While the COVID-19 impact has been predominantly negative, the pandemic appears to have sparked increased interest in developing agricultural technology (agtech) to improve the efficiency of food systems, from input supplies through farming and processing to delivery and retail.

Paul S. Teng

During the pandemic, the international media highlighted phenomena like farmers dumping milk and feeding quality produce to cattle, vegetables rotting in fields due to lack of labour to harvest, increased food waste in urban environments, delays in supply of inputs for growing crops or feeding fish, and supermarkets with empty shelves. The pandemic has highlighted the need to produce more food locally and to use techniques which both minimize the use of labour and avoid a high carbon footprint. Governments have responded to some of these through policies and action. The private sector has responded even quicker, having detected investment opportunities to support solutions to these problems. Venture Capital funds like AgFunder and Yield Lab have set up their Asian bases in Singapore to support initiatives throughout the Asia-Pacific.

Some of the exciting new agtech developments deal with ensuring new sources of inputs for farming crops and fish. This is exemplified by waste valorization to extract valuable elements from water and biowaste that can be used to grow plants. Many new ventures use the Black Soldier Fly, a ubiquitous insect that feeds on food waste, to harvest larval protein directly or indirectly for use as feed supplements for fish and chicken. Countries like Singapore and Malaysia, which import almost all their agricultural inputs, have provided incentives to spur these activities so that they have more resilience in their supply of fertilizers and animal feed.

Genevieve Donnellon-May

There are also exciting developments to help farmers make better use of increasingly scarce or expensive inputs like water and fertilizer. Precision technologies, such as drip-irrigation which are supported by the monitoring of soil moisture and plant water status, are now available in several countries. One company has even developed technology to supply chilled, oxygen-enriched water to stimulate plants growth in the tropics.

In land-strapped countries like Singapore, the number of high tech vegetable and fish farms using vertical farming technology with multiple stacks of vegetables or fish tanks, and supported by digital tools to monitor the growing environment, and plant and fish growth, has increased dramatically during the pandemic. The Singapore government in fact enacted a “30 by 30” strategy to produce 30% of its nutrition needs (vegetables, fish and eggs) by 2030 and incentivized an accelerated research and development programme (called the Singapore Food Story) with some Singapore $144 Million to create new technologies that enable high-density farming. This follows on achievements in other Asian countries, notably Japan, China and South Korea, to increase their share of controlled-environment farming using indoor plant factories, a form of “Smart farming”. Moving forward, these indoor plant factories will also allow countries to address weather patterns attributable to climate change.

One of the significant set of activities precipitated by the pandemic has been on e-commerce – using telecommunications and the internet to link farmers to retailers, manufacturers to traders and food and beverage outlets to consumers at home. The growth of this sector has been spectacular in Asia as movement control measures to reduce the spread of the virus encouraged households to use the internet to order raw and cooked food. It is likely that this practice will continue even after the pandemic has become an endemic.

Apart from agtech, there has been similar growth in fintech and foodtech. Using digital technology and the widespread use of mobile phones and other portable personal devices, even giants like MastercardTM have entered this space of providing financial services to small farmers. Others have linked financial services to marketplace information. Likewise, foodtech is providing food processors and ultimately consumers with many new offerings, such as extending the shelf-life of vegetables and fruits with environment-friendly sealants and packaging are now in use. Precision fermentation technology has also seen an upsurge to produce more diverse plant-based protein, and in the near future, also cellular meat. Concern for the negative effects of producing animal protein on the environment and climate have spurred innumerable startup companies to venture into the “Alternative Protein” space. Furthermore, nutrition-enhanced food, such as with vitamin and essential minerals, is also likely to see an increase in the marketplace.

It can be argued that all the above would have happened even without the stimulus provided by the pandemic. But the pandemic has convincingly increased awareness on food security worldwide, and coupled with the COP26 climate summit urgings, has led to this increase in activity to use modern agtech, fintech and foodtech in sustaining our food systems.

Paul S. Teng is Adjunct Senior Fellow, Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies at Nanyang Technological University Singapore and concurrently Managing Director of NIE International Pte. Ltd. Singapore. He has worked in the Asia Pacific region on agri-food issues for over thirty years, with international organizations, academia and the private sector.

