Mr Speaker
The motion before the House today is topical. The issue of Singapore’s food security and resilience is a thorny one, and many will remember Covid era images of panic-buying emptying supermarket shelves, and the hoarding and stockpiling of food items like eggs. With various wars, blockades and their attendant disruptions to supply chains and increase in prices, it is no wonder that our attention is once again focused on how we feed ourselves. More recently, we have also been hit with a wave of food business closures, with heritage names like Ka-Soh and Warong Nasi Pariaman permanently shuttering. These joined the more than 3,000 businesses that closed in both 2024 and 2025, and over 2,000 between January and July this year alone. And even when the number of new food outlets opening may be more than those closing, the sense of loss and concern as we hear about yet another well-known food outlet closing down is much harder to measure or compensate away.
Likewise, the fear of what happens should we run out of food is a visceral one, and when we layer on relentless well-loved food business closures, we start applying a scarcity lens to frame the issue. While we quite rightly need to understand and properly tackle the complex challenges our nation faces in feeding our people, scarcity means we focus too much on how much we grow, how much we import, what happens if we run out. But scarcity is the wrong starting point. It leads us to only look at defensive policy that can hit its own targets while still leaving Singaporeans hungry. Scarcity on a macro level also means that we risk not addressing the lived food insecurities that many of our fellow Singaporean households face.
Singapore must not hit supply-side targets on paper, yet still leave vulnerable households food-insecure. The 2019 Hunger Report – now more than six years old – estimated that around 10% of Singaporean households face food insecurity. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, covering 2022-2024 found that 9,5% of our population – over 500,000 people – experienced moderate to severe food insecurity, with 3,5% experiencing severe food insecurity, meaning insufficient food quantity and risk of physical hunger. This report found that prevalence has tripled comparing 2014-2016 against 2022-2024. Scarcity asks if we have enough food, but the question is not whether food exists in our country, but whether every household can reliably access and afford it, even under stress.
This is why I hope to today expand on the speech that I made during the debate of the Food Safety and Security Bill in January 2025, to land our attention squarely on our food resilience.
Food resilience can be broken down into three pillars:
Exposure;
Sensitivity; and
Adaptive capacity.
Exposure measures how exposed we are to external shocks, sensitivity measures how much harm a shock will actually cost, and adaptive capacity measures the ability of households and the system to absorb and recover from shocks without lasting damage.
Exposure
First on exposure. Our high land, labour, energy costs and consumer uptake means that despite many previous attempts at boosting local food production, we still import over 90% of our total food consumption. Our previous 30 by 30 target was ultimately a scarcity target: it asked how much we grow, not how resilient we are. The Singapore Food Story 2 strategy that replaced this dropped target last year narrows and refines these targets to 20% of our fibre needs and 30% of our protein needs to be met locally by 2035.
My colleague Dennis Tan spoke on the challenges that still remain to local food producers. What I would note is that our aggregate national supply has, in fact, held up through real shocks — through COVID, war-driven price spikes, and global protectionism. We did not run out of food. One read of this is that the system-level resilience we have built through import diversification, overseas partnerships, and now stockpiling, has kept our larders stocked. But yet we are still seeing rising food insecurity among our own people, then the vulnerability we should REALLY be worried about lies elsewhere, and it is one which the scarcity lens may be inadvertently obscuring, food insecurity experienced by households.
Sensitivity
Next, sensitivity. Importing the majority of our food supply naturally leaves us highly exposed to price fluctuations and supply chain shocks. Sensitivity measures how much harm such shocks will cause.
Singapore is ranked the world's most food-secure nation by the Economist Intelligence Unit. But this ranking can hide important nuances at the individual or even community level. For example, research on food insecure pregnant women at KK Women's and Children's Hospital published just last year found that food insecure pregnant women often present with higher than average body weight while suffering real deficiencies in the form of low haemoglobin and vitamin D. This suggests that sometimes food insecurity in our wealthy nation can hide behind seeming abundance.
When we zoom out to the general population, the 2019 study estimated over 500,000 of our people live with moderate to severe food insecurity. It is even more sobering when we realise that this study was done in the context of ‘business as usual’ pre Covid, and in nation top ranked as food secure.
For food insecure households, one can only imagine what effect a crisis would have on them. Even without one, they already find it difficult to eat well. Every day, members of these households face having to make difficult choices about how much they can afford to eat, and when they need to forgo a meal in favour of another pressing daily need. Worse, international studies suggest there is even a gendered dimension to this, in the form of a phenomenon known as ‘maternal buffering’ – that is, mothers in food insecure households giving up nutrition in favour of other family members, often at the expense of their own wellbeing. A recent New Zealand study heart-breakingly illustrates this. Mothers described reducing their own portion sizes, reserving the most nutritious foods for their children, skipping meals, eating minimally, giving quotes such as ‘a piece of bread will fill you up’, and even masking hunger with water.
