A Multi-Stakeholder Dairy Platform for the Asia-Pacific Region:Justification and Issues to be Considered for Formation and Management

Given the importance of dairy in Asia and its diverse characteristics, stakeholders have proposed to create dairy platform to facilitate sharing of knowledge and experiences. A review of several existing regional and global multi-stakeholder platforms reveal that there is no single model for organizing and managing a platform or forum or alliance for joint action across countries. And participation from the Asia-Pacific region in the established regional and global platforms related to livestock and/or dairy is minimal partly because priority of those platforms is to address problems and issues facing the developed country dairy industries and partly because of lack of resources of many small stakeholders in the region to widely and actively engage in those platforms. Therefore there is a need for creating a voluntary open platform by stakeholders in the region to (a) Promote dialogue towards enhancing common understanding of development issues and their solutions,(b) build consensus on the role of dairy towards sustainable food security and nutrition and (c)catalyse stakeholder commitments to action and on-the-ground improvements through exchange and dissemination of knowledge and experience. The paper outlines various issues and options for building such a platform.