Why Southeast Asia Fights Over Food—but Shouldn’t

A geopolitical battle is being waged over the so-called “king of tropical fruits,” a spiky, pungent, and polarizing fruit known as durian.

Durian gets a bad rap in the West, where it’s been described as having a “deep dank rot”—igniting debates about orientalist tropes in food writing—and made headlines for forcing an evacuation of a post office in Germany in 2020 and causing repeated gas leak false-alarms in the same country this year. 

But in Southeast Asia, the iconic fruit is coveted—so much so that a group representing durian producers and manufacturers wants it to be formally recognized as Malaysia’s national fruit. The Sept. 8 proposal, submitted by Malaysia’s Durian Manufacturers Association (DMA), also asked the Agriculture and Food Security Ministry to make July 7 National Durian Day, which the association hopes will be celebrated through festivals, exhibitions, and farm visits.

“Durian is not just another fruit. It’s part of our national identity,” DMA president Eric Chan said, according to Malaysian news outlet The Star. “Every Malaysian, no matter their background, has a durian story—a memory, a tradition. It’s the one thing that unites us all.”

But making durian Malaysia’s national fruit also appears to have stoked divisions across the region.

Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Food Affairs Zulkifli Hasan, known as Zulhas, said on Monday that Indonesia actually has a stronger claim to the fruit because it produces more of it. “I believe durian is Indonesia’s national fruit,” Zulhas said, according to CNBC Indonesia. (Neither Malaysia nor Indonesia currently has a national fruit.) “Durian is not just a commodity, but also a culture and a source of livelihood for millions of farmers,” he added. “When it comes to national symbols, we must base our attention on data and reality. Indonesian durian is our strength in Asia.”

According to the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics (BPS) data, Indonesia produced close to 2 million metric tonnes of durian last year, its highest level in the past five years. Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi are the greatest production sources of durian across the country.

Malaysia, by contrast, produced around 592,000 metric tonnes of durian in 2023, according to Malaysia’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. Still, Malaysia’s durian production has increased over the years, as global appetite for Malaysia’s durians, especially the premium Musang King variety, has grown. (Indonesia has also noted an uptick in demand from China for its durians.)

The Musang King, which is grown mainly in the highlands of Pahang and parts of Kelantan and Johor, has geographical indication status in Malaysia, which was renewed by the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia for 10 years until March 2034. That status prevents other countries from claiming or using the name.

Even as durian demand soars abroad, declaring durian Malaysia’s national fruit could have critical commercial benefits for durian farmers in Malaysia and potentially provide more national support for the industry. Farmers in Pahang have been embroiled in an ongoing dispute with the state government over their encroachment onto state land—which they argue had been informally permitted as part of a government plan in the 1970s that encouraged rural communities to meet domestic food supply needs by farming unused land. This year, the Pahang state government has led enforcement operations that involved felling decades-old durian trees and issued eviction notices to farmers, which the farmers have disputed.

Director general for Malaysia’s Agriculture Department Nor Sam Alwi told The Star that no official decision has been made in terms of either designating durian as the national fruit or declaring a National Durian Day.

Chan told The Star that the proposal is not intended to claim ownership of durian or negate other countries’ connection to the fruit.

“Both Malaysia and Indonesia share deep cultural and historical ties with durian—it thrives across our region. Making it Malaysia’s national fruit does not diminish Indonesia’s right to do the same,” he said. “National symbols are chosen for their cultural significance, historical roots and global association. Malaysia has built a strong international reputation for premium, high-quality durians, with a distinctive presence worldwide.”

Many countries in Southeast Asia produce and eat durians, with Thailand and the Philippines being major producers alongside Malaysia and Indonesia. Durian, a part of Flora Malesiana, which describes plants native to the Malesian region, is a prime example of how foods are not constrained by man-made borders, says Khir Johari, author of The Food of Singapore Malays. “The name comes from duri, a Malay word, spoken throughout the Malay speaking world, meaning thorn,” Johari explains, “and with the suffix becomes ‘durian’ to mean ‘that which have thorns.’”

In the 1970s, women’s magazines in Malaysia took up the question of whether the country should have a national fruit amid a push to better support local fruit industries, says Joshua Kam, a doctoral Asian Studies student at Cornell University. The idea was, Kam says, “Why are we buying apples” imported from overseas “when we should be proud of our mangoes, proud of our durians?”

Native fruits and plants feel especially close to the heart of tropical Southeast Asian countries, Kam says.

“It’s so tied to either the forest or the orchard or the farm,” he says. “It brings us back to this idea of a homeland, and the idea that there is a natural goodness that can be derived from our own land.”

Culinary connectedness

The latest durian quibble reflects a broader debate over national foods across Nusantara—which refers to the Malay Archipelago, extending across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Timor-Leste, and the Philippines. Past attempts to officially or unofficially recognize a food as belonging to one country have often led to fiery online debates.

