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Singapore was once rated as one of the world's most food secure countries. Though 90% of their food is imported, it is imported from 170 plus countries around the world. But in 2019, climate change concerns led the government to try to produce 30% of its nutritional needs locally by 2030 without greatly expanding farmland.
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They called it 30 by 30.
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But the policy struggled to find its footing. And in November 2025, the government waved the white flag and dropped it in today's video. Singapore's failed local agricultural aspirations the right goal at the wrong time Singapore is a tiny island nation with a large population of about 6 million people to support. At the time of Singapore's independence in 1965, about 60% of the food eaten by its 1.6 million people was grown on the island. This included 25% of its vegetables and 100% of all of its pork, poultry and eggs. The island had over 20,000 family farms and total cultivated land was about 13,160 hectares, about 22.5% of the island's then total land area of 58,150 hectares. But as the country began to develop, more land was needed for factories, infrastructure and housing. In the 1960s, housing alone consumed about 520 hectares of land each year. Major works like the 1971 Ring Concept Plan, which set the foundation for Singapore's current development, showed major challenges for the agricultural sector's long term future. Then, in the 1970s, environmental concerns arose regarding runoff from the pig farms, poisoning the country's various water sources. Thusly, in 1974, the government tried to address this by relocating all commercial pig farming to the Punggol area. Half a million pigs were relocated, a.
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Great effort that they pulled off.
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The government encouraged farms to compensate for shrinking land with improved production via economics of scale and intensification. Essentially, do more with less. Sounds like my dad's advice. But farms struggled with labor and the unstable market conditions inherent in farming. And the land decline Trends relentlessly continued. Fifteen years after independence in 1979, those 13,160 cultivated hectares in Singapore had declined to 50,595 hectares. In 1980, just 267 hectares were available for growing vegetables. After rapid economic growth in the 1970s, agricultural activities had fallen below 2% of GDP, hitting 1.3% in 1980. Some argued that eliminating agriculture would actually boost GDP growth in island cities like Singapore, because land was such a growth limiter. In March 1984, Singapore began phasing out all its pig farms, blaming the runoff, pollution issues they positioned the move as part of a transformation to a first world country. A month later, First Deputy Prime Minister Dr. Koh Kang Sui said in a press conference that the Singapore government no longer aimed to be self sufficient in pork, chicken and eggs. Instead, he said that Singapore should focus on its competitive strengths and buy food from other countries. For the remaining pig farmers, a rough blow. They had followed government guidance relocating to Penghgu a mere few years earlier, installing automated feed systems and even building a waste treatment plant. One farmer bitterly lamented, it was the government that encouraged us to set up commercial farms in Punggol. We responded, and what happens? As late as 1986, Singapore produced 73% of its own pork, 68% of its eggs, 41% of its chicken meat and 11% of its fresh vegetables. These numbers collapsed soon after the phaseout of the pig farms and others was completed. The government then selected farms in sectors seen as technologically advanced and consolidated them in agro technology parks in the island's isolated northwest areas. Then Chukang, Mandai, Marai, Sungy, Tenga and Luoyang.
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So all in all, the only farming.
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Left happens on about 600 hectares and or about 1% of Singapore's total land.
