Securing the Resilience of Local Farms

Food is Defence: Securing the 2035 Targets

Gerald Giam (Aljunied)

9 Sep 2026

Mr Speaker,

Our local agriculture sector is a vital component of our national resilience, yet it continues to face severe structural headwinds that threaten its long-term viability. 

Today, we are debating a motion to enhance food resilience and support efforts to ensure Singaporeans have access to an affordable food supply amidst geopolitical uncertainties and climate-related risks. While I agree with the intent of this motion, achieving genuine food resilience requires an earnest review of the structural market forces that are currently encumbering our local farmers.

In November 2025, the Government replaced our national commitment to produce 30 per cent of our nutritional needs locally by 2030—known as the “30 by 30” goal—with revised 2035 targets of 20 per cent for fibre and 30 per cent for protein, citing pandemic supply shocks, high energy and manpower costs, and tough financing conditions. 

While SMS Zaqy Mohamad explicitly acknowledged the need for substitute demand, the Government’s primary remedies remain overwhelmingly focused on automation and agri-tech grants. 

Helping entrepreneurs build high-tech farms while leaving them to compete against cheap imports creates a deep inconsistency: trying to solve a demand-side shortfall with supply-side fixes. 

This reliance on capex-heavy supply fixes carries a fundamental flaw. Without more certain off-take, continuous supply-side grants risk creating projects that rely heavily on grants but fail once funding ends. Our farmers built what we asked them to build. The missing piece was not the grant—it was the buyer.

​Without assured demand, local seafood and vegetable farms often operate below their installed planting capacity, struggling to compete against cheaper imports despite heavy technological investments.

To ensure the new 2035 targets do not suffer the same fate as the original 30 by 30 target, the Government needs to bridge the demand gap by reforming its procurement framework. I propose modernising public procurement to secure Singapore’s food resilience—to move away from qualitative preference points toward binding, structural procurement of local produce. The objective is to achieve the revised 2035 local production targets by dynamically leveraging institutional demand and resolving the issue of caterer margin compression. 

We must first recognise the structural limitations of the current tender framework. When I raised a Parliamentary Question in November 2024 regarding local food uptake by major institutional buyers like the SAF and public hospitals, Minister Grace Fu highlighted qualitative preference points awarded under the Farm-to-Table Recognition Programme. 

While awarding bonus evaluation points in GeBIZ tenders is a useful first step in signalling intent, evidence indicates that it has not driven mass-scale volume uptake in critical categories. According to the Singapore Food Agency’s Singapore Food Statistics report, released in June 2025, locally farmed vegetables accounted for just 3 per cent of total domestic consumption, while local seafood dropped to 6.1 per cent.

There are three key reasons that this policy could be failing to drive purchase volume.

First, because GeBIZ tenders prioritise price competitiveness, caterers using premium local produce must absorb the price gap directly into their own margins, disincentivising purchases beyond the bare minimum.

Second, caterers can meet SFA’s 15 per cent Farm-to-Table threshold by buying low-cost items that already have price parity—like eggs or beansprouts—completely bypassing local leafy greens and fish.

And third, static one-to-two-year GeBIZ contracts demand fixed, long-term supply volumes. Because small high-tech farms cannot risk committing to fixed tonnages over two full years, they are locked out of public tenders—leaving them without the guaranteed off-take they need to scale.

Proposals

To address these limitations, I would like to propose four procurement approaches that can be implemented in Singapore.

Proposal 1: Set Institutional Procurement Targets

First, we must set institutional procurement targets tied to the 2035 goals. The Government must lead by example. Rather than only awarding discretionary evaluation points, public institutions such as the SAF, public hospitals and government ministries should aim to purchase local produce beyond the national 2035 targets. Specifically, they should set an institutional baseline of 35 per cent for protein across seafood and eggs, and 25 per cent for fibre via vegetables, within their catering budgets. Expanding this into binding institutional procurement targets across all public sector catering creates the guaranteed off-take our farmers desperately need. 

State-level ring-fencing of institutional food budgets is a viable global model. For example, the European Commission introduced a draft proposal to mandate that fruit, vegetables and milk bought through its 220 million euro annual schools scheme must be made in Europe, explicitly prioritising domestic industries and local farms with low climate footprints over cheaper foreign imports.

To ensure compliance with Singapore’s Free Trade Agreements and the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement, which generally prohibit discriminatory non-tariff barriers, the Government can utilise perfectly legal workarounds. Under Article 23 of the WTO GPA, an explicit general exception is made for procurement necessary for the protection of essential security interests. Given that local food production is a matter of national security, this provision can be invoked. 

