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In May 2010, I was invited to Brunei to give two lectures on agriculture. At the time, the government there had just launched a plan to become more self-sufficient in rice production to promote greater ‘food security’ – a goal Brunei still holds today, along with greater ‘sustainability’. After one of my lectures, I was asked by a journalist what I thought of the plan. My sense at the time was that this plan was wrongheaded, and I said so. Brunei is a tiny, super-wealthy sultanate composed mainly of tropical rainforest on the ecologically fragile island of Borneo. The country’s wealth was (and still is) based overwhelmingly on oil and natural gas. I suggested that the sultanate carry on with carbon, and purchase the rice it needed from neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia, which is, after all, the buckle of the world’s rice belt. In other words, pursue your comparative advantage, rather than divert resources to produce a cheap, basic commodity relatively inefficiently on bad soil in an unsuitable setting.
Alas, the country is still plugging away on its rice plan, which hasn’t gone all that well. After years of assiduous efforts and considerable investment, in 2024 Brunei produced 8 per cent of the rice it consumed, up from 4.8 per cent in 2017, which means it is still a long way from self-sufficiency.
Fortunately for Bruneians, the sultanate easily gets all the rice it needs from neighbouring countries, as Southeast Asia has long been a rice-surplus region. I would argue that, if Brunei remains insistent on achieving greater self-sufficiency in rice, it would do better to buy or lease farmland and hire agriculturalists elsewhere to grow rice for the sultanate than try to raise rice for itself.
The Brunei case is instructive, or it should be. As a result of the short-term supply-chain disruptions of the COVID-19 period, countries around the world have been pushing for greater food security and greater sustainability, come hell or high water, and, in so doing, paying insufficient regard, in my view, to the opportunity costs involved. Safety-first strategies rather than strategies promoting efficiency are all the rage these days, and it behooves us to raise a caution flag or two before we go too far down the ‘security’ path. A deep dive into one of the most unusual – and sophisticated – of such efforts, that undertaken in Singapore, is instructive in this regard, for it illustrates the real possibilities and the potential pitfalls of the security/sustainability approach.
Singapore’s interest in both water and food security, and sustainability more generally, has long, tangled roots. In part, it grew out of governmental policy initiatives to ‘green’ the city-state since independence in 1965. Urban ‘greening’ was seen by the People’s Action Party (PAP) – which has ruled Singapore from the pre-independence period to the present day – as both conducive to public health and a means to boost tourism. An important generator of foreign exchange, tourism was particularly important early on, as Singapore strove to climb the developmental ladder ‘from third world to first’, as the legendary PAP leader Lee Kuan Yew put it. Singapore succeeded spectacularly in this effort – it is now among the wealthiest countries in the world – and, as its population became richer, it increasingly supported green policies, reflecting a preference to ‘buy environment’.
The PAP was cognisant of such consumer preferences, which dovetailed with its own strategic plans, and hopped onto the climate-change bandwagon beginning in the early 2000s. Fearful of what might happen to the low-lying island just north of the equator should temperatures – and, more ominously, sea levels – rise, should severe weather ‘events’ become more frequent, and should the climate in general become more unstable, the PAP became a strong advocate of climate-change mitigation, and greater sustainability and food and water security. By buying into the mainstream climate narrative, going green, decarbonising and promoting more sustainable practices across the board, the PAP at once demonstrated its ‘wealthy nation’ OECD-like chops and signalled to Singapore’s more sophisticated and independent voting population that the venerable ruling party wasn’t fossilised but could in fact change with the times. The Singapore Green Plan, launched in 2021, reflects such priorities, including among its five key pillars the goal of rendering Singapore a true ‘City in Nature’ by 2030.