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Basically at the fringes. Singapore's amelioration of its food import dependency has been largely to diversify. They often say that they get food from over 170 nations. Teams are regularly sent overseas to try and develop new sources. A perfect example of this working happened in 2022 when Malaysia curbed chicken exports to Singapore due to higher costs and effects from disease. Netizens and media exploded with concerns about things like Singapore's famous Hainanese chicken rice. But supplies smoothly switched to chicken from Indonesia. The country, like others in Southeast Asia, also stockpiles critical foods. Rice importers, for example, are required by law to stockpile about two months of rice. But Singapore also stockpiles wheat, eggs, flour and milk powder. Basic stuff. In 2019, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Singapore as the most food secure country out of 113. This was based on criteria like affordability, availability, quality and safety. Yet the economists also noted Singapore's lack of natural resources. And concerns remain about potential food security risks beyond borders and as well as potential over reliance on certain countries. There's historical examples of this risk. In 2007 and 2008, Singapore and the rest of Asia suffered sudden price increases in grains like rice, wheat and corn. I briefly covered this event in a prior video. Concerns about this eventually led to an effort to revitalize to a degree Singapore's local agricultural capacity 30x30 in 2018, the Singaporean government consolidated the food related functions of various departments into a single statutory board called the Singapore food Agency, or SFA. The following year, March 2019, Singapore Minister Masagos Zukeeffli of the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources set a visionary goal for the SFA in a Parliament speech. In his speech, Zukeef Lee noted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that climate change will cause crop yields to decline by 25% and cut arable land per capita in half. Food scarcity via climate change is a real problem. At the same time, he cited the successes that Singapore has had in water the water story as it was referred to. I've covered the water story in another video. Basically, it's the narrative of how Singapore, once very dependent on raw water from Malaysia, became 70% self sufficient in water thanks to long term investments in new water technologies and bold water use policies. Singapore has been investing in local food production since at least 2009, starting with a small 30 million Singapore dollar AVA food fund. But now Zuqi Flee challenged Singapore to go further to apply the same energies and principles from its water story to diversify the country's food supply, reprocess food wastes and promote a high tech, climate resilient style of agriculture. The ultimate goal would be to locally produce 30% of Singapore's nutritional needs by 2030, ergo 30 by 30. This was officially set in November 2019 and the SFA would take the lead. Most people recognized that the goal was technically not impossible. It sort of depends on how you define 30% of nutritional needs, which was never really concretely defined. In 2019, Singapore's 77 vegetable farms, 3 egg farms and 122 fish farms produced about 13% of green leafy vegetable demand, 10% of fish demand and 26% of egg demand. If we focus on green leafy vegetables, 13% is about 11,800 tons. So raising that to 30% means another 18,700 tons, which doesn't feel impossible. Many reports pointed to vertical farms like those demonstrated by the Japanese company Spread company if their high yields scale, then Singapore can hit its 30% target on just 14.55 acres of land. But it will not be easily achieved. Local companies will have to work hard to keep costs low and be competitive with imported food. Many overseas governments subsidized their agricultural sectors, which Singapore was not going to do. Ministers even then emphasized that 30x30 was an aspiration to strive for rather than an explicit go, and it's worth noting that SFA hedged by planning to continue diversifying its food import sources and work with local farms to grow food on overseas land. But Singapore likes to say that challenges are opportunities. SFA pointed to the growing number of vertical farms in the country, vertical aquaculture farms, and changing consumer perceptions towards healthier, sustainably grown food. Singapore felt it would be possible to develop these technologies at home for domestic use and then pivot to exporting them abroad. The Singapore Food Agency's 2019-2020 annual report lists a multi pronged strategy. First, they needed to find new lands for growing food as well as make the most of what they have. The 2019 report mentions commercial farming on buildings, deep sea aquaponics and redeveloping areas to do cultivating and processing side by side. Perhaps the centerpiece of this effort was the Lim Chu Kang area in northern Singapore, one of the island's few remaining undeveloped areas. In October 2020, SFA announced that it would redevelop the area into a 390 hectare agrifood zone. Fully master planned, the zone would accommodate many vertical farms. Centralized water and waste infrastructure would help demonstrate principles of the circular economy, putting waste to productive