DPM Heng Swee Keat at the Singapore International Agri-Food Week Gala Dinner 2023

Mr Lim Boon Heng, Chairman of Temasek
Mrs Iwona Piorko, EU Ambassador to Singapore
Ms Alexis Taylor, US Undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs
Excellencies, 
Ladies and gentlemen,

Good evening, I’m delighted to join you for this year’s Singapore International Agri-Food Week (SIAW) Gala Dinner. This dinner marks the closing of a busy week that has brought some 7,000 agri-food stakeholders – regulators, entrepreneurs, companies and industry – together to discuss a more sustainable food future for all. 

When we met a year ago, we were concerned about growing food prices resulting from global inflation and supply chain disruptions. A year on, the situation has become more worrying. While inflation is slowly coming under control, there are new pressures and risks. For one, we are facing greater climate and disease disruptions.

El Nino is already affecting food production all across the world, and there are worries that we are heading into a “super El Nino” come 2024. Some countries, such as India, have imposed export restrictions on staples such as rice, for which prices have increased by 41% year-on-year.

This could rise even further if other rice-producing countries like Myanmar and the Philippines take similar actions. Poultry production has also been affected by bird flu outbreaks, which have spread to new geographical regions, including South America. The global geopolitical situation has also deteriorated, putting further stress on the stability of global food supplies. Just as the Russian-Ukraine War, which is persisting into its second year, has disrupted food production and energy supplies, there are concerns that the current conflict in the Middle East will create similar knock-on effects. And at the financing level, the agri-food sector has also been affected by the global “funding winter”. AgFunder’s Global AgriFoodTech Investment Report 2023 estimated that agri-food tech funding in 2022 has declined 44% year-on-year. This means that it has become harder to resource and scale good ideas from farmers and businesses.

With this gloomy picture of climate and geopolitical challenges, the urgency of addressing agri-food issues is higher than ever. At the global level, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that chronic hunger has grown from 7.9% in 2015, to 9.2% in 2022. We are regressing on this UN Sustainable Development Goal. This must be a wake-up call to galvanise collective action. Like climate, agri-food is an issue of global stewardship. Hunger and food insecurity is a lived reality for so many communities today, we cannot stand by and watch, or expect someone else to take action. Everyone, including small countries like Singapore, must play a part in building a more secure and sustainable food future. What are the concrete steps we can take to build a more sustainable and climate-resilient agri-food sector? There are two inter-connected prongs: First, we must invest in decarbonising the agri-food sector, and ensure it contributes to the global net-zero transition. Second, we must press on with agri-food innovation, to develop solutions that can address immediate challenges, as well as re-imagine the future of food and agriculture.

Decarbonisation

Decarbonisation is an urgent and necessary task across the board, to get us on the path towards net-zero by 2050. Alas, given the state of the world today, it has been difficult to mobilise leadership attention and action. While the agri-food sector gets less attention than energy, it actually contributes to 34% of global CO2 emissions. Of this, Asia is responsible for 42%. This is not surprising, given that 60% of the global population reside in Asia, andAsia dominates global rice production, which is a major source of agricultural emissions in the region. Given how climate, agriculture and food are intimately tied together, taking action to decarbonise the agri-food sector brings multi-layered benefits. Agriculture and food production depend on climate, yet food production could damage the climate through unsustainable practices like indiscriminate use of water for irrigation, and excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides. We must therefore find practical ways to mobilise the sector, which spans from smallholders to MNCs.     

I am glad that Temasek, together with PwC, Rabobank and Terrascope, are giving focus to the decarbonisation of the agri-food sector in the 3rd edition of the Asia Food Challenge Report.  We will hear more about it later, so I will only highlight three points:

One – the good news is that compared to other sectors, there are ready technologies and practices that can be deployed to decarbonise the agri-food sector. This means that issues are immediately addressable, and we can begin cutting emissions today, and not down the road.