The fact that sustainability dovetailed nicely with another complementary PAP goal, national resiliency, facilitated things further. One could argue that under PAP leadership, independent Singapore was always concerned with resiliency – toughness, the ability to bounce back quickly, and to withstand, even absorb, shocks to the system. That said, the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 and the aftershocks of the Great Recession, as well as the upheavals and disruptions associated with two public health crises – first SARS in 2003, and then COVID-19 in 2020-23 – encouraged the PAP to double down on resiliency qua strategy. While the strategy had many dimensions, ranging from fiscal prudence and financial independence to social inclusion and solidarity, greater water and food security were right up there. Singaporean leaders had long been anxious about the degree of dependence the island-nation had on Malaysia for its freshwater supply, and the food supply-chain disruptions (real and potential) associated with the COVID-19 pandemic motivated the PAP leadership to push for greater sustainability and self-sufficiency in both the supply of freshwater and in domestic food production on the island, preferences made manifest in policy and practice.
The issue of importing water has proven controversial – and, from a Singaporean perspective, dangerous
Let’s start with freshwater supply, where Singapore’s quest for sustainability and self-sufficiency goes back a long way. Small islands the world over typically suffer from limited supplies of freshwater, which has often led their governing authorities to intervene, sometimes massively, to ensure adequate supplies for drinking, sanitation, etc. Singapore is unexceptional in this regard and, pre-independence, the British colonial government created several reservoirs in the country, beginning with the MacRitchie Reservoir, completed in 1867, followed by the Lower Peirce Reservoir, in 1910, and the Upper Seletar Reservoir, in 1940.
In addition to drawing water from the reservoirs, Singapore began importing significant quantities in pipelines from the state of Johor in Malaysia in 1927 and has continued to do so ever since, principally via water agreements signed in 1961 and 1962. The issue of importing water has proven controversial – and, from a Singaporean perspective, dangerous – no time more so than in 1965 when the Malaysian prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman related to the British high commissioner to Malaysia Anthony Head that ‘If Singapore’s foreign policy is prejudicial to Malaysia’s interests, we could always bring pressure to bear on them by threatening to turn off the water in Johor.’ To be sure, Tunku’s statement must be contextualised – it was made during the heated Konfrontasi between 1963 and 1966 involving Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore – but Singapore’s leaders never forgot this implied threat. With so much of its freshwater being imported – at least half, at the time of independence – they have therefore worked diligently over the past half-century both to price water efficiently and to strengthen and diversify their hydrological portfolio in order better to ensure water security.
Singapore’s government has tried to structure and shape demand for water by pricing it as a scarce but invaluable resource, rather than a ‘free’ good. At the same time, it has also dramatically improved technologies for water capture, collection, ‘harvesting’, treatment and storage on the island. It has done so through a variety of deft public-sector interventions, ranging from innovative rainwater collection to additional reservoirs – the construction of the Marina Barrage, which allowed for the transformation of salty Marina Bay into a freshwater reservoir, is a case in point – to the construction of the country’s surface and underground drainage systems to damming river estuaries around the island.
Moreover, despite intermittent tension and disagreements with Malaysia over the terms of existing and possible future agreements, Singapore has been able to maintain long-term rights to import a significant quantity of water – both raw and treated – at a fixed price from Johor until 2061. However, because of uncertainties regarding the future of water imports thereafter, Singapore’s leaders began pursuing other water-supply strategies too.
In the early 2000s, Singapore pushed to develop two major new sources of supply: reclaimed water (branded NEWater) and desalinated water. Scientific knowledge relating to both water reclamation and desalination had been around earlier but, by the first decade of the 21st century, the technology had improved sufficiently and the price points reduced enough to initiate reclamation and desalination projects at scale in Singapore. NEWater – reclaimed from ‘used’ water through reverse osmosis, microfiltration and UV technologies, and safe for drinking – was introduced in 2002, and the first desalination plant commenced operations in 2005. Adding these water sources to the two older ones led Singaporeans to speak of the country’s ‘Four National Taps’ – a term first used in 2004 by Lim Swee Say, minister of the environment – with the proportion of water imported from Malaysia falling to about 40 per cent by 2009.
Although the country’s population and demand for water have both increased significantly since independence, Singapore’s leadership has dealt successfully with water scarcity on the water-constrained island, through focused attention, long-term planning and sufficient resource commitments. As a result, most experts believe that, even with climate change and continuing demand growth, Singapore’s freshwater supply should be ample, safe, secure and sustainable through the remainder of the 21st century, with more and more of its freshwater being derived from the two newest ‘taps’. The hope, even expectation, is that in 2061, when the agreement with Malaysia terminates, roughly 85 per cent of Singapore’s water needs will be met via treatment or desalination.
