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RESEARCH PAPER

“THE POLITICS OF NEGLECT” – RE-CONCEPTUALIZING RELATIONS BETWEEN SMALLHOLDER

FARMERS AND THE STATE IN SINGAPORE

PREPARED BY: CHI XIN CI HEATHER

U072285X

A. Introduction: the imperative for re-contextualizing the peasant-state “conflict”

Contemporary Southeast Asian literature on peasant-state relations frequently situates

farmers within the trajectory of, and in opposition to, external vectors of change such as

the state and the market (Scott and Kerkvliet, 1986). In Singapore, the close relationship

between policy and economics presents a unique case study from which we can examine

the ways in which an ideology of economic pragmatism promoted by the government has

influenced the ordering of the agricultural community in the city-state.

While the heated encounters between smallholder farmers, represented by local

agricultural cooperative the Kranji Countryside Association (KCA), and officials from

Singapore’s food regulation body the Agri-food and Veterinary Authority (AVA), suggest

that local farmers and the state are in constant conflict, a close analysis of farmers’

demands reveal that farmers are quite willing to compromise and have been actively

attempting to align their production objectives, business approaches and even lifestyle

choices with national development goals. In addition, a review of state policies and

priorities also reveals that the state has not totally neglected the agricultural sector; the

AVA promotes research into composting techniques and organic farmingi, as well as

post-harvest technologyii and there is both a Horticultural Service Sector, which “provides

technical advice and support, consultancy and trade facilitation services to those involved

in the production and trade of vegetables, foodcrops, orchid, ornamental plants and

aquatic plants in Singapore”iii and a Farm Manpower Section to manage workers in the

agrotechnology industryiv.

Despite the apparent efforts of both parties to accommodate the needs of the other, there

is much unhappiness on the part of the farmers, whom, through the KCA, raised a number

of concerns regarding government directives; land lease, tenure and development

controls; farm manpower; public transport and road safety; security; financial/ technical

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assistance, and food security in a dialogue with the Ministry of National Development on

14 September, 2008. Thus, a re-contextualizing of the “conflict” in terms of the

willingness of both parties to explore opportunities for compromise is necessary to better

understand the dynamics of farmer-state relations.

Another significant factor shaping these relations is the nature of the spaces within which

farmer-state negotiations take place. From interviews with local farmers and a retired

AVA official v, it is clear that the state has been reluctant to grant farmers a personal

audience and is often unresponsive to their proposals, thus limiting the interactions

between both parties to the institutional sphere of inspections, permit applications and fee

collections. The lack of dialogue between farmers and the state in political spaces has

meant that farmers’ evaluation of their place in Singapore society and the avenues

available to them to seek redress is solely based on such administrative interactions,

which heavily restricts opportunities for deeper understanding and compromise between

both parties.

In this paper, I adapt Tan’s concept of the “middle ground” (Tan and Walker, 2008) as a

starting point to examine the nature of such institutional, political and personal spaces

within which farmer-state negotiations take place in order to determine the factors

shaping and structuring the “conflict”. Here, I will outline the main contentions and

concerns of contemporary farmers in the context of agricultural development in

Singapore. What emerges from this analysis is a much more complex picture which

suggests that the basis of the conflict may in fact be the rooted in the very ways these

spaces have been utilized – and neglected.

B. Background: An overview of agricultural development in Singapore

Economic development in Singapore since the 1960s has been significantly shaped by

state policies and directives, with shifts in government priorities for funding and

institutional support for higher value-added sectors such as electronics, chemicals and

petroleum resulting in rapid changes in the industrial structure of the country’s economy

over the last 50 years.

