The farm upstairs: COP27, Singapore and how urban agriculture could solve the looming food crisis

Now that the dust has settled on the 27th edition of the UN’s Council of Parties (COP) climate change summit, there’s time and space for stakeholders who follow agriculture and the technology and trends around it to step back and assess some of the food challenges facing the planet, and their possible solutions. With food and nutrition companies including Eat Just, Aloha and SpoonGuru in our portfolio, NJF Capital is one of those stakeholders (indeed, Eat Just served their very own cultivated chicken at the summit).

Over the next 30 years, the UN estimates that the world will have to produce 70 per cent more food than it currently does to feed the growing global population. In Cairo, COP27 emphasised the central importance of food and agricultural systems in a changing climate (though, staggeringly, this was the first Conference of Parties that included a dedicated food systems pavilion). Solutions will be needed as the Earth’s population passes a hungry eight billion, which it did just last month. In future weeks and months, this blog will explore several of them, starting today with the case study of urban farming – the practice of growing food or raising livestock on generally small plots of land on or near city buildings – which will likely represent one significant strategy in trying to meet global food requirements.

The world leader in urban farming today is Singapore. Countries that are short on arable land for reasons of space or climate naturally benefit the most from urban farming practices, so it’s not surprising that the city-state is ahead of the curve when it comes to adoption. Even as late as 1970, about ten per cent of Singaporeans were engaged in fishing or farming, but the extremely fast urbanisation of the island, which is only 700sqkm in size but home to 5m people, has led to creative attempts to maximise the space available. Singapore imports 90 per cent of its food, and so the cost benefits and increased food security speak for themselves.

In 2012, the disused site of Singapore’s largest prison complex, the 1,000-capacity Queenstown Remand Prison, was converted into an 8,000-square-metre urban farm called Edible Garden City. Since then, more farms have sprung up, including far smaller examples. Most apartment complexes in the city are owned by the government and run as public housing, meaning the state can designate their rooftops as agricultural space in the public interest at will. And it's not all crops – chickens are easy to raise in small areas of space, and beehives on rooftops count as urban farms, too. Where space is at a true premium and there’s not even space for soil, plants can be grown in hydroponic conditions, meaning they are fed on mineral nutrient salts dissolved in water.

There are other notable urban farms in cities as diverse as Montreal, Paris and Liège, but because there is considerably more farmable land in Canada, France and Belgium than in Singapore, these tend to be more typically run as high-end food brands than attempts to ensure food security. They give their customers the satisfaction of knowing the details of the entire supply chain for the food they consume: it may only be as long as the street they live on. In the UK, this trend also generally applies, and urban farms are the mainstay of the trendiest parts of regenerating and gentrifying city boroughs. So: will full-scale, practical urban farming ever catch on as it has done in Singapore?

Maybe. According to the Government’s Food Security Report 2021, in 2020, the UK imported 46 per cent of the food it consumed. As food security becomes more important in an unstable world, and as food prices themselves rise as a result, there’s every likelihood that urban farming could catch on here. Perhaps, in thirty or forty years’ time, someone flying into Heathrow Airport might crane their neck to look out of the window of their plane and see not the grey concrete or tiled rooftops that currently define the urban sprawl, but greenery and tilled soil: acres and acres of crops planted on top of Lambeth tower blocks and Dulwich villas alike.