World can be our farm: Singapore

Conrad Raj, Today Online 6 Jun 08;

WITH food prices shooting through the roof, Singapore should perhaps take a leaf from Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday that there has been a growing interest among Middle Eastern countries to use land overseas to ensure food security. The British financial daily also reported that the small but fabulously wealthy emirate state of Abu Dhabi was preparing to develop 70,000 acres of land in Sudan in an effort to secure its own food supplies.

Saudi Arabia and Eygpt are also said to have had talks with the Sudanese government about launching their own agricultural projects in the country which, according to FT, “has vast, but underdeveloped, agricultural resources and has been described as a potential breadbasket for the Middle East”.

With nearly 5 million people crowded on an island covering a land area of just over 600 sq km, Singapore should perhaps consider investing overseas in similar food ventures.

Yes, we grow some vegetables, and farm some fish, but the output is hardly enough to satisfy a fraction of its populace. For most part, we are at the mercy of overseas producers and exporters, even as authorities have repeatedly said they are constantly striving to diversify our food sources.

There have been previous attempts to have farm and agricultural ventures in Indonesia and Thailand but these, too, are too small to feed our hungry millions.

Companies like Sunmoon (fruits in China) and Fraser and Neave (dairy products) have also been making attempts to secure their food supplies, especially in China. But the big money is with our sovereign wealth funds — Temasek Holdings and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC).

Only these two Singapore entities have the necessary funds to embark on projects on the scale of Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.

Abu Dhabi’s North Sudan project is being led by the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, which has hitherto focused on providing soft loans to poorer countries for infrastructure projects. The fund is working in partnership with the Arab Authority for Agricultural Investment and Development, a Khartoum-base pan-Arab agency set up in 1977 with a paid-up capital of some US$367 million ($502.5 million).

Instead of spending our reserves in just buying up overseas properties, and companies in telecommunications, power and shipping, perhaps some money should be ploughed into agricultural projects like rice, vegetable and fruit farms.

There are also areas where aquaculture can be carried out.

According to the FT, Sudan, in trying to attract funding into technology for agriculture, provides land for such ventures for free. The country is estimated to have about 100 million acres of agricultural land of which currently only 20 million acres is said to be used.

There is no harm in Singapore in working with the AAAID in trying to get some land in the sub-Saharan state to grow crops like rice.

Places like Australia, too, have lots of land where crops can be grown or livestock raised. For instance, Brunei has since 1982 been raising beef and dairy cattle on 1.5 million acres in Australia’s Northern Territories for its own consumption.

And if Singapore needs help to find countries with agricultural or farm land, it can _ like Saudi Arabia, which is planning to phase out its wheat fields by 2016 to preserve its water supplies - call on the World Bank.

The bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, told the FT: “They have asked us to connect (Saudi Arabia) with countries in Africa and Central Asia.”

Let the world be our farm land. We have got to hurry, for there are also others out there with the money to secure their own food chains.

X-REF world story on food prices