While I could not find Singapore-specific studies on this phenomenon, these descriptions are not unheard of in my interactions with constituents. We need to more fully understand the magnitude of this problem here, especially since improper nutrition also adversely affects emotional and mental health – an issue I brought up during the debate on the Mental Health motion back in 2024.
The government may point to the plethora of assistance schemes already in place. But intention is not reach. Nor does it account for the simple fact that we are dealing with human beings. The New Zealand research I mentioned earlier also noted that we have to look beyond ‘lack of awareness’. There were reasons such as embarrassment, the belief that other families needed it more, or just dejection, which prevented food insecure families from getting the support they needed. Here in Singapore, it is worth noting that the Hunger Report found only 22% of food-insecure households received any support. Of those, only one in five felt it made a lasting difference, suggesting that the problem is extremely complex.
Mr Speaker, if we take sensitivity seriously, our obligation is not just to ask whether Singapore has enough food. We must also ask whether every household, especially those least visible to us, can reliably access and afford it, in good times as much as bad. We need a fresh, nationally representative study updating the 2019 Hunger Report, so this House is no longer relying on six-year-old data for a problem the FAO tells us has multiplied over the years. Any review of support schemes must also begin with harmonising eligibility across ComCare, food banks, and community assistance, so access does not depend on which door a struggling family happens to knock on first.
Boosting our Adaptive Capacity - Accessibility to Nutrition
Mr Speaker, if sensitivity asks how deeply food insecurity already harms our people, adaptive capacitytakes this further. It asks that when a shock hits, be it a price spike, a rent increase, a hawker forced to raise prices, can each household's different needs still be met, or does our system offer the same rigid response regardless?
Underpinning this is how we must strive to ensure that all households have access to safe and nutritious food. Crucially, we also must not stigmatise those who seek help. Research has found that shame often remains one of the most persistent barriers keeping food-insecure households from obtaining the support meant for them, and that we have to address what these different households need. These range from a mother using water to stave off hunger so that her child can be full, a disabled elderly person unable to cook for themselves, or a family forced to choose between keeping the lights on or buying more fibre and protein.
How can we ensure every household can access what it needs? My Sengkang colleague Louis Chua earlier proposed tapping the existing CHAS card system to provide tiered discounts at hawker centres, coffee shops, and supermarkets, with Blue cardholders receiving the highest quantum. This approach uses infrastructure we already have, and critically, gives recipients autonomy to decide for themselves whether they need cooked food, groceries, or other essentials, rather than people sitting in an office deciding for them.
Another resource to tap on to boost our adaptive capacity already exists: our hawkers. Historically, hawkers provided us with affordable, accessible cooked food that kept our families fed. Yet in recent years, hawkers have struggled, exposed to rising rentals and operating costs. These costs inevitably pass through to their food prices.
Mr Speaker, beyond one-off rental rebates, we need more systemic reform, and this should extend to how many of our hawker centres are run in the first place, specifically, SEHCs.
Since 2011, new hawker centres have been handed to private operators to manage, for a fee. NEA however remained the sole agency responsible for planning, building, and maintaining every one of our existing centres. And after more than a decade, the government's own data show that occupancy, stall turnover, satisfaction and even rents appear to be broadly comparable between SEHC and NEA-managed centres. If these core outcomes are already comparable without the additional layer, what then does management fee actually purchase? Even One Punggol, run by an experienced operator since opening, saw that operator exit early over operational difficulties. The government's response there was that viability depends more on catchment, amenities and connectivity than on which operator is in charge. NEA should thus publish a proper like-for-like assessment — controlling for age, location and catchment — comparing net expenditure, hawker viability, and satisfaction. And when the next SEHC contract expires, we should be willing to pilot direct NEA management and let the evidence, not assumption, decide whether this middle layer remains necessary.
This is why we have called for all hawker centres to come back under direct NEA management. It does not mean that every useful function currently performed by an SEHC operator must disappear. Where specialist expertise genuinely adds value, those capabilities can still be developed or procured. NEA can retain the direct relationship with our hawkers and build up its own institutional expertise rather than assuming that professional management necessarily requires a middle man in the form of a master tenant.
Boosting Adaptive Capacity – Reorientating the way we eat
Mr Speaker, another way in which we can boost adaptive capacity is to further reorient our plates around local produce. But ask any household doing their grocery run, and the reality is this: local produce still costs around 30% more than the imported alternative. For a family watching every dollar, “buy local” or “champion local” isn't really an option for them.
