Urban farming in Singapore — '30 by 30', a city-state that made farming national policy

If you think of urban farming as 'something you take up because there is spare land,' Singapore looks like the exact opposite of a candidate. This is one of the most densely populated city-states in the world, where less than 1% of the land is said to be available for farming. About 90% of its food is imported, and agriculture accounts for well under 1% of gross domestic product. On the numbers alone, it could be counted among the countries furthest removed from farming.

And yet in recent years few countries have institutionalised 'producing food in the city' as seriously as Singapore. Rooftops, the tops of car parks, the insides of closed factories, and rotating towers nine metres tall — every gap in the city is becoming a laboratory for food production. What drives this is, more than the passion of individual farmers, a clear act of national will. What this report examines is a state project that turns the constraint of land to its advantage, rebuilding 'food security' with policy and technology.

The key to understanding Singapore's urban agriculture is compressed into a short slogan: '30 by 30.' In March 2019 the government announced the goal of being able to produce about 30% of the nation's nutritional needs at home by 2030. Local production at the time was said to be around a tenth of what was needed, so this meant raising it nearly threefold — an extremely ambitious figure. And the land available for farming would remain under 1% of the country. In other words, it was a declaration to tackle, as a whole nation, the problem of productivity: how to produce much from little land.

What matters is that this is not a mere aspiration but is translated into concrete institutions: a dedicated agency, subsidies, public tenders for land, research and development. As the core body carrying the goal, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) was established in 2019. From here, this report traces in turn — beginning from the history of the Garden City — the founding of the SFA, the mechanism for turning public-housing rooftops into farms, the spread of vertical farms and community gardens, and on to the 2025 revision of the target, drawing the full picture of the national project called '30 by 30.'