Each week, TODAY’s long-running Big Read series delves into the trends and issues that matter. This week, we look at the issue of food security, which is no longer taken for granted by Singaporeans amid the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a shortened version of the full feature,​ which can be found here.

SINGAPORE — It is rare to see visitors at Yili Farm given its remote Lim Chu Kang location and the unsavoury odours of vegetable fertilisers permeating the farm, but things were different on February 7 and March 17

Many people rushed to supermarkets to snap up daily essentials in the two days when Singapore’s disease alert level was upped to orange, and when Malaysia was about to impose a nationwide lockdown respectively.

Some decided that it would be a good idea to head to Lim Chu Kang to buy fresh vegetables right from the source, recalled Miss Toh Yingying, 24, business manager of Yili Vegetation and Trading. They left empty-handed.

“This has never happened to us before. They thought vegetables from Malaysia would run out,” said Miss Toh.

The latest bout of mass buying petered out after Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on March 17 the flow of goods and cargo from Malaysia would continue during the lockdown, having received reassurances from his Malaysian counterpart, Mr Muhyiddin Yassin.

With the movement of goods across the Causeway mostly unaffected during Malaysia’s lockdown, Singapore appears to have dodged a bullet. And even if the lockdown affects Malaysia’s ability to produce food for itself, Singapore’s robust food diversification strategy would mean there is no real cause for concern.

However, if the Covid-19 pandemic rages on globally, the rising number of quarantines and nationwide lockdowns could diminish agricultural labour and threaten global food production. This could put unprecedented pressure on Singapore’s food security, said experts. Then, there is also the issue of climate change.

It is a new reckoning for Singaporeans on the island’s food security — an esoteric concept for many but one that has worried authorities and academics for decades.

“With Covid-19, the urgency of Singapore’s food security has suddenly cropped up again,” said Mr Veera Sekaran, one of the directors of indoor vertical farming firm VertiVegies.

SELF-RELIANT, DIVERSIFIED APPROACH

Singapore has planned for food supply disruptions for years, putting in place a comprehensive strategy after the food crisis of 2007 and 2008, which saw the global prices of food shoot up dramatically due to trade shocks, rising oil prices and food stocks diverted to produce biofuels.

The Singapore Food Agency (SFA), which was formed in April last year, places the country’s food security as its core mission.

As a result of all its planning, Singapore topped the Global Food Security Index of 113 countries by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2018 and 2019.

Dr Cecilia Tortajada, senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s Institute of Water Policy, said nevertheless, Singapore’s main challenge is its high dependence on foreign produce. The Republic currently imports more than 90 per cent of the food it consumes.

Explaining why this is so, Professor Paul Teng, an adjunct senior fellow at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies in the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said that unlike bigger nations, Singapore is forced to be self-reliant because it lacks natural resources, ample land and water.

Food security at the household level is linked to per capita wealth, he added. Most Singapore households spend a relatively small portion of their incomes on food and thus have a “buffering capacity” should prices surge in response to supply declines. Thus, food security and rising prosperity goes hand in hand.

Singapore has strived to import from as many sources as possible. This is the first part of Singapore’s “three food baskets” approach — to diversify its sources of imported food, encourage firms to grow food overseas, and expand its local produce industry.

Today, Singapore’s food imports come from over 170 countries and regions around the world, up from 160 in 2007. It is a culmination of years of sourcing trips and prudent procurement decisions to ensure that the nation will not starve.

Such a strategy provides resiliency to Singapore’s supply of food, said Prof Teng. Disruption from a single source may hurt, but it is not a complete wipeout if the country has the ability to quickly top up the shortfall from other sources, said experts.

Singapore has demonstrated this resiliency time and again over the years.

The latest instance was just days after Malaysia — the source of more than 90 per cent of the island’s imported eggs — announced at around 10pm on March 16 that it would be locking down its borders from March 18 to 31.

On March 19, Minister of Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing posted pictures of a “special cargo” of more than 300,000 eggs arriving at Changi Airport by air freight from a non-Malaysia source, understood to be Thailand — one of several alternative sources.

Today, the number of hen shell eggs imported from sources other than Malaysia has increased from an average of 1.4 per cent of total imports in 2018 to 5.7 per cent of total imports in December 2019, said an SFA spokesman in response to TODAY’s queries.

Another prong of the three-basket strategy is to encourage Singapore’s agricultural firms to grow food abroad and scale-up during “peacetime”, and bring the produce back to the country in times of crisis.