use and growing more with less. Second, the SFA set aside 144 million SGD to research sustainable urban food production and food waste recycling. More speculative things like alternative proteins and aquaculture will also be explored. Third, SFA offered grants to local farms. The first such initiative kicked off in April 2020 when the SFA called for grant applicants interested in local food production in eggs, leafy vegetables and fish. Fourth, there were efforts made to develop agrifood talents through partnerships with educational institutions. One such effort was a collaboration with Republic Polytechnic for a part time diploma program in urban agricultural technology. Fifth, they would enroll the support of the Singaporean public and get them to prefer locally grown food, even if it might cost a little bit more than the imports. Sixth, the SFA will work to provide a good regulatory environment for firms, making sure they can get approvals and favorable treatment. For instance, Singapore taxes the special machinery imported for vertical farming. Exemptions would need to be secured. You might have noticed by now that 30x30 actually predates the COVID pandemic, but the goal's themes gained special resonance when Covid disrupted the world's supply chains. Singapore's food chains held, but it only reinforced the lesson to be learned. Unfortunately, Covid also threw a wrench into early efforts to get 30x30 off the ground lockdowns and travel Restrictions made it harder for builders to get foreign workers and construction materials. But when the pandemic drew to a close, people in Singapore remained optimistic about 30x30s prospects. Restrictions were being lifted and the supply chain pains reinforced the need for local food. So as 2021 turned into 2022, things seemed back on track. The 2021 SFA Annual Report plentifully discussed progress on the 30x30 goal, including the development of the Lim Chu Kan master plan. Then suddenly in 2022, the world's geopolitical and economic situations drastically changed the full scale. Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 massively disrupted world supply chains. Its disruptions caused food and energy prices to rise as Europeans switched away from Russian gas. Electricity prices fluctuate, but in 2021, low tension supply cost about 22.7 cents per kilowatt hour. That jumped to 28 cents in 2022 and eventually nearly touched 30 cents in 2024. The 30x30 plan depended on vertical farms, where rows on rows of food are grown in climate controlled environments. You get easier transportation, higher yields, fewer carbon emissions and less water use. The major downside is that vertical farms use a lot of electricity and 95% of Singapore's energy comes from natural gas, the prices of which skyrocketed due to the geopolitical situation. One estimate by Paul Tang and Steve Kim at Nanyang Technological University notes that strawberries in a vertical farm in Russia required 1,404 kilowatt hour per square meter per year, as compared to 0.4524 for a regular farm in Chile. So 3,000% more electricity. Though maybe it's a bit of an exaggerated comparison because Russia gets no sunlight and Chile is one of the world's finest agricultural zones. But a 2014 simulation somewhat confirms these results, showing that vertically farmed vegetables would use 15 gigawatt hours of power per hectare as compared to traditional farming's 1.75 gigawatt hours. So at least eight to nine times more. Singapore gets a lot of light and there are vertical farms that use raw sunlight. But that is no panacea because light intensity varies between the top and bottom shelves and you still need electricity to run the climate control and water systems. It's a data center, except you're churning out cabbages instead of ChatGPT tokens. Guess which one does better economically? Then the US Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. The USA had been in a zero or near zero environment for many years, including 0% in the early days of the pandemic. But with inflation rising in wake of COVID stimulus and the war, the Fed does their first increase since 2018 in March. Aggressive rate hikes follow thereafter, and by July 2023 the target range was 5.25 to 5.5%. Indoor vertical farms are businesses like any other, perhaps a little more capital intensive than your average shop and so rely on investors funds. Higher rates make breakeven on those funds much harder. Capital dried up. Venture capital investments in the agritech space declined 60% from 2021 to to 2024. Perhaps there was some gravity effect from ChatGPT in the AI boom. And with regards to funding, Singapore's scheme was well meaning but suffered serious flaws. The SFA's grants only addressed capital costs associated with setup, nothing with inherent ongoing operating costs. Moreover, they wanted to eventually re export whatever agricultural technology was developed. So looking to upscale, SFA focused on funding only high tech. In other words, speculative agritech plays with high risk. Farmers wanting to use more ordinary proven methods got little attention. One of the SFA's goals was to convince local Singaporeans to buy locally grown food, even at a premium. The marketing outreach included a SG Fresh Produce logo system, farmers markets, chef and restaurant collaborations, and a national messaging campaign regarding the Singapore food story. Emotional