Speech by MOS Maliki Osman at the Youth-AG Summit 2015 Award Ceremony cum Dialogue on Food Security
Jul 28, 2015
I am delighted to join you today at the Youth-Ag Summit 2015 Award Ceremony. It is heartening to see so many young people concerned about feeding our growing population, and coming together to share their vision, ideas and passion in achieving food security.
Challenges of global food security
The global population is projected to increase to 9 billion by 2050. To feed this larger population, global food production must increase by 70 percent. In the meantime, the impact of climate change on agriculture is uncertain. Food crops are also being diverted to the production of biofuels, which contributed to the 2011 global food crisis which saw riots and food export controls, and even accelerated the overthrow of governments during the Arab Spring.
Food security is a complex issue, given the numerous driving forces such as population growth, changing demographics, income growth, urbanisation, climate change, and resource scarcity. It gets even more complicated when we consider the interdependencies within global food system, such as between food, water, arable land and energy, which are scarce in various regions - and we cannot talk about food security without discussing food safety.
Food security is therefore a serious matter which cannot be taken for granted, as critical to our very survival as water. Ensuring food security for everyone will be a daunting task. Given this challenging environment, let me share with you some of the measures that the Singapore Government has taken to make food supply to Singapore secure.
Diversifying food sources
As you know, Singapore is not an agricultural country. Our limited land is needed for many uses - from housing and industry, to commerce and recreation. Currently, less than 1% of Singapore’s land area is used for farming. Without vast tracts of land for farming, we have to turn to imports to meet most of our demand for food. In fact, we import more than 90% of our food.
With such heavy reliance on imports, how then do we ensure Singapore’s food security? The answer lies in diversifying our food supply sources. We import various food items, such as rice, meat, vegetables and processed food products from more than 160 countries all over the world. This helps to spread the risks and mitigate the impact of any crisis on any single food source.
Role of local agriculture
To complement our source diversification strategy, we support local production of key food items such as leafy vegetables, fish and hen eggs, within that 1% of land area that we have. Our agriculture sector, though small, still plays an important role in Singapore’s food security – by buffering us against sudden supply disruptions.
We target to have our farms produce 10% of our leafy vegetables, 15% of our fish, and 30% of our eggs. Our farms currently supply 12% of our leafy vegetable supply. For fish and eggs, our farms produce 8% and 25% respectively today. There is scope for our farms to ramp up their productivity to meet these production targets.
Our farmers however, face many challenges, but two key ones are limited land and limited manpower, which are due to inherent constraints that Singapore faces as a small city state. To overcome these constraints, we will need to rely on R&D and technology to increase local production of food with less land and less manpower.
R&D
We believe that R&D can be a game changer in achieving greater food security for us through developing automation of farming processes, growing higher productivity food crops, and novel solutions that optimise farm land. For example, when I visited the Netherlands and Denmark last year to learn about their food security approach and initiatives, I found that their agri-food sector employs extensive use of technology and automation. A lettuce farm which I visited cultivates different varieties of lettuce in a controlled and fully automated environment. The farm uses robotics to move the seedlings and young plants across the different stages, with gutter water treatment through the downstream flow of water and nutrients thus minimising wastage of resources. The farm requires only a few workers to operate.
In Singapore, we want to create an enabling environment for leading agricultural companies to set up their facilities and carry out agricultural R&D; and we are poised to do so with our good R&D infrastructure, robust intellectual property regime, pro-enterprise tax and financial environment. A case in point is Bayer CropScience, the organiser of the Youth Ag-Summit. Bayer CropScience has been operating a rice research laboratory in Singapore since 2011, which uses cutting-edge technologies to develop new varieties and hybrids.
Technology adoption
In addition to R&D, our farmers need to be prepared break away from conventional methods of farming and adopt technologies and innovations that could help them raise their productivity.
Some of our farmers have experienced for themselves what technology can do to raise production. Sky Greens, a vegetable farm in Lim Chu Kang, has built greenhouse towers that rotate racks of vegetables vertically to get sunlight. It has the potential to produce close to five times more vegetables per hectare of land compared to conventional vegetable farms. Very interesting, if you have time, do go and visit. This is the time you bring vegetables to the water, and not water to the vegetables. In Tuas, Panasonic is producing vegetables indoors using a multi-tiered L.E.D. lighting – another solution to produce more food with less land. Another interesting technology where I never realised we could use red lights and blue lights to grow plants and vegetables.
Our farmers need to adopt new technologies not just to increase their productivity, but also to better control external conditions that will affect their farm output. For example, for the last two years, our coastal fish farmers at the Johor Straits have been affected by mass fish deaths. Earlier this year, close to 90% of our fish farms in the East Johor Straits lost up to 600 tonnes of fish due to plankton bloom, which could be triggered by unusual weather and elevated concentration of nutrients in the water. I had personally seen fish farmers lose their entire fish stock overnight.
This episode highlights the importance of building a resilient agriculture sector. We need to leverage technology to minimise the impact of external conditions on our food supply. To this end, the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority, or AVA in short, awarded a tender to five companies in March this year under the Co-Innovation Partnership Programme (CI Partnership) to develop a system that can isolate fish from adverse seawater conditions when needed.
