Suchergebnisse

This policy report proposes that community gardens have the potential to be a reliable basket that adds to Singapore's food supplies, focusing on leafy vegetables. This is given the availability of usable spaces for growing crops on public and private estates, rooftops, schools, organisations/institutional facilities, interim land, and industrial spaces. However, regulatory requirements for farmers to sell their produce are currently tailored for commercial farm establishments and thus conceivably too complex for individual community farmers. Moreover, productivity levels are low given community gardeners' limited time and investments in growing food. This report highlights how digital technologies can help transform food farming to address community farmers' "pain points", making it a more viable enterprise. It concludes with two recommendations: i) to encourage the formation of organised community clusters to navigate the complex regulatory requirements for selling food, and ii) to conduct digital-readiness assessments on community farmers' attitudes towards digital technology adoption.

Singapore's present status of importing over 90 per cent of its domestic food consumption needs is a result of the city-state's deliberate industrialisation policy to transform from third world to first over the past decades, reducing the farmlands for food production from about 15,000 hectares in the 1960s to about 600 hectares today to make room for higher value-adding industries. However, during the March 2019 Parliament Debate, Minister Masagos Zuklifli of the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) had aptly observed that "climate change brings new existential threats." The Singapore Food Agency's website notes the risk that Singapore may not have stable food imports from its food sources. Challenges (droughts, storms, pests and diseases, and climate change) faced by food producing countries could quickly spill-over to importing countries when they put their own domestic food security interests first. This makes food security a transboundary issue, which is beyond the state's direct control. To guard against these threats, Singapore is now aspiring to increase its food self-sufficiency from less than 10 per cent today to 30 per cent by 2030, also known as the "30-by-30" target. Given the high opportunity cost of land, the direction Minister Masagos proposed is to follow the water sector's example whereby self-sufficiency and economic goals are achieved conjointly. Singapore's "Water Story" is about its use of new technologies such as desalination and water recycling to contribute to its 70 per cent water self-sufficiency, while also creating approximately 14,400 jobs and contributing SGD 2.5 billion to GDP.

This NTS Insight highlights a key issue to consider in pursuing an urban food cluster (UFC) for Singapore, and three strategic considerations in addressing this moving forward. Clusters are geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers, firms in related industries, and associated institutions in particular fields that compete but also cooperate. Singapore has succeeded previously in developing clusters for industries such as petrochemicals, water, and biomedical services, increasing productivity growth and production capacity in these sectors. Urban food production has recently been identified as a potential new cluster, building on the rapid growth of agricultural technologies (agtech) which are the intersection of food production with advanced technologies. Apart from productivity growth and production capacity expansion, as was achieved by past clusters, the UFC will also seek to contribute to higher levels of food self-sufficiency and food security in the city-state.

This NTS Report aims to add to the study on the benefits of labour migration, by going beyond the context of intra-regional trade and regional integration, and exploring other structural factors or conditions which allow for migration to have positive impact on wages in receiving countries. This Report, in particular, examines the linkage between labour migration and wages and analyses how the competitiveness of business firms/companies, and the conduciveness of country-level conditions to firm competitiveness, allow for a positive impact of migration on wages. Specifically, we want to examine whether having more competitive firms and providing a conducive business environment to boosting firm competitiveness, allow for wage increases in labour receiving countries, under an open migration policy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been described as a 'once in a lifetime' crisis that has severely upended peoples' wellbeing and security, with potentially long-lasting consequences. Governments have already taken measures to restrict supply chain activities, people movement and food exports. Absent well-thought out preparedness planning and policy responses, the disruptive impact of pandemics can rapidly escalate into a food crisis of global proportions, aggravating problems of malnutrition and hunger, and potentially triggering conflicts. This NTS Insight examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security in Asia, and explores measures that countries can take to 'pandemic-proof' the food security of their constituents to prevent pandemic-induced food crises. It looks at Singapore's approaches in food security as potential best-practices for countries that both produce and import food, and also proposes a roadmap in averting and mitigating the serious consequences of pandemics on food security.

Given the attention to high value local food production, as well as the release of the fixed-price tenders, we conducted an economic analysis of scaling urban agri-tech farms in Singapore for leafy vegetables. The objective of this study is to determine to what extent PFAL-based commercial farming of leafy vegetables can be scaled up, by investigating both the demand and supply of locally grown leafy vegetables. The study is limited to the tendered land by AVA (first tranche, announced in May 2017, for leafy vegetable production), but can be expanded to assess the financial viability of commercial urban agriculture in other settings. Findings will be relevant to cities around the world which face the same land constraints as Singapore; ASEAN countries which share a similar culture and climate; and the local Singaporean government which has embarked on a number of initiatives to further leafy vegetable production in the country.

The Singapore agri-food ecosystem is fast changing from one focused primarily on food security to one which also addresses a new economic sub-sector for export of processed food and "disruptive technologies". Recently there has been a marked convergence of various technologies including FoodTech, AgTech, FinTech and MedTech. In 2019, exciting initiatives were announced which included the development of a new 18 ha Agri-food Innovation Park (AFIP), a new food security strategy of 30% food self-sufficiency by 2030, the launch of the Enterprise Singapore backed Seeds Capital investment for several new AgriFoodTech Accelerators and the launch of the new Singapore Food Agency (SFA) under the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources (MEWR). All these have come at a time when there is an increasing number of new startups and commercial enterprises engaged in farming and food processing, including indoor plant factories growing a range of fruit and vegetables and land-based fish farms. How do all these developments compare with similar ecosystems in successful agri-food countries like the Netherlands? Building on a previous NTS INSIGHT on developing a successful urban food cluster, this INSIGHT will explore ways to successfully integrate the key elements such as research and development; retail and consumers; human resources and education; financing; and policy. It concludes with some foresighted insights on the future direction of the ecosystem.

The adoption of climate-adaptive agricultural technologies (CAATs) for extensive (outdoor) agriculture is stalled by funding gaps experienced by governments in the Mekong countries, with negative implications on the rural farming industry, on income and job security among smallholder farmers, and on food sufficiency and access across the population. We argue that one way of helping bridge these gaps is for providers and users of CAATs for extensive agriculture to learn from the practices of those in CAATs for intensive (indoor) agriculture. Indoor CAATs are already receiving significant private-sector investment, a key reason being their ability to leverage the complementary nature of these technologies within farms that are integrated and enabled to use the so-called Internet of things (IoT). Seamlessly linking different CAATs (sensors, crop analytics, and automation) can allow for synergies that significantly boost crop yields and, in turn, the viability of investing in CAATs. We demonstrate these synergies through two case studies, one that looks at the increasing global investment in indoor CAATs and another that describes a financial viability assessment for an indoor farm in Singapore. We conclude with lessons on how these insights can be transferred to the Mekong countries, including a prototype IoT-enabled extensive farm that integrates multiple CAATs, and an investment assessment tool for translating the yield benefits into terms that investors can appreciate. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance ; DGO