Cendol, an icy dessert of pandan jelly and red beans swimming in a soup of coconut milk and gula melaka (palm sugar syrup), was the source of a neighborly dispute between Malaysia and Singapore after CNN included it in its list of 50 best desserts in the world in 2018—and called it Singaporean. Words flew between Malaysians and Singaporeans. Then, some experts stepped in and said it really originates in Indonesia, which also has more varieties of it. Meanwhile, Thais, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Burmese, have their own versions of the dessert: lot chong, banh lot, lot, and mont let saung.

Similar online arguments have broken out over nasi lemak, a dish of rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaves typically served with ikan bilis (fried anchovy), sambal (chili relish), slices of cucumber, peanuts, and a boiled egg; bak kut teh, a fragrant herby pork rib soup; and chilli crab, mud crabs in a thick, tangy tomato-chilli sauce.

Khir tells TIME that many of these dishes, as well as the ingredients and culinary practices that form them, predate modern borders. “They came from a shared cultural world, not from isolated nation states,” Khir says. “People moved freely across islands and coastlines. They traded, married into one another’s families and carried ingredients, tools and cooking ideas with them.”

Kam agrees: “Food often came before countries. The dishes that we share often moved with people who were moving about before there were borders, before there were passports.”

Many countries in Southeast Asia are shaped by long histories of migration and trade, which is even more so the case in multi-ethnic societies like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. There are several dishes, like sambal, rendang, and fermented fish that come from Malay culture, for example, but the mobility of Malay people between coasts has meant that those foods transcend modern national borders, according to Fanada Sholihah, a doctoral student in history at the University of Indonesia.

The Southeast Asian region has also experienced shifting borders over time, particularly due to boundaries imposed by colonial powers. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, for example, established colonial spheres of influence for the sake of preferential trade, with Britain’s region of control spanning the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, while the Dutch received control of the Riau-Lingga islands south of the Strait of Malacca.

“The colonialism of the 19th century established geopolitical boundaries that disrupted these interconnected culinary heritages as nationalist sentiments intensified,” Fadly Rahman, a food historian at Padjadjaran University in Indonesia, wrote of his research for the Asia Research Institute.

More shifts occurred as countries gained independence after World War II. Singapore became part of Malaysia in 1963 when British colonial rule ended, in a merger that also included the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. Two years later, the merger ended and Singapore became independent.

Given that history, “such fights over ownership and heritage can be myopic,” wrote journalists Foong Li Mei and Kirsten Han for Malaysia-based independent media outlet New Naratif. “Looking beyond artificial constructs of state borders, people have long experienced Singapore and the Malayan peninsula as a region within which communities, cultures, capital, and yes, food, moved.”

Similarities between culinary traditions “are not copies,” says Khir, but rather “the result of a fluid space that grew together over centuries.”

Food in nationalism

Food can serve an important role in nation-building and constructing a national image, especially in multi-ethnic societies where “food becomes a kind of common language that can make all groups feel that ‘we are one,’” says Sholihah.

At the same time, Khir says debates over ownership or claims over a food “arise because our sense of the region has changed” geographically. “Labels like national dish often trigger conflict because people forget how current geopolitical boundaries actually came into being,” says Khir. “When a country insists on sole ownership of a dish that its neighbours also prepare, it reflects cultural amnesia.”

Historically people understood the maritime world through the sea and rivers, Khir says. “Movement between islands was ordinary life, not an exception. People recognized echoes of themselves wherever they travelled.” Shared foods were “proof of interconnectedness,” he adds.

Now, “the rivers and straits that once carried ideas and ingredients no longer sit at the centre of our imagination. As a result, countries begin to see themselves as isolated cultural units,” Khir says. “They focus on what makes them distinct rather than what binds them to their neighbours, to their region.”

These tensions tend to be more inflamed when it comes to international recognition, Kam says, which is often measured through “best of” lists. Because these lists are also tied to tourism or other commercial interests, they are inherently competitive—and often end up becoming politicized, he adds.

Media, tourism, and national marketing only reinforce culinary nationalism as countries use food as “a tool for nation branding,” says Sholihah.

That became clear when Singapore nominated its hawker culture for UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage of humanity list in 2018, much to the chagrin of Malaysians who contended that it can be found elsewhere. (Singapore’s hawker culture—which is part of a distinctive government-planned social enterprise model to provide affordable food to the public—was inscribed on UNESCO’s list in 2020.)

But Khir says a better model exists. In 2020, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania successfully submitted couscous to UNESCO for intangible cultural heritage status. “They chose to acknowledge a shared inheritance rather than fight over it,” he says. “That gesture shows what is possible when countries recognise the deeper history behind a food tradition.”