Mr Eric Ng, chief executive of land-based vertical fishery Apollo Aquaculture, said his firm is able to take advantage of lower costs by locating part of its operations in Brunei through a joint venture with the Brunei government. Produce from Brunei can be shipped or flown back to Singapore during a national crisis in “a very short time”, he said.

WHEN A PROTRACTED CRISIS HITS

Despite the best-laid plans, a prolonged and escalating crisis, such as what the Covid-19 pandemic is shaping up to be, may still push Singapore’s diversification strategy to its limit.

Such a crisis entails a widespread impact on the world’s food-exporting countries, including the key sources that Singapore imports significant amounts of food from, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Brazil, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa and the United States. This is Singapore’s “Achilles’ heel”, warned Prof Teng.

When it comes to that, there is another layer of defence: the national stockpiles. This is where the Ministry of Trade and Industry, which operates the Rice Stockpile Scheme, comes in.

In a bid to reassure Singaporeans, Mr Chan had revealed on March 17 that more than three months’ worth of carbohydrates, like rice and noodles, are stockpiled. For meat and vegetables, Singapore has more than two months’ worth of supplies at normal consumption patterns.

Eggs, which do not fall under the stockpile scheme, have similar safeguards. Since April last year, egg importers have been required to provide the SFA with a viable business continuity plan to mitigate the impact of supply disruptions, said an SFA spokesman.

However, what has been difficult to anticipate and to plan for are the socio-psychological responses to perceived food shortages, Prof Teng said. The recent supermarket runs do not necessarily mean that food is unavailable, but they show the limits of resupplying amid the unplanned rush, added Dr Tortajada.

HARVESTING LOCAL PRODUCE IN TIMES OF CRISIS

If the stockpiles run dry, what comes next would be unchartered territory for Singapore, said Prof Teng.

Food rationing could be imposed, and Singapore could tap regional stockpiles such as the Asean Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserves. It could also work out new bilateral trade deals with countries with large export stockpiles, he said.

Singapore could also drastically ramp up its local food production, Prof Teng added. Currently, less than 10 per cent of Singapore’s food is locally grown.

In March last year, Mr Masagos said that by 2030, Singapore aims to provide 30 per cent of its nutritional needs with homegrown produce, using less than 1 per cent of its land area.

Mr Veera Sekaran believes it is possible to scale up as long as the Government leads the way. “Farming is not rocket science, and there is land on rooftops, underneath expressways that all can be converted for this purpose,” said Mr Sekaran.

But agricultural practitioners say the issue of urban farming and local produce has always revolved around commercial limitations — the price of locally grown food will always be higher than imported food due to the costs of land, manpower and raw materials here.

Mr Edvin Lim, director of egg producer Chew’s Agriculture, said it will take at least six months to ramp up the local egg production, as the chickens need about 18 weeks to grow before they start laying eggs. “It is not a matter of supply, but of commercial demand,” said Mr Lim. “We are very willing to ramp up production provided the market can absorb it.”

Progress towards Mr Masagos’ 2030 target will require time and effort to work out the kinks, said Miss Toh of Yili Vegetation. “We got to figure out how to make the technology, which we think is still not yet mature, work for us. Most high-tech indoor farms end up growing kale, not kangkong,” she added.

THE BIGGER THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Intensifying local farming is not the only way to raise production — advances in food technology raise the possibility of manufacturing novel foods, such as food substitutes and alternative proteins like Impossible Meats and Quorn.

These innovations could pave the way to more productive and more sustainable methods of producing food. Building a soy-based meat patty takes a fraction of the time, manpower, land and raw material costs of rearing an animal.

“Traditional meat production methods are often land and water intensive, and generate high levels of emissions. Today, alternative proteins... are poised to become game-changers,” said Mr Masagos in the budget debate this month.

Climate change is a serious challenge to Singapore’s food supply strategy and is a far more profound crisis to tackle than Covid-19, he had warned.

If perfected, novel food technologies could be the answer to the seeming paradox of food security: Destructive land-use practices to grow food ends up putting food security at risk. Such growing trends in agri-food technologies means that an agriculture industry in land-scarce Singapore is “very feasible”, said Dr Tortajada.

But Prof Teng said getting Singapore consumers to change their dietary preferences or to pay for higher priced, but more sustainable foods, is tricky. Aside from the generation that lived through World War Two, Singaporeans never had to confront the lack of choice in food. “What would Singaporeans settle for as food substitutes when there is a real crisis of food shortage?” he said.