Alternatively, procuring entities can legally set aside specific procurement thresholds for SMEs, naturally preferencing our local small-scale agricultural producers without violating national treatment rules. 

While this is not an exhaustive list of legal workarounds, the point is that workarounds are possible with sufficient political will.

Proposal 2: Rebates for the purchase of SG-certified produce

Second, the Government should provide an automated flat-percentage rebate, such as a 25 per cent cashback, on all SG-certified produce purchased by institutional caterers. This figure should be calibrated to bridge the typical baseline price gap between local high-tech produce and cheaper regional imports, in order to achieve greater price parity.

To avoid overburdening caterers with manual invoice submissions, this rebate could be integrated directly into business-to-business distributor-level reporting. When a caterer buys from a certified local aggregator like the Singapore Agro-Food Enterprises Federation Limited (SAFEF), the wholesale system logs the public institution contract code and automatically triggers the rebate credit from the Government, requiring minimal extra paperwork from the caterer.

This adapts the demand-side principles of the US state of Michigan’s 10 Cents a Meal for Michigan’s Kids and Farms programme. According to the programme’s 2023 to 2024 Evaluation Results published by the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems, a US$3 million state investment generated an estimated US$10.2 million in economic impact, reaching 594,000 children. 

By using an automated block rebate, Singapore removes administrative friction while achieving the same margin protection for buyers.

Proposal 3: Dynamic Food Procurement digital exchange

Third, we must build a B2B Dynamic Food Procurement digital exchange. While SAFEF’s SG Farm app tracks production metrics, it is not a transactional marketplace. A dedicated digital exchange allows institutional caterers to order flexibly from a pooled network of local farmers based on daily yields, bypassing rigid multi-year tenders. 

Similar dynamic procurement models were successfully piloted in the UK’s Monmouthshire County and recommended in their National Food Strategy to direct public spend to local growers.

Proposal 4: Buyers Posting Forward Demand

Fourth, instead of expecting farmers to plant blindly and pray for buyers, institutions should post upcoming procurement requirements so farmers will sow precisely what is needed for harvest. This can be done using the Food Procurement digital exchange.  Connecting demand directly to planting schedules provides farmers with predictable, long-term orders while giving caterers full visibility on incoming yields.

Public institutions can be instructed by the Government to share their forward demand on this platform. If we begin with the public institutional buyers, the local farming sector will readily plug into the system, as aligning with this forward demand will become the clearest pathway to securing predictable, long-term orders.

Fiscal Impact

To assess the fiscal impact of a flat cashback for institutional buyers, we can model the annual cost based on an order-of-magnitude estimate of public sector demand. 

Across our major institutional buyers—including army camps, about 12,000 public hospital beds and 6,500 individuals in our prison facilities, total catering contracts across these core domains conservatively exceed S$300 million annually. It would be helpful if the Ministry could publish the actual consolidated public sector food procurement figures to enable an accurate evaluation of the scale of our institutional purchasing power.

Because raw ingredients typically account for roughly 30 per cent of total catering contract values, this represents a S$90 million total addressable ingredient market. However, because local farms produce fresh vegetables, eggs and seafood rather than staple grains or red meats, our targets focus on fibre and protein. 

Under my proposed institutional targets of 25 per cent for fibre and 35 per cent for protein, caterers would procure approximately S$23 million to S$32 million worth of SG-certified local produce annually. 

Applying a 25 per cent cashback rebate strictly to this local off-take brings the total cost to the Government to between S$6 million and S$8 million annually. This modest annual expenditure stands in stark contrast to supply-side interventions like the initial S$60 million Agri-food Cluster Transformation Fund and its subsequent S$70 million top-up, which averages roughly S$14 million annually over five years. 

Reallocating or matching even a fraction of this capital into a targeted demand-side rebate guarantees immediate off-take revenue for our local farms, and will be vastly more capital-efficient than repeatedly pouring tens of millions into supply-side grants for infrastructure that risks sitting under-utilised without guaranteed buyers.

Conclusion

Mr Speaker, SMS Zaqy himself rightly identified the need for substitute demand. However, identifying the problem is only the first step. We need to follow through with active solutions, especially for the farmers who have poured their life savings into their farms, believing in Singapore’s food resilience ambitions. If we are serious about not repeating the failure of 30 by 30 when we arrive in 2035, we cannot keep pouring capital into supply while leaving demand to chance. 

I urge the Government to study these structural reforms, which can be implemented at a modest and well-justified fiscal cost to secure a resilient, sustainable future for local food production.

I support the motion.