Two – these solutions are win-win for the climate as well as for farmers and corporations. These are often not costly solutions that, when deployed, can lead to higher yield, lower costs, and better profits. For example, Thai Wah, a starch producer is working with its 50,000 smallholder farmers across Thailand and Cambodia to reduce upstream food loss and waste emissions. It has reduced its fertiliser spend and emissions from food loss by creating a high yield fertiliser of fermented tapioca waste. It is also developing slower release fertiliser in bioplastic capsules that can reduce fertiliser run-off and emissions from overuse.

Three – while decarbonisation requires system-level interventions, let us also take a nimble approach by starting small, learning fast, and scaling up. There are many good practices and solutions already out there, so we should leverage platforms like SIAW to learn and cross-share. One example is Jiva, a smallholder farmer services platform that brings financing solutions, microinsurance, advisory services, and harvest purchase directly to farmers in their local communities. By digitalising the agricultural supply chain, it has enabled more sustainable practices to be adopted, which in turn enables farmers to increase their yields and grow their incomes.

Innovation

I have spoken on the first prong of decarbonizing the agri-food sector to build a more resilience and sustainable future. The second prong, is to invest in agri-food innovation, in order to move the needle. Food is a universal need and therefore a universal challenge. We must take a collaborative and open approach to achieve collective progress and impact. Sharing ideas and challenges not only shortens our learning curve, but allows good ideas to scale faster. Here in Singapore, we import more than 90% of our food and are vulnerable to supply shocks and disruptions. We therefore diversify our supply chains to strengthen our food supply resilience. But this is not sufficient as a strategy, given today’s volatile world and climate. Resilience must also be developed domestically, thus our ambitious “30 by 30” vision to build our capability and capacity to sustainably produce 30% of our nutritional needs by 2030. Singapore’s urban, constrained environment means that the solutions we are developing can have applications for other cities too. So let me share three aspects of Singapore’s agri-food innovation journey so far, in hope that we can learn from one another.

Awareness and mindsets

The first is awareness and mindsets. For innovation to take place, there must be awareness and understanding for the issue at hand, in order to build capabilities and sustain capacity. By creating awareness and excitement, we are encouraging Singaporeans to live sustainably, and attract students, researchers, and workers to join a nascent agri-tech sector. We are not starting from zero base as Singaporeans are very passionate about their food! As such, we focused on strengthening awareness of our food vulnerabilities, and bringing innovations to the community. COVID was a learning opportunity because like many others across the world, Singaporeans experienced food supply disruptions and had to spend more time at home.

Our National Parks Board (NParks) decided to give out seeds to encourage households to grow edibles. It was a great way to raise awareness and appreciation for fresh food. I know of many families who continue to enjoy this as a bonding activity, and farming has also become more common in our schools! 

Our high-rise public housing estates have also become “urban kampungs”, with community gardens increasingly becoming a common feature. Our residents can apply for an allotment plot to grow fruits and vegetables; these are often over-subscribed!

Through these gardens, we build up friendly communities of urban farmers who share their harvest with the rest of their neighbours. In my East Coast constituency, we have community fridges for farmers to share their fruits of labour and love with the community – it is a heartwarming example of building community bonds through food!Similarly, the non-profit Ground-Up Initiative has a “Kampung Kampus” in Yishun, where residents can connect with nature through farming and upcycle furniture at the woodwork workshop. These activities instill greater appreciation for sustainable practices.

Growing local capabilities

As I mentioned earlier, we hope that with greater awareness and appreciation, we can grow local agri-food capabilities. For one, awareness helps build consumer support for local urban farms and produce. This often appeals to younger or more environmentally conscious consumers who care about the carbon footprint of their food. Local companies like Eco-Ark and Artisan Green have a good following, for offering fresh, grown-in-Singapore produce.