Despite schemes like the SG Fresh logo, local vegetable and seafood consumption has continued to decline. Fairprice also recently pulled produce from at least three local farms off its shelves, even as our farmers contend with rising costs that only widen the price gap. Consumer goodwill alone will not reverse this.
If we are serious about our new fibre and protein targets, we need to tackle both sides of this equation: cost, and demand.
On cost, our farmers still operate individually, each absorbing energy, manpower and rental pressures alone. We must explore cooperative structures which allow local farms to pool costs. On the Farm-to-Table Recognition Programme, could qualifying criteria be strengthened over time, paired with preferential credits or tax relief that actually translate into lower prices for diners at FTTRP establishments, rather than rely on goodwill or exposure alone?
For demand, institutional buyers can move volumes individual consumers cannot. In July, seven urban farms struck wholesale deals with buyers like SATS and central kitchens, which is worth scaling. In this vein, I want to bring up a point I made in January 2025: given our ongoing struggles to feed our children well in schools, could central school catering be combined with a community-supported agriculture arrangement with local farms? This is more extensively built on in my Aljunied GRC colleague Gerald Giams’s speech, and would build both a demand pipeline for our farmers and allow children to understand what eating local means from a young age.
Because if buying local only ever makes sense for those who can absorb the extra cost, it will never become the norm and will remain a virtue reserved for those who can afford it.
Resilience of Our Food Identity
The last aspect of resilience which I hope to touch on today, is the resilience of our food identity whilst being buffeted by winds of change.
And key to our adaptive capacity when we talk about food, is also the accumulated knowledge, skill, and memory that lets communities sustain themselves through hardship. Long before "30 by 30" or "Food Story 2," our people already spent generations building ground-up adaptive capacity, and figured out how to feed their families well using what was at our doorstep. Nyonya cooks stretched modest ingredients into rendang and kueh, hawkers built cuisines around head-to-toe cuts and local catch. This is not nostalgia. It is the resourcefulness we have to capture and maintain: how to eat well, sustainably, from what our farms and waters can actually provide. Crucially, this wisdom was never static, and each generation adapted what came before to new ingredients and constraints. The capacity to evolve, is itself the inheritance worth protecting, not a fixed set of recipes frozen in time.
This knowledge also survives only when they are practised, passed on, and allowed to keep evolving. Just as our dependence on a handful of countries for the bulk of our food imports is a sensitivity risk, the steady closure of heritage establishments concentrates our food landscape into fewer hands, and fewer places where this evolution and adaptation can happen. Heritage establishments were not spared.
This is why our efforts to preserve our food heritage such as hawker culture, through the Hawker Succession Scheme and its UNESCO inscription, cannot stop there. I would suggest two extensions. First, extend succession support beyond hawker centres to privately-run heritage establishments — Ka-Soh and Wing Seong Fatty's closed for the same reasons many hawker stalls once did, no successor, no institutional bridge, but they fall outside the scheme purely because they are not government-managed. Second, formally document and digitise culinary knowledge that today exists only in family memory, particularly for cuisines like Eurasian cooking, extending NHB's existing work on individual heritage dishes to actively record recipes and techniques before they are lost with the practitioners who hold them.
All this matters. Our food identity has never been fixed; it has always absorbed new ingredients, new communities, new constraints, and made them its own. This ability to evolve and adapt is even more important in a world reshaped by climate change and the sustainability choices we have debated today. As we ask Singaporeans to eat more local vegetables, more eggs and seafood, less red meat, we are asking our food culture to evolve once again. That evolution will succeed far more if it draws on a living, well-documented tradition of resourceful, homespun cooking, than if we let that tradition vanish and try to invent sustainable eating from scratch. Preserving this knowledge is not about holding onto the past, it is about protecting our capacity to keep adapting, which is exactly what a changing climate will keep demanding of us.
In conclusion, an overemphasis on scarcity overlooks the genuine strengths we already have: diverse supply chains, the means to trade globally, a system that holds up through real shocks. Dwelling on scarcity diverts attention from what actually is our binding constraint: whether every household can access and afford good food.
This is why I believe that to fully understand and strengthen resilience, we have to look beyond exposure and sensitivity. A more equitable food system is a more resilient one. A diet shaped around what we can sustainably grow strengthens both our farms and our planet. And a food culture that is actively preserved, and allowed to keep evolving, gives us the adaptive capacity to meet whatever comes next.
Mr Speaker, we take pride in calling ourselves a nation of food lovers. But for food lovers, food must first nourish every family’s table, without exception. We must move beyond asking merely whether we have enough, and commit to a food system that is equitable, sustainable, and unmistakably ours. Thank you.
