The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) has been allocated $138 million under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2030, Urban Solutions and Sustainability (USS) domain, to support the RIE2030 Singapore Food R&D (SFR) Programme and drive the next phase of agri-food research and innovation.
2 Singapore has been steadily building agri-food research capabilities across aquaculture, agriculture, future foods and food safety, through close partnerships with researchers, farms and industry since 2019. More than 100 projects have been awarded across RIE2020 and RIE2025.
3 The RIE2020 SFR Programme established foundational capabilities across the four domains. These included expertise in aquaculture nutrition, fish health and vaccines; crop breeding and improved varieties; cultivated meat cell lines and production technologies; and advanced methods for faster and more effective food safety assessment.
4 Building on these capabilities, the RIE2025 SFR Programme, announced in Oct 2022, focused on addressing key industry challenges and strengthening the links between research and industry. SFA introduced more targeted and coordinated R&D initiatives such as the Seed Innovation Hub and AquaPolis, bringing together research institutions, local farms and industry partners to strengthen pathways from research to adoption.
5 These initiatives have made encouraging early progress. The Seed Innovation Hub is advancing improved crop varieties tailored to Singapore’s farming systems. Under commercial greenhouse conditions, the research team achieved a further 28 per cent increase in yield for an improved choy sum variety over an earlier high-yielding cultivar. Further validation with local farms and seed companies will support potential commercialisation and wider adoption.
6 AquaPolis has commenced selective breeding efforts for Asian seabass and marine tilapia, alongside farm trials on vaccines and feed additives. It has also developed an AI-enabled, smartphone-based tool that counts fish parasites more than 100 times faster than manual methods.
7 As many RIE2025 projects remain ongoing, further outcomes will materialise over the coming years.
8 The RIE2030 SFR Programme will take these efforts further by sharpening its focus on critical agri-food inputs, advancing core Future Foods capabilities, strengthening the assessment of food safety hazards relevant to Singapore, introducing Food Supply Resilience as a new domain, and also enhancing translation pathways from research to deployment. The programme will focus on five key domains:
(i) Aquaculture – Breeding better-quality fish fry and fingerlings adapted to local tropical conditions, improving fish feed and fish health and enhancing farming systems to raise productivity on local farms;
(ii) Agriculture – Developing seed varieties suited to tropical conditions and precision cultivation technologies that increase crop yield and reduce energy use;
(iii) Future Foods – Continuing to advance research capabilities in engineering biology, bioprocessing, nutrition and sensory science to improve the production efficiency, affordability and nutritional quality of future foods;
(iv) Food Safety – Identifying and assessing emerging food safety risks, and developing more advanced assessment tools such as New Approach Methodologies and Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA). These tools offer faster, human-relevant alternatives to conventional animal-based assessment.
(v) Food Supply Resilience – A new area that uses data and modelling to anticipate climate-related risks and supply disruptions, and technologies to optimise food-storage solutions.
9 Mr Leong Der Yao, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of SFA said: “Research & Development is key to overcoming the constraints faced by our agri-food sector and strengthening its long-term competitiveness and resilience. Building on capabilities established through earlier RIE investments, RIE2030 will sharpen our focus on critical agri-food research capabilities across aquaculture, agriculture, future foods and food safety, expand into the new domain of food supply resilience, and strengthen partnerships across the research and industry ecosystem to translate ideas into practical and scalable solutions.”
10 More information on the SFR Programme grant calls will be released in 2027. For more information on the SFR Programme, please refer to https://www.sfa.gov.sg/recognition-programmes-grants/grants/singapore-food-story-rd-sfr-programme