As climate change progresses, the need to protect our food production from the environment becomes even greater, not just for fish, but for the growth of other food as well. Our farmers must consider modernising their farming methods so that they are better protected in the longer term.
The Government is ready to help our farmers do more. For instance, AVA has worked with our vegetable farmers to testbed new and innovative farming technologies. To further support our agriculture sector, AVA has in place a $63 million Agriculture Productivity Fund to assist our farmers build farm capability, invest in transformational farming systems, and conduct R&D in innovative production technologies.
Joining the sector
To address the manpower challenge, we need to attract and nurture more young Singaporeans to join the agriculture sector and develop the manpower capability to help transform the industry and achieve higher productivity. Traditional, agriculture work involves strenuous back-breaking work in outdoor conditions, and often it is difficult to get people who are willing to take up such work. Many other developed countries face this problem too. Thus, it is all the more important to use technology to reduce reliance on manpower for farming.
With R&D and automation of manual work, we aim to enhance the professionalism and professionalise the image of farmers so that our young people will be more receptive to a career in high tech farming. Continuing to rely on foreign manpower would not be sustainable for our farming industry in the long run. I hope some of you here would consider a career in our agriculture sector, as it contributes to Singapore’s food security.
Food wastage reduction
Other than food production, it is also important for us to take steps to minimise food wastage too. Currently, 30% to 50% of all food produced in the world is wasted. If this wastage is minimised, it would go a long way to meeting the 70% of additional food that needs to be produced by 2050.
Food wastage can occur at any point along our food chain - at industry premises, retailers, households and even individually. For example, manufacturers and supermarkets may choose to filter and discard food products that do not look like they are at the peak of quality, although still edible.
At the consumer level, we tend to take our access to food for granted in Singapore. It is not uncommon to see plenty of leftovers on the tables of restaurants, particularly during buffets, wedding lunches and hawker centres after meals, or to buy too much food from the supermarket only to throw them away when they expire. Or, upsizing our value meals when you don’t actually need to upsize meals. It troubles me to see good food being thrown away as we should not be wasting resources unnecessarily. It is both a practical issue of reducing our food reliance, as well as an ethical one. Today, there are almost 800 million undernourished people in the world who desperately need the food that we cast away without a thought.
I would like to see more youths to be involved in initiatives to reduce food wastage reduction. An example of such initiatives is a Bread Re-distribution programme organised by one of my residents’ committee (RC). On a weekly basis, nearby bakeries would send “day-old” bread that is a few days to expiry to the RC centre, and the grassroots leaders would repack them for distribution to low income families in the community. This has also assisted families in alleviating their challenges in providing food for their children, and they appreciate the value of reducing food wastage. There is much that we can do. I encourage young people to explore various opportunities where you can help out to reduce food wastage.
There is scope for everyone to do their part to reduce food wastage, starting with simple things like our shopping habits in the supermarkets and choices in restaurants and hawker centres. For example, not taking more than what we need at buffet spreads or deciding carefully before we decide to upsize our value meals.
Food safety
Food security encompasses not just a resilient food supply and food wastage reduction, but food safety as well. Indeed, with food scares both past and present, from the melamine contamination in milk products from China a few years ago to the current reports of plastic rice, ensuring that the food on our tables is safe to eat is all the more crucial.
Food safety in Singapore is in line with international standards. AVA has put in place an effective integrated food safety system to ensure that food is safe for consumption. In fact, in recognition of AVA’s food safety system and expertise, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) endorsed our Veterinary Public Health Centre (VPHC) as Southeast Asia’s first OIE Collaborating Centre for Food Safety last year.
However, no system is foolproof without the collaboration of the industry and consumers in Singapore. We need to play our part as consumers. We all handle and consume food in one way or another. We need to take personal responsibility, which involves simple actions such as selecting our food carefully and keeping our food at safe temperatures. The assurance of food safety is a shared responsibility.
International cooperation
At the international level, countries need to be vigilant, strengthen their food safety systems, and share information and intelligence with each other. Food security is not an issue that concerns only Singapore, but also other countries. In this inter-connected world, all countries play a part in strengthening global food security. In this aspect, Singapore has signed an MOU with the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) just last month on technical cooperation in areas such as food security and nutrition, food safety, sustainable fisheries and aquaculture. This partnership would support capacity development and increase expertise, knowledge and technology transfer between Singapore, FAO and other countries, to advance our common interest in food and agriculture.
Youth activism
I believe our youths can do more in the area of food security – from simple individual actions in our daily lives to ensure food safety and reduce food wastage, to participating in platforms like this Youth-Ag Summit where our youths can exchange ideas on the topic of food security with youths in other countries. The two award recipients, Shao Cong and Su Chin, will be representing Singapore at the Global Youth Ag-Summit 2015 held in Canberra, Australia in August. I hope they will have an inspiring and fruitful exchange with the Summit’s participants and return to lead innovative projects to have more young people advocate for food security and food safety issues.
Conclusion
On this note, I wish you an enjoyable afternoon, and congratulate the two winners. I hope you have a good discussion on food security and food safety. Thank you.