Over the past three decades, strong economic growth, rising agricultural productivity and output, and the structural transformation of the agricultural sector have driven considerable advances in food security in Southeast Asia and enabled the region to become a net exporter of agricultural commodities. Whereas the vast majority of Southeast Asian people still lived in rural areas during the 1960s and 1970s, today, the bulk of the population lives in cities. Even in the least urbanized countries (Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) urbanization rates are rapidly rising (Sheng 2020). Combined with income growth, this has had a profound impact on the region’s labor markets. In 1991, 60 percent of the Southeast Asian population was still employed in the agricultural sector, but by 2019, this share had been halved, to just 30 percent (World Bank 2020). In conjunction with these shifts in employment, rural households are deriving an increasing proportion of their income from nonfarm sources, which has had an important impact in reducing overall poverty (Booth 2019). Nearly one in two Southeast Asians were living in extreme poverty in the 1990s. By 2015, this share had fallen to 12 percent (Sheng 2020). Notwithstanding these extraordinary economic transformations, a large share of the region’s population, whose income levels are just above the poverty line, remain vulnerable to unforeseen income and price shocks; natural disasters; and public health shocks, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.