Singapore is not a country typically known for its agriculture. At present only 1% of Singapore's land area has been allocated by its government for agricultural purposes. Despite its seeming irrelevance however, Singapore is actually an intriguing case for the study of smallholders and their persistence, for a number of reasons. First, Singapore presents a case where a country has gone from a position of enjoying close to total self-sufficiency in a range of food products, to a position of depending on imports to satisfy around 90% of its domestic food needs – all in the space of approximately 35 years, from the 1980s to the present day. Furthermore, contrary to common assumptions, the early stages of Singapore's industrialization in the 1960s proved very beneficial to the local farming sector, which increased yields produced despite decreasing acreage. In fact, the innovation and quality of local farming methods had been evident as early as Singapore's colonial era, when family farms managed to thrive despite the catastrophic failure of colonial plantation agriculturalists from the East India Trading Company. Even with their privileged access to advanced technology and financial capital, colonial plantations could not survive and were even grossly outperformed by family farms which only had very limited access to labour, capital, and technologies of the day. While Singapore has undergone tremendous changes since colonial times, smallholder and small-scale agriculture has persisted.

This chapter will show, firstly, that smallholdings in the past several decades have expanded into pockets of spaces not specifically reserved for agriculture by the state, and secondly, that the state itself – having vested interests in local agriculture – has played no small role in providing smallholders with much-needed resources over the years.