To boost local production of food items, S'pore needs agrotechnopreneurs to find innovative, tech-driven, space-saving methods of farming
Despite the fact that we are in the middle of a global pandemic and Singapore imports over 90 per cent of our food supply, Singaporeans are not panicking, testament to the confidence we have in a steady food supply.
The calm, as we go about our lives at home during the circuit breaker period, is the outcome of years of strategic planning and foresight in ensuring food security.
Food security is fundamental to Singapore's national security, a strategic imperative.
When the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) was set up as the single integrated agency to ensure food security and safety from farm to fork in April last year, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Masagos Zulkifli stressed that Singapore must not be over-reliant on any single food source.
Singapore's food security strategies are reviewed regularly to ensure that Singaporeans continue to enjoy affordable and safe food.
One likely impact of Covid-19 is that Singapore will want to boost its own local production of food, to ensure greater self-sufficiency in some essential items and to grow our local agritech sector.
Indeed, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, SFA launched on April 17 a "30x30 Express" grant call. "30 by 30" is Singapore's national food security strategy of producing food here to meet 30 per cent of our needs by 2030.
The grant provides $30 million of funding support for the local agri-food industry to ramp up local production of eggs, leafy vegetables and fish over the next six to 24 months - the timeframe when Covid-19 is expected to affect economies before a vaccine is found.
SFA wants to encourage local agri-food players with productive and innovative farming systems to participate in the grant call and expand their production capabilities.
I am optimistic that Singapore will succeed in this food security strategy because the nascent agritech sector is showing promising results. Our network of alternative food sources is getting wider, and there is strong support to strengthen Singapore-owned overseas ventures which control the upstream farming activities.
A TALE OF TWO FARMERS
Let me tell you the story of two entrepreneurs who have gone into farming technology to explain why I am optimistic about our nascent agritech sector.
Mr Vincent Wei is a co-founder of a start-up agritech company called Archisen. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from the National University of Singapore. Today, he is a high-tech farmer.
As an urban city with limited land resources, growing vegetables the traditional way in Singapore will not work. So Archisen designs, develops and operates systems and solutions to enhance the local production of fresh vegetables in urban cities.
Mr Wei sees the advent of the Internet of Things and data analytics as enabling the modernisation of farming operations. Urban farms bring the source closer to the table by shortening the supply chain, so that the produce is fresher and more nutritious.
Next, fancy having strawberries grown in Singapore? Yes, that is now possible using climate-controlled agriculture which has enabled Mr Benjamin Swan's company, called Sustenir Agriculture, to grow strawberries here.
Sustenir adopts sustainable technology in its vertical farms. It uses 95 per cent less water than traditional farming and uses technology to ensure that its energy consumption stays lower than industry standards.
Looking to the future, a key long-term strategy is to educate the next generation of "farmers of the future". We need to promote agro-technopreneurship. We should aspire to be the Silicon Valley for agro-technology.
As a trusted hub, Singapore can be positioned as the strategic digital hub to prevent food supply disruptions. To play to our strength as a digital economy, we could lead in setting up the digital infrastructure for a resilient food value chain.
We can leverage data and artificial intelligence to predict supply chain disruptions across boundaries and manage food security risks proactively.
To educate more techno-farmers of the future, institutions of higher learning are already ramping up courses and training in the field. Temasek Polytechnic, for example, has launched an Aquaculture Innovation Centre. Republic Polytechnic has a diploma programme in urban agricultural technology.
We should have more indoor vertical farms and ramp up deep-sea fish farming in future across Asean and Asia to accommodate these farmers of the future.
Consider Barramundi Asia, which already operates the largest ocean barramundi farm in Singapore and Australia. It is now setting up operations in Brunei. By 2030, its goal is to produce 50,000 tonnes of barramundi across the three geographies.
DIVERSIFICATION OF FOOD IMPORT SOURCE & GROWING UPSTREAM
The Singapore Government conducts overseas sourcing missions regularly with industry players to increase the places Singapore imports its food from. These sources have gone up from 140 countries in 2004 to more than 170 countries and regions today.
In addition to locally produced food and food imports, Singapore's third food basket involves going upstream to secure food at source, such as through operating or controlling farms, or via contract farming.
This way, Singapore can better control the supply and quality of food, as well as obtain the first right of purchase in times of supply shortages.
Consider Singapore's investment in a food zone in Jilin, China. SFA has been providing technical advice to the Jilin authorities to help them maintain a disease-free zone within the food zone in relation to pork.
SFA hopes that this will help in creating greater certainty of pork imports from Jilin in the future.
This whole-of-government plus whole-of-industry approach, founded on robust public-private partnership, underpins Singapore's food security, and is the reason why we can all stay calm and carry on food shopping even through a pandemic.
For even greater food security, we also need to boost local production, for which high-tech farmers are needed.
• Zaid Hamzah is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, and the founder of Food Security Exchange.
© 2020 Singapore Press Holdings
This article was written by Zaid Hamzah from The Straits Times and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.
