them the most, exposing a growing sense of exhaustion and detachment among Southeast Asian youths.

A Filipino teacher raised concern over how many young people no longer feel urgency toward achieving the SDGs, especially as economic instability continues to shape their realities, sharing that many of her students now see migration away from Southeast Asia as the more stable path forward.

Ambassador Santos acknowledged that this is felt across the region, particularly in countries where the majority of the population remains under 30 years old. In Timor-Leste, for instance, labor agreements with Australia have become one of the ways to ease economic burden among the younger generation.

Dr. Phyu Phyu, moreover, pointed out that many young people in Myanmar are also trying to leave due to political instability, uncertainty, and limited opportunities at home. She argued that the issue never lay in Southeast Asia as foreigners are migrating to the region, but instead in the systems governing them.

“You actually should not belittle the potential we hold in Asia,” she stressed. “Our problem is up there, not down there.”

Furthermore, with the forum overlooking the worsening regression of Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions under SDG 16 in the region, such as in the Philippines, where red-tagging and the weaponization of anti-terror laws continue to suppress human rights defenders and activists, in an exclusive interview, Dr. Montesclaros believed education and an informed public are the answers.

“By improving our education through levels, then the people will be better informed in the kinds of leaders that they select,” he said. “So basically, we deserve the leaders that we get. And we need to train ourselves so that we can better select leaders that will really do what’s best for us.”

A boat tilting off course

With just less than four years away before the 2030 SDG deadline, the entire ASEAN region finds itself losing time as wars continue to ravage on, disasters grow more destructive each year, public health threats spread faster across borders, economic inequalities deepen between urban and rural communities, governments persist to suppress human rights, and citizens begin to lose faith that the benefits of development will ever fully reach them.

Still, the speakers repeatedly returned to one idea, partnership. Partnership so that no country can navigate these crises alone, no community can solve them in isolation, and no development agenda will succeed if people remain excluded from the decisions shaping their future.

And so as the first session came to a close, the image of the balangay as a vessel struggling to stay balanced while entire communities struggled to paddle alone lingered. For as long as progress continues to favor some while others are left exhausted, unheard, and drifting behind, ASEAN’s sail toward sustainable development will remain not a voyage moving forward, but a boat slowly veering away from the shore it promised everyone would reach together.