Regarding water issues, then, Singapore has enjoyed great success. On the other hand, its recent aggressive efforts to ‘grow’ agriculture on the island are more questionable. Their principal manifestation thus far was the government’s now-jettisoned ‘30 by 30’ Plan, issued in 2019, the goal of which was to produce 30 per cent of the food Singapore’s population consumes, by 2030. In 2019, Singapore imported more than 90 per cent of its food, so this goal was ambitious. Perhaps more ambitious still was the additional goal of doing so while still using less than 1 per cent of Singapore’s land for food-producing activities.
Even after adding ‘eating out’, the total spent on food in Singapore is 20 per cent of household income
Since few citizens or permanent residents in Singapore today envision agricultural futures for themselves, the type of agricultural system or systems planned would be highly capital-intensive and knowledge-based for the most part, which has led more than one observer to suggest that ‘30 by 30’ was as much about providing a platform for Singaporeans to develop greater expertise and experience in agribiotech as it was about achieving greater self-sufficiency in the provision of food on the island. If that was in fact a major goal, I would have been more bullish on the initiative, for I believe that Singapore’s food security already rests on a platform sufficiently strong – its wealth, location and strength in transportation and logistics – to render its population food-secure come hell or, more likely, high water. My argument here is supported by the following two points. Point one: according to the World Bank, the share of GDP accounted for by agriculture in Singapore is the joint-lowest of any country/region in the world, along with Hong Kong, Aruba and San Marino. Point two: the proportion of household income spent on groceries in Singapore is about 7 per cent, which is the lowest figure of any country for which we have data (except for the US, where the proportion is slightly lower still).
Singaporeans love to eat out, of course – not for nothing were the country’s hawker stalls awarded World Cultural Heritage status by UNESCO in 2020 – but, even after adding the ‘eating out’ component to food consumption, the total proportion spent on food in Singapore, about 20 per cent of household income, remains quite low by global standards.
At present, food security doesn’t seem to constitute much of a problem either, and The Economist seems to agree. The magazine’s Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) periodically compiles a global food security index. As recently as 2019 – the year ‘30 by 30’ was launched – the EIU ranked Singapore number one in the world (out of 113 countries included) in terms of food security. In 2022 – in the midst of COVID-19 – Singapore dropped somewhat (to 28 in the EIU rankings), mainly because of changes in methodology, which accorded more weight to ‘farmer-focused’ measures and the ‘first mile’ criterion, that is, ‘the segment of agriculture that links farmers to the nearest market’, as well as measures relating to resiliency.
At this point, a bit of historical context is needed regarding agriculture in uber-urban Singapore today. It might surprise some that the island was once the site of considerable agricultural activity, including by Malay and Chinese farmers for centuries before British colonisation began in 1819.
With the coming of the British, agricultural production increased and intensified, with some of the production occurring on larger, more commercialised and more specialised sites. In addition to a small subsistence sector, some farmers specialised in the production of foodstuffs for the growing urban population on the island, while others established larger farming operations to produce plantation crops such as gambier, spices, pineapples, coconuts and, later, rubber.
Such activities continued throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th century too. Plantation crops were largely abandoned after the Second World War, pig farming was phased out in 1989, and chicken production has declined precipitously. But small-scale farming activities have continued – fruits and vegetables, flowers, and fish farms mainly – right up to the ‘30 by 30’ Plan in 2019. That said, the combined contribution of agriculture, forestry and fishing activities to Singapore’s GDP in 2024 was negligible – rounding to 0.0 per cent, the joint-lowest percentage for ‘agriculture’ in the world – down from 3.1 per cent in 1965.
The downward trajectory of agriculture in Singapore has been closely monitored by its government, which has long been concerned about the nation-state’s resiliency. The shortages and logistical logjams associated with the 2007-08 financial crisis, which disrupted the rice trade in Southeast Asia, and the broader product shortages related to COVID-19 shutdowns around the globe heightened interest in resiliency. As a result, the government, ever vigilant, has devoted more time and effort to anticipating such shocks and preparing to withstand them via scenario planning, building redundancies and slack into the country’s systems, and developing sophisticated protocols and policies for communication and messaging.