The shift to higher-value added industries to propel Singapore’s capitalistic development

has resulted in a significant re-ordering of Singapore’s agricultural sector. The sector,

comprising vegetable, fruit, flower, fish, frog, goat and poultry farms, has undergone, in

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succession: a period of targeted rural development (1960s-70s), a period of

industrialization characterized by a shift to high-technology agriculture (1970s-1980s)

and a period of relative neglect, with the shift in government priorities to food safety and

research (1990s-present). In 1965, some 25000 families were engaged in farming. The

pattern of agriculture then was “essentially one of horticulture with food crop production

ranking as first in order of importance”vi. At the time, the Singapore government was

actively promoting a wide range of agricultural services to farmers, including co-

operative development and rural development programmes, agricultural education,

tractor ploughing services, rural news broadcast, and sales of agricultural inputsvii. The

priority of the government during the 1970s was agricultural intensification for the

purposes of optimizing land and manpower resources to maintain Singapore’s self-

sufficiency in the key food products of poultry (80%), eggs (100%) and pork (104%)viii ,

hence policies to industrialize agriculture, such as developing larger commercial farms

and meat technology laboratories, were still aimed at strengthening local food security

through upgrading the skills of existing farmers.

However, the government’s policies after 1980s shifted away from the existing farming

population and focused instead on a new generation new high-technology agri-

businesses. The state conducted a massive re-ordering of the existing farming population,

moving a large number of farmers into public housing projectsix and downsized or

eliminated farms altogether to free land for housing and industrial development. Today,

there are only some 274 farms covering 753.220 hectares of landx left that nevertheless

still generated revenues of some S$97.9 million in 2007xi.

The main government agencies involved in agriculture are the Agri-Food and Veterinary

Authority (AVA) that oversees farm land and activities; the Urban Redevelopment

Authority (URA) that sets overall policy on land use; the Singapore Land Authority

(SLA) that manages all state land and the National Environment Agency (NEA) that

ensure farmlands meet public health standards.

C. The space of farmer-state relations: trends, challenges and opportunities

There are three main spaces within which farmers and the state interact in Singapore: (i)

institutional space – referring to the framework of rules and regulations imposed by

government agencies to order and determine the cropping, land and technological

regimes for agricultural land uses in Singapore; (ii) political space – referring to both the

formal and informal contexts in which both parties assert and negotiate their interests;

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and (iii) personal space – referring to the way the state’s presence is experienced,

understood and internalized by the farmers themselves.

As articulated by Tan, there is rarely a “binary of either the erasure of local practices

(and cultures) or resistance by the locals against the…seemingly overwhelming force”

of the state (Tan and Walker, 2008). What you find are more likely to find instead is a

“middle ground” shaped by a “sophisticated process of recombination” between state

forms and local forms in order to achieve workable, effective outcomes acceptable to

both parties. The dynamics of negotiations within this middle ground, however, are

determined by the power relations between different actors within the space, as well as

how open both sides are to using such a space in the first place.

The presence of a centralized state has a significant impact in limiting the extent and

effectiveness of peasant action (Roberts, 1990); indeed, the absence of a landed class in

Singapore has been acknowledged as one of the main factors facilitating the rapid

expansion of the state during the country’s nation-building years from 1965 onwards

(Chua, 1996). A significant policy that dramatically changed the landscape of farmer

society during this time was the institution of the Land Acquisition Act in 1966, which

gave the government power to enter, survey, plan for the acquisition of, and take

possession of any land “for public and certain other specified purposes, the assessment

of compensation to be made on account of such acquisition”xii. A large amount of

farmland was re-possessed for the development of industries and public housing, and

many farmers were shifted into the newly developed Housing and Development Board

(HDB) flats. This effectively meant an eviction of farmers from their traditional lands

and a forced abandonment of their previous communal kampong lifestyles. Interviews

with farmers affected by the relocation reveal that at least a number of them were

traumatized by the movexiii and found it difficult to keep in touch with their former

neighbours. This dispersal, coupled with farmers’ acceptance of change in the face of

powerful state directives and the fact that many of them were more concerned with how

to sustain their households in the new environmentxiv than with reclaiming their land,

meant there were few attempts by farmers then to contest the land acquisition. As we

shall see, it is such ‘efficient’ economics-centered policies, implemented by a

hegemonic administration, that has both limited the spaces open for dialogue with

stakeholders concerned, as well as contributed to a highly contested one-sided ‘reading’

of agricultural spaces by the state, namely as an economically-valued resource divorced

from any social or cultural significance.

