Food agency committed to making local produce accessible and affordable

We thank Liu Fook Thim for his constructive suggestions in his letter "Make local vegetables affordable at places where consumers shop" (Nov 3).

Local farms provide a regenerative source of food and serve as a buffer during supply disruptions, contributing to Singapore’s food resilience.

Nonetheless, our farms face higher land and manpower costs than farms elsewhere because of Singapore’s land and resource constraints. These constraints have made it challenging for our farms’ produce to be price-competitive compared with imported food.

To help address this, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) has been working closely with the Singapore Agro-Food Enterprises Federation (SAFEF) to help our farms improve productivity, efficiency and economies of scale.

This includes technology adoption and improved agri-inputs, as well as ways to facilitate aggregation and ensure dependable offtake to help farms offer produce at more competitive prices. 

SFA and SAFEF have been working with various farms to broaden their market access by aggregating and distributing their produce through different sales channels such as retail outlets, wholesale markets and new potential channels like vending machines.

For example, in July 2026, SAFEF partnered vegetable suppliers at Pasir Panjang Wholesale Centre to sell locally grown vegetables from seven local vegetable farms at wholesale channels, enabling the farms to pass on savings from packaging costs to consumers.

Each channel has differing impacts on reach, convenience and availability. In addition, the pricing for the different channels may differ due to cost factors such as manpower and rental.

SFA will continue to work with partners to explore ways to make our local produce more accessible and affordable for consumers and food businesses.

In turn, we need the support of consumers and businesses to choose local produce so that we can collectively increase demand and offtake and enable our farms to increase their productivity and competitiveness.

Together, we can all play our part to contribute to Singapore’s food resilience.

Cheong Lai Peng
Senior Director
Local Production Strategy & Development Division
Singapore Food Agency

 

ST Forum Letter: “Food agency committed to making local produce accessible and affordable” (Nov 11)

 

ST Forum Letter: “Make local vegetables affordable at places where consumers shop” (Nov 3)