The resiliency mindset and its policy toolkit provide the context for ‘30 by 30’, at least in part. Concerned about the ‘volatilities of the global food market’, the Singapore government launched the ‘30 by 30’ Plan in 2019. Given the physical limitations posed by Singapore’s small size, the fact that the population of the country is essentially 100 per cent urban, and that the government remained committed to devoting less than 1 per cent of the island’s land to agriculture, the plan’s aim was impressive indeed. No one has ever accused the Singaporean government under the PAP of lacking brain power, of being unserious, or of being unrealistic, so just how did government planners, working in tandem with the private sector, expect to meet their primary goal?
Clearly, moving to 30 per cent from less than 10 per cent over the course of a decade proved overly ambitious
Simply put, through big pushes to aggressively innovate the food and agriculture space (broadly conceived to include efforts to extend the frontiers of agribiotech); further promote automation in food production and processing; reimagine forms of agricultural organisation and fish cultivation; introduce/elevate the consumption of novel foods; stimulate the development of precision nutrition; and reshape consumer education. Thus far, innovations in agribiotech, particularly moves into ‘lab-grown’ cultured meat (grown from cells in bioreactors) and in reorganising agricultural spaces – vertical agriculture (indoor farm towers, rooftop production, and ‘closed-containment’ aquaculture farms) – have probably received the most international attention, but such efforts merely scratch the surface of recent Singaporean innovation in food and agriculture. For example, a large part of a new ‘eco-district’ in the northern-most reaches of Singapore will be devoted to an 18-hectare public-private project called the Agri-Food Innovation Park at Sungei Kadut, launched in 2019.
Although construction of the park has been delayed – it is now scheduled to be completed in 2026 – many of the innovations mentioned (and others) are already being implemented in other parts of the island. Singapore emerged as a centre of lab-grown meat production by 2022, but by 2024 cultured meat (and seafood) production had slowed considerably, as high costs, difficulties in scaling up, and consumer resistance (or indifference) surfaced, setting back prospects for a number of startups on the island and elsewhere, leading some to cease operations. In addition, in 2024 the Singapore Food Agency authorised the sale of 16 species of insect for food use on the island, but heavy regulation requirements have slowed things down in this area too.
On the other hand, efforts at further automation in chicken-egg production have gone well, innovations in the aquaculture industry have grown that market, and the production of vegetables in vertical silos by companies such as Sky Greens has proven viable, if costly because of high energy costs. There is potential for production of fruits – strawberries, for example – in such silos, and Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay urban park has demonstrated that flowers can also do well when grown vertically.
Research endeavours in precision nutrition are flourishing in Singapore R&D facilities at universities and with private companies – Danone Nutricia Research’s Precision Nutrition D-Lab at Biopolis (a public/private biomedical R&D centre in Singapore) being the most obvious example. And the Singapore Food Agency, which was founded in 2019, has been working hard since the advent of ‘30 by 30’ to promote local food production and local food consumption.
Given the government’s track record over the past 60 years, I wouldn’t completely rule out Singapore’s impressive food-security goals over the long run. But, clearly, moving to 30 per cent from less than 10 per cent over the course of a decade proved overly ambitious. Through the year 2024, the percentage changes in hen-egg production, vegetable production, and local seafood production – the three main product groups emphasised thus far – proved modest, with hen-egg production increasing (by 6 percentage points), but vegetables and seafood declining (by around 1 percentage point).
Indeed, in the 2024 report, the government already seemed to be easing away from the ‘30 by 30’ heady rhetoric, emphasising the diversification of Singapore’s food-supply chain – currently at 187 countries/regions, up from 140 two decades ago – and now referring to local food production as a ‘complement’ to a ‘multi-pronged approach’ to food security, rather than a ‘buffer’ or ‘insurance’ policy to help mitigate supply disruptions going forward.