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In contemporary times, farmers continue to face institutional pressures and controls in a

number of ways; first, the Urban Redevelopment Authority defines the situation and size

of agricultural areas in Master Planxv updated every five years. Farmers are only allowed

to bid for land released by the URA for tender and do not have the ability to define and

purchase their own land holdings. There are also no institutional platforms for farmers

to contest the quality of the lots released for tender; hence the location and amount of

agricultural land available for cultivation in Singapore is solely controlled by the state

and is non-negotiablexvi. Such a ‘cut and dry’ manner of allocating and managing

agricultural land effectively defines agriculture as a ‘land-use’ similar to any other land

uses and fails to acknowledge the multiple functions and meanings of agricultural land

to its inhabitants.

This has several implications for the ways farmers conduct their livelihood. Mrs. Ivy

Singh Lim, president of the KCA and owner of lifestyle farm, Bollywood Veggies,

described the difficulties she had in applying for permission to build a house, a

restaurant and culinary school on her land because of the URA’s rule that at least 70%

of the land has to “retain the predominant agricultural use for the land in keeping with

the land use zoning, as well as to preserve the rustic character of the surroundings” xvii.

In the state’s view, agricultural land uses are intended primarily for food crop

production and “rural aesthetic” and are not seen as the integral part of self-sustaining

farmer community (as they are in the rural areas of other countries) that overlaps with

other land uses such as residential (house), commercial (shop or café) and institutional

(culinary school or community centre). Even the opening up of part of the farm for tours

and farm stays for the purposes of diversifying income and promoting tourism, a

strategy that has been acknowledge and provided for by the URAxviii , involves a

bureaucratic process which requires interested farmers to pay a costly differential

premium.xix Farmers’ arguments that such multi-purpose uses of their land are implicit

in agriculture’s function as both a lifestyle and a livelihood, and hence should not be

subjected to additional charges, are not considered at all in the state’s computation of the

differential premium, which are based on Development Charges that accommodate the

new land use and/or intensity with the intention to “encourage optimization of land use

and to facilitate the overall pace of redevelopment in Singapore”xx. This is once again

evidence of how an economic-centered approach pursued by the government effectively

silences alternative conversations about agriculture and limits the spaces available for

negotiations between farmers and state.

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The second policy that has significant impact on farmers is the tenure arrangement for

agricultural land. In Singapore, every agricultural lot has a 15-20 year tenure that must

be paid upfront by the farmer. Land sales, which are administered by the Singapore

Land Authority, are conducted through a tender system where selected lots are released

for public tender or auction by private companies or individuals. Such a policy

essentially requires farmers to be cash-rich, and also business- and operationally-adept,

due to the high capital input required and limited amount of time available for farms to

become financially viable. Hence, such a tenure arrangement clearly favours profit-

driven agrotechnology companies over household-centered farms, which may lack

access to capital or may not be willing to take the risk. In addition, because each lease

only lasts a maximum of 20 years and there is no guarantee that farmers will be able to

secure the same plot for a second term, many are unwilling to invest in infrastructure

and machinery that would improve production in the medium- to long-termxxi, thus

limiting the potential of their farms as well as their ability to lead secure lives. Under

SLA’s current guidelines, the government “may allow lease extension if there is

substantial investment on the land or property, and the proposed agricultural use remains

relevant to (the country’s) strategic national needs”xxii. Such a policy effectively requires

farmers to be aligned with the government’s pragmatic priorities of high-technology

production and/or agri-tourism, which require considerable capital investment, to avoid

losing their land. Their inability to contest the basis of this policy within other both

institutional and political spaces has also resulted in great resentment and unhappiness.