Genevieve Donnellon-May is a research assistant with the Institute of Water Policy (IWP) at the National University of Singapore. She is also a master’s student in Water Science, Policy and Management at the University of Oxford. Genevieve’s research interests include China, Africa, transboundary governance, and the food-energy-water nexus.

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COVID-19 has disrupted supply chains that are essential to assure food security in the Asia Pacific region, yet countries overall seem to have managed, so far, to keep supermarkets stocked with food and feed those who can afford it.

The Asia Pacific region is home to over 60% of humanity and also contains sub-regions with among the highest frequencies of severe weather events and some of the most challenging environments for agriculture. As a region it is characterized by diverse food systems and a multiplex of supply chains. Under normal circumstances, food security is already threatened by a multitude of factors.

Paul S. Teng

China has been at the forefront of the COVID-19 battle and the earliest to have taken broad action. Its total movement control or “lockdown” has been successful in containing the spread of the virus, although admittedly at some inconvenience. This “lockdown” approach has been adopted by other countries subsequent to the Chinese action but in most countries this has disrupted parts of the supply chain, in particular the food processing and transport sectors.

This is important as “physical access to food”, i.e. consumers being able to access food, and farmers being able to get their produce to the consumer, is an important part of food security. Physical access has been seriously affected in many countries.

In India and elsewhere, agricultural produce are either being dumped, fed to livestock or left to rot. All because farmers cannot harvest their produce or transport them to market. In China and Malaysia, restrictions have been put in place to limit consumer access to supermarkets and other food retail outlets.

Capacity to transport food items between countries, either by land, sea or air has reduced further. This particularly affects countries which depend on imports as the key means of making food available, like the small island states.

Of greater concern in the Asia Pacific region is the disruption of crop planting, which in many countries and for important food crops like rice, is closely tied to seasons. The April-May period is critical for planting rice to replenish stocks. And several rice exporting countries, perhaps in anticipation of reduced future production, have already started putting restrictions on the timing and quantum of their exports.

Rice is important for food security in the Asia Pacific region and it behooves governments to remember the learnings from the 2007-08 crisis and not indulge in panic reactions such as restricting exports or hoarding. Both the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have projected sufficient rice stocks for the rest of 2020 even though the new rice season has been forecasted to produce slightly lower due to weather conditions.

In this regard, it is also important that governments view agricultural activities and farm workers as providing “essential” services and be exempted from some of the total lockdown measures. The example of China is worth noting, where special “green channels” at lockdown checkpoints allowed the passage of vehicles and people transporting agricultural inputs to grow new crops.

Another metric of food security is food affordability as measured by food prices. Overall, although there have been reports of price increases, governments appear to have been effective in preventing the price spiking seen during the 2008-08 crisis which led to civil unrest in over 47 countries. The increases mainly reflect supply chain delays rather than real shortages. At the macro level, the FAO Food Price Index for March 2020 has not shown increases except for rice.

The COVID-19 pandemic if allowed to run longer has potential to affect the nutrition aspect of food security. Asia is already home to the largest number of poor and hungry people in the world, according to FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Scenes of thousands of daily-paid workers in cities currently deprived of work in South and Southeast Asia, and not have the means to buy food portend the threat that hunger and under-nutrition may become more prevalent. In the rush to implement movement control, governments need to have ready safety nets to help this sector avoid food insecurity.

In January 2013, I attended an ASEAN High-Level Cross-Sectoral Consultation titled “Pandemics as Threats to Regional and National Security” in Manila and spoke on the “Impacts of Pandemic Disasters on Food Security.” I shared a framework that showed that the longer a pandemic lasted, the more players in a food supply chain would be affected, leading eventually to total paralysis.

Some of the interventions discussed in 2013 are currently being implemented, e.g. movement control, release from stockpiles, food price control. Warnings were also given to avoid export restrictions, hoarding or panic buying.

Some countries have learnt better than others in formulating responses, after having gone through the SARS and the 2007-08 food crisis. The sense of déjà vu reminds one of Santayana’s advice that those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.

Paul S. Teng is Adjunct Senior Fellow, Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies at Nanyang Technological University Singapore and concurrently Managing Director of NIE International Pte. Ltd. Singapore. He has worked in the Asia Pacific region on agri-food issues for over thirty years, with international organizations, academia and the private sector.