President Shanmugaratnam urges ‘new green revolution’ to secure food future

Singapore must reduce water usage and cut methane and greenhouse gas emissions.

President Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that Singapore needs to revolutionise food systems to sustain food supply amidst growing demand.

Speaking at the Philanthropy Asia Summit on 5 May in a dialogue with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Shanmugaratnam said Singapore needs a “new green revolution” that delivers higher yields while using fewer resources and producing fewer emissions.

He said the new approach must “uses less water, allows more moisture to stay in the soil, involves less methane emissions from rice cultivation especially, and less greenhouse gas emissions in general [but] still gives farmers a better yield”.

“We have reached the limits of traditional ways of producing food, both by ordinary smallholder farmers as well as in industrial agriculture. We've reached the limits because it is too large a source of greenhouse gas emissions; we can't keep encroaching into natural forests and other natural ecosystems; and also because soil health has deteriorated very significantly,” he said.

Temasek Trust’s Philanthropy Asia Alliance has launched the Decarbonising Rice initiative, which uses new seed varieties or new strains that are more resistant to droughts and floods.

This cultivation technique results in a 50% reduction in water requirements and 20% to 50% reductions in methane emissions.

“We have about 1.7 billion people being added to the world’s population in the next 25 years. In fact, in the next 10 years, we have about 800 million people. And we have a much larger increase in food and nutrition demand – by some 50-75% over the next 25 years,” the president said.

On the same day, the Gates Foundation, the non-profit organisation founded by Bill Gates, announced it would open a new office in Singapore to expand its regional presence.

During the discussion, Gates noted that Singapore is home to many committed philanthropists and strong family values.

“And so having something even beyond whatever the family business is—having the family philanthropy, getting the family members working together and being proud about what they're able to achieve—I think we're seeing a big increase in that,” he said.