Farmers complain about the lack of single adoptive agency to direct their queries to, as

they currently have to appeal to and consult multiple administrative authorities (AVA,

URA, SLA, NEA) for the various licenses and permits. Within the political sphere,

farmers also lament the absence of the agriculture in the national narrative and the lack

of recognition by local policymakers of the contributions that local farming has to food

security, community bonding and environmental protection. The lack of a state agency

to directly represent the interests of farmers has also meant an inability to get their

voices heard in the political sphere.

To their credit, and consistent with the idea of a “middle ground”, farmers have

attempted to align their agricultural activities with national priorities and concerns; their

attempts to incorporate agritainment facilities to encourage ‘rural tourism’ and cater to

local educational field-trips, as well as shift to organic-style farming both to provide

healthy vegetables for local consumers, as well as weekend farming activities to create

opportunities for families and communities to bondxxiii can be read as direct efforts to

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raise both the commercial and social value of their farmland so as to be acknowledged

and supported by the state. This represents an attempt by farmers to negotiate their

relationship with the state within a personal space that is nevertheless influenced by

interactions with the state in external institutional and political spaces.

D. Conclusion: opening up the middle ground

As is suggested from this preliminary study, the basis of conflict between local farmers

and the state stems at least partially from a lack of awareness and political will on the

part of government agencies to engage farmers beyond the administrative space and

accept that they could have interests aside from that of food production for economic

ends.

The numerous efforts by the farmers to scale-up production and diversify their land use

to raise the value of their farms has also been limited by state policies on land lease,

tenure and development guidelines that marginalize smallholders. More importantly, the

efficient hegemony of the administration has meant that there is little provision for more

dynamic avenues of interaction within which farmers could seek redress for grievances

and negotiate a wider range of issues. Hence, despite attempts from the state to

accommodate and support farmers, these efforts have been restricted to top-down

directives at the institutional level in terms of legislation to ease renewal of land lease

and the provision of commercially-oriented agricultural services. In conclusion, it

appears that the lack of dialogue between both parties in political spaces to debate issues

such as the potential for agriculture to contribute to food security and national

development, or the viability of organic agriculture to enhance consumer and

environmental health, is an important issue that needs to be addressed for a middle

ground of compromise and reconciliation between both parties to be made more

accessible.

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References

Chua, B.H. (1996), “Singapore: management of a city-state in Southeast Asia” in J. Ruland (ed.), The Dynamics of Metropolitan Management in Southeast Asia, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 207-24 Scott, J.C. and B.J.T. Kerkvliet (eds.) (1986), Everyday forms of peasant resistance in South-East Asia, Totowa, N.J. : Frank Cass. Roberts, B.R. (1990), “Peasants and Proletarians”, Annual Review of Sociology, 16, pp. 353-77 Tan, S. B-H and A. Walker (2008), “Beyond Hills and Plains: Rethinking Ethnic Relations in Vietnam and Thailand”, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 3(3), pp. 117-57.