We are also investing in transforming our agri-food sector, by redeveloping Lim Chu Kang to become “best-in-class” in terms of innovative, sustainable and resource-efficient farming practices. For example, we are looking into stacked farms with different levels of food production – vegetables, fruits, fish – on same piece of land. We plan to apply circular economy principles, such as smart waste management, to fully utilise by-products within the ecosystem.

The Lim Chu Kang project is part of the broader effort to build a robust agri-food ecosystem. In this regard, the Singapore Food Story R&D Programme is our key enabler. The programme covers both the traditional agriculture and aquaculture, as well as non-traditional elements like novel food and ingredients. Like Singapore’s broader RIE efforts, we have grants to support early-stage R&D as well as commercialisation through the Seed Grant and Research Translation Grant, respectively. The objective is to bring different stakeholders and expertise together to co-develop solutions.

There are already success stories with tangible outcomes. A Republic Polytechnic team worked with our research institutes and local aquaculture farms to develop genetic markers to identify faster growing red snappers for selective breeding. This will give our local fish farms high-quality fingerlings. CRISP Meats, a research programme led by A*STAR in collaboration with the Singapore Institute of Technology and NUS, has developed cell lines and a method of replacing certain growth media components, which will enable more efficient production of cultivated meat and seafood. We also provide tailored infrastructure and services to support agri-food startups’ efforts to scale up. The Food Tech Innovation Centre set up by Nurasa has two joint labs operated in partnership with A*STAR’s Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation. It provides shared spaces to spark industry collaborations, and lower the upfront capital costs for alternative protein startups.

At the same time, we are actively fostering partnerships to position Singapore as an innovation hub for urban agriculture. SFA together with NUS and the Economic Development Board signed the Topical Vegetable Breeding R&D Collaboration Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) earlier today with global developer and producer of seeds, Syngenta. This MOU will help our farms become more climate-resilient and boost their productivity.

Creating impact for the world

I have spoken about what Singapore is doing domestically to sustain agri-food innovations – by growing local awareness, and nurture our ecosystem. While Singapore alone is a small population of less than 6 million people, the addressable market for agri-food is regional and global. This brings me to my final point – we want to collaborate, learn and help create impact beyond Singapore. SIAW is our small contribution of bringing stakeholders from all over the world and across the agri-food value chain together, to share ideas, learn from one another, spark new collaborations.

We also welcome everyone to leverage and be a part of our agri-food ecosystem. As I mentioned earlier, the challenges Singapore faces are similar to those faced by other urban cities. We are therefore keen to gather the best ideas and help grow them. Last year, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) and Temasek Foundation co-presented the first Food Grand Challenge as part of The Liveability Challenge, a global crowdsourcing platform to support commercialisation of innovative, sustainable solutions. The Challenge received nearly 600 entries from 82 countries, and eventually awarded $1mil to Singapore aquaculture company TeOra (“tea-or-ra”), which is developing an oral vaccine to prevent and treat Scale Drop Disease Virus. This Virus is endemic in the Southeast Asia region, and affects barramundi. With this grant, TeOra is now piloting its vaccine, If successful, this can enhance disease management and increase yield for aquaculture farms across the region.

I look forward to even more outstanding entries for the 2024 Challenge, which will focus on food resiliency and adequate nutrition.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by reiterating that food is “here and now” global issue. From food supply disruptions, to food insecurity and hunger, we all have a stake in ensuring a sustainable and resilient food future for all.

We must address agri-food challenges together with climate change, for they are mutually reinforcing. By decarbonising the agri-food sector and putting in place more sustainable practices, the agri-food sector can also become more climate resilient.

At the same time, we must continue to drive and invest in innovation, to contribute solutions that can be implemented and scaled to other communities. Every country may have its own innovation and food resilience journey, and I have shared about Singapore’s experience of growing and strengthening our local R&D ecosystem.

The end point must be that we collaborate and share solutions that can benefit more around the world. This way, we can collectively take concrete actions and make a positive impact on the global agri-food landscape, to build a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable future for all.

Thank you and I wish you a pleasant evening.