This shift in emphasis was all to the good in my view because the logic behind ‘30 by 30’ always struck me as questionable when it was first announced. Bluntly put, was forced-draft production of food locally the best way to ensure food security and resiliency on a tiny, totally urban island such as Singapore, a place whose comparative advantages today clearly lie elsewhere than in primary production?
Perhaps – I have great respect for the PAP and its strategic thinking – but perhaps not. Food security comes in many varieties, and resiliency has opportunity costs, sometimes steep. To me, Singapore’s best route to food security is to continue to pursue its well-earned comparative advantages in trade, logistics, FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate), high-tech manufacturing, management, educational services and R&D, and travel and tourism. Specialisation in such activities has made Singapore one of the most developed, wealthiest countries in the world, and, according to The Economist in 2019, the most food secure. Moreover, getting local food production up to 30 per cent seems somewhat arbitrary, without compelling justification – why 30 per cent rather than 20, 40, or 50 per cent?
In addition to security and resiliency, another rationale for Singapore’s ‘30 by 30’ Plan was sustainability. Singapore has attempted to ‘go green’ in a big way over the past 20 years, and reducing the country’s carbon footprint by becoming less reliant on imported food should be seen as part of that effort. But Singapore’s raison d’être historically has been as an entrepôt or trade post – it has long had one of the world’s highest trade-GDP ratios – and reducing the margin on food imports won’t change things that much. Given its size, Singapore’s carbon footprint amounts to a small rounding error in global carbon accounting, no matter what policies the country adopts.
To my way of thinking, the best means for Singapore to ensure food security is to carry on with the policies that have made it so successful – and so wealthy – since independence. These revolve around global engagement and pursuit of the country’s comparative advantages. As wealthy as it is, and as sophisticated as its trading and logistics systems are, it seems highly unlikely that it will ever fall short of foodstuffs, particularly as it’s in the midst of one of the world’s most bounteous food-producing areas. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776): ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ And there are – and likely will always be – many parties willing and happy to serve their own interests by providing food to Singapore and Singaporeans. To use concepts first developed by Amartya Sen, one of the great theorists of famines, Singapore and Singaporeans have both ample entitlements (the rights to which they have access) and ample capabilities (the freedom and resources they have to claim such entitlements), rendering the issue of food insecurity in Singapore largely moot. The fact that Singapore’s food-supply chains are sophisticated and varied, and that markets for food in Southeast Asia are neither monopsonistic nor monopolistic, inspires further confidence that food will be there for Singapore and for Singaporeans.
As with sustainability and security, so with resiliency. Resiliency generally involves baking redundancies into a system and the baking process often has very high opportunity costs. Increasing production of bayam, bok choy, kangkong and okra can be justified in decision-making terms as a satisficing strategy, but the opportunity costs for urban, highly developed Singapore seem high. Arguably, there is also some psychic income to be gained by growing more of your own food, and some virtue signalling (and tourist dollars) in burnishing your green bona fides. But, in my view, the best case for ‘30 by 30’ was in the potential knowledge gained – particularly in agribiotech – which had R&D implications and presumably applications in areas where Singapore has embedded and growing comparative advantages: biology, chemistry, and pharmacology.
What then is the verdict on Singapore’s water and food strategies? It seems fair to say that the efforts to achieve greater self-sufficiency and security in water were as appropriate and well-conceived as they were successful. The wisdom of the ‘30 by 30’ strategy regarding food less so, as the government itself now seems to agree. In mid-November 2025, it dropped the ‘30 by 30’ goal, despite all the earlier hype, and set a less ambitious target of 30 per cent for home-grown protein, and 20 per cent of fibre (leafy and fruited vegetables, beansprouts, and mushrooms) by 2035. Reality bites, at least to some degree, even in Singapore.
Other nation-states around the world are grappling with related issues regarding food and water security, often considered in terms of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for zero hunger and clean water and sanitation. Singapore effectively met these goals long ago, and would perhaps do better to focus, as other high-income countries often do, on reducing food waste, improving supply-chain efficiency (which it is doing), and encouraging sustainable consumption, rather than trying to meet arbitrary metrics regarding home-grown leafy and fruited vegetables, beansprouts and the like.