Endnotes i Four studies relevant for production of vegetables in Singapore were published in the Singapore Journal of Primary Industries, an AVA publication of original research findings and review of progress in fisheries, horticulture, animal husbandry and veterinary science and allied subjects: “Plug transplants for leafy vegetable production” (Poh B L, Leong W H, Yap-Koh T K and Ong PH in Vol 31, 2003/04), “Organic farming in Singapore” (Khoo G H, Ong P H and Lam W in Vol 30, 2002), “The selection of Brassica chinensis cultivars for local cultivation” (Lam W, Yap-Koh T K and Poh B L in Vol 29, 2001), “A review on composting for vegetable production” (Lam W, Poh B L, Leong W H and Ong P H in Vol 28, 2000). ii From “Post Harvest Technology for Vegetables”: http://www.ava.gov.sg/FoodSector/PostHarvestTechnology/Vegetables/index.htm. Accessed on Oct 25, 2008. iii From “Horticulture Services Centre”: http://www.ava.gov.sg/AgricultureFisheriesSector/TechServicesAndResearch/HorticultureServicesCentre/index.htm, accessed on Oct 25, 2008. iv From “Workers for Agrotechnology Industry”: http://www.ava.gov.sg/AgricultureFisheriesSector/FarmingInSingapore/WorkersAgroTechIndustry/index.htm, accessed on Oct 25, 2008. v The interviewees are: Mrs. Evelyn Lim (60, Farmer, Green Circle Organic Farm), Mrs. Ivy Singh-Lim (60, Farmer, Bollywood Veggies), Mr. Chuo Sing Kwong (70, Farmer, Golden Technologies PL), Mr. Alan Seah (52, Farmer, Go Organic Farm), Mr. Chai Boon Fah (70, Former AVA official), and Mr. Tay Lai Hock (45, Exco Member, Kranji Countryside Association). They were interviewed between Sep 22, 2008 to Sep 26 2008. vi Review of the Primary Production Department, 1960-1965, Singapore: Government of Singapore. vii Full details of the rural development programmes can be found in Review of the Primary Production Department, 1960-1965, Singapore: Government of Singapore. viii From “AVA – History”: http://www.ava.gov.sg/AboutAVA/History/. Accessed on Oct 25, 2008. ix The relocation of Singapore’s rural population to urban public housing development, which has significant impact on farmer lifestyles and livelihoods, while not the focus of this study, has been documented comprehensively by local academics. See in Public housing and community development : the Singapore experience (Siew, W.W.L, 1993), Public housing policies compared : U.S., Socialist countries and Singapore (Chua, B.H., 1988) and The Singapore experience in public housing (Tan A.H.H and Phang S-Y, 1991) x Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority Annual Report FY2006/07. Singapore: 2007. xi From AVA statistics: http://www.ava.gov.sg/AVA/Templates/AVA-GenericContentTemplate.aspx?NRMODE=Published&NRORIGINALURL=%2fPublications%2fStatistics%2f&NRNODEGUID={F2752F0E-A9A1-4A96-BA40-F6843F8CB26A}&NRCACHEHINT=Guest#area. Accessed on Oct 25, 2008.

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xii Adapted from the Land Acquisition Act (latest amendment, 2007). Accessed online at: http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/non_version/cgi-bin/cgi_retrieve.pl?&actno=Reved-152&date=latest&method=part, on Oct 25, 2008. xiii Local filmmaker Eng Yee Peng in her two short films, Diminishing Memories I and II, documented the relocation of farmers from Lim Chu Kang. These documentaries, which feature 6-7 interviews with past and present Lim Chu Kang farmer, highlight the pain that many went through in the process of relocation, including depression, nostalgia and difficulties adapting to high-rise living. In an interview with Dr. Tan Cheng Bock, a then Member of Parliament, Dr Tan revealed that a number of farmers actually committed suicide during this time period. xiv These views were expressed by a number of ex-Lim Chu Kang residents in Diminishing Memories I (see vii). Scholars such as Eric Wolf and Francesca Bray have also extensively studied the importance of the household maintenance to economic decision-making of peasants. xv The Master Plan is the statutory land use plan which guides Singapore's development in the medium term, over the next 10 to 15 years. It is reviewed once every five years, and shows the permissible land use and density for every parcel of land in Singapore. (URA: www.ura.gov.sg) xvi Personal correspondence, Mr Chai Boon Fah. xvii From “Circular to professional institutes – guidelines for visitor amenities on farms”: http://www.ura.gov.sg/circulars/text/dc05-03.htm. Accessed on Oct 30, 2008. xviii The main guidelines on visitor amenities within farms has been outlined here: http://www.ava.gov.sg/AgricultureFisheriesSector/FarmingInSingapore