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SINGAPORE – Local produce could potentially be aggregated and supplied to hawkers to help create more “predictable and consistent” demand for farmers, said Mr Melvin Yong (Radin Mas) in Parliament on Aug 7. This was among suggestions put forth by MPs to better support the ailing farming industry, following a spate of farm closures and falling food production in 2023. Other suggestions raised included using grant funding to help offset some operational costs, and expanding government support to help farms scale up and commercialise. The MPs’ suggestions come in the wake of recent farm closures in Singapore’s nascent agricultural sector, with players such as I.F.F.I and Sky Greens Most recently, The Straits Times reported that citing issues related to rising costs and challenges linked to biosecurity measures. Agriculture sector observers and experts had cited high electricity prices and lack of local demand as among the main culprits behind the challenges that the industry faces. To that end, the Singapore Agro-Food Enterprises Federation (Safef) has been working to help aggregate demand and supply for locally produced vegetables and fish from some farms, to sell them to consumers at lower prices and garner more local support. The farms’ operating costs are reduced by maximising efficiencies in logistics, branding and packaging.  Mr Yong asked if collaboration could be extended to supply a collective pool of local produce to hawkers through hawker associations here. “This can result in a win-win outcome where farmers get more certain demand, and our hawkers get fresh, quality local ingredients,” he added. In response, Senior Minister of State for Sustainability and the Environment Koh Poh Koon said that the suggestion was something that Safef and the local farms are prepared to explore. “But it is not a straightforward issue of trying to ask the hawkers to buy from the aggregator, because many of these hawkers and many of the businesses have already established relationships with specific suppliers, and it’s probably not so easy for them to change this kind of relationship overnight,” said Dr Koh. “If there are particular hawker associations, groups of hawkers in a particular locality who are keen to come together to do some... group-buying, I think Safef will be prepared to work with them and discuss the longer-term contracting models, where there’s more consistency of supply and good quality, and there’s also better demand for the farmers themselves,” he added. Mr Yong also suggested using the $60 million Agri-food Cluster Transformation (ACT) fund to offset high operating expenses faced by farms – in particular, rising electricity costs. The ACT fund comprises co-funding components for local farms to help them build and expand their production capabilities and capacities, so that they become more highly productive, climate resilient and resource efficient. In response, Dr Koh said that the fund has been enhanced with energy efficiency programmes so that farms can tap the fund to do energy audits, and see if equipment or processes can be altered to adopt more energy-efficient measures. “It could involve things like adopting more solar panels, so that you can actually get some renewable energy sources that could well be cheaper than energy from the grid. So these are measures that farms can adopt to defray some of their operating energy costs,” he added. As for directly offsetting a farm’s operating costs, Dr Koh said that this will be something that is “quite challenging” because it will end up having the perverse effect of paying for an inefficient player to offset the cost, and will eventually have a detrimental effect on taxpayers. He added that the Government wants to fund farms to help them change the way that they operate, to ensure a more sustainable future for them. As at end-April, some $25.7 million of the $60 million ACT fund has been used for 42 companies across 68 projects, noted Dr Koh. Ms Cheryl Chan (East Coast GRC) asked if the ministry will consider helping farms beyond just grants, and look into areas such as research and development, scaling and commercialisation, as farms increasingly move towards more resource- and energy-efficient models of agritech production. For example, this could come in the form of actively curating technologies that “may actually be functional” and introducing them to businesses so that farms here could be successful. In response, Dr Koh reiterated that the ACT fund has a technology adoption component that allows farms to adopt technology that already has “some degree of curation” by the expert panels, and has a proven track record. The fund also has provisions to allow farms to innovate using current technologies, he added.