appeals were made. Website copy in 2020 went grown in Singapore. For Singapore, locally farmed food is closer to home, which means it is fresher and has a lower carbon footprint. These efforts were earnest but failed to address the core issue the substantial price gap between local food and imports. Those gaps only widened after 2022. Food prices overseas eased thanks to strong growing seasons in Brazil, the US and Southeast Asia. Shipping and container prices were also declining, making it cheaper to ship goods abroad. Yet LNG energy prices inside Singapore did not recede the same way as natural gas projects take three to five years to come online. A 2024 article in the Vertical Farm Daily puts it rather starkly Imported leafy greens carry an average price tag of $2 per kilo, whereas indoor farm products are sold in 200 gram packages between 3 and $4, Singaporeans might be willing to pay a little more for local food, but seven times more meh. And with the government unwilling to subsidize any farming operating costs, a policy that dates back to at least 1980, the farmers were left high and dry throughout 2023 and 2024. Failures rocked the alternative protein, cultivated meat, aquaculture and vertical farming spaces. In 2020, a San Francisco startup called Eat just announced a $100 to $120 million manufacturing facility in Singapore to produce their plant based protein products like Just Egg. The Singapore government then issued a groundbreaking commercial regulatory approval of Eat Just's lab grown chicken, thus allowing a restaurant called 1880 to offer nuggets to the public for the first time. But the category's progress stalled. A meat production facility slated to open in 2023 got delayed and finally canceled in March 2024. SFA's officials also noted issues with consumer acceptance of these alternative proteins, some probably cost related but others probably stranger. I'm not sure Singaporeans are yet ready to eat bugs. Not every day anyway. Singapore's infant vertical farming and aquaculture industries also suffered with multiple failures or retreats hitting The News In 2022, a company called Vertiveggies received a land grant to build a vertical farm inside the Limchoo Kang area, but failed to finish the construction within the three year timeline. So in April 2024 they returned their land plot to the SFA. A month later, in May 2024, another local farm startup called Indoor Farm Factory Innovation or Iffi Iffy ceased operations. They had been founded back in 2019 and had hoped to build Singapore's first indoors mega farm and receive one of SFA's first 30x30 land grants. So their loss was a bitter one. As well as the Dutch firm Grohe, which officially launched an 8,000 square meter vertical farm in November 15, 2024 using technologies developed in the Netherlands. But they did not last an entire year, winding UP operations in November 7, 2025. I should note that these failures were not exclusive to Singapore. Vertical farms across the world were struggling or even failing during this time Bore Refarming and Plenty Unlimited in the United States, both once valued at over a billion dollars in farm indoor urban farming in Germany, Jones Food company and Vertical Future in the UK all were hit by the same problems, though it should be added that the Singapore government did.
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No favors for their local farmers.
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If you grab the SFA's thrilling tome Starting a Farm in Industry Guide version two, you might notice the need to interface with 10 agencies for approvals, and the guide's own timeline notes that it can take up to 106 weeks to get started. By contrast, approvals for a US farm might take eight to 20 weeks if you have the land on hand, 60 if you do not have it or want something heftier. By 2025, the 30x30 goal seemed beyond saving, and in March the government officially confirmed that a review of the goal was underway. And then in November it was replaced with targeted reduced goals by 2035 20% in fibers like leafy fruited veg, bean sprouts, mushrooms. Right now that Metric is at 8% and 30% in protein, including eggs and seafood. Right now that is at 26%. Both of these seem rather doable by 2035. When announcing the replacement, Sustainability and Environment Minister Grace fu remarked that 30x30 was aspirational from the very beginning, and she highlighted successes like hen egg self sufficiency clucking up to 30% and bean sprouts shooting up to 50%. But overall self sufficiency in target categories like vegetables had actually worsened. Work for the aforementioned Lim Chu Kang development project had caused local farms to shut production in 2023 in preparation for a move. If those farms come back Then then the 20% fiber goal seems much achievable, and planning for the Agri Food Zone is still in progress, but the futures of it and others like it remain up in the air. 30x30 is one of the Singapore government's bigger public failures in recent years, a rather rare one, but I'm glad that they tried. Food self sufficiency is a worthy goal, but lessons need to be learned on how to better encourage that, especially considering Singapore's formidable structural disadvantages. All right everyone, that's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel, sign up for the Patreon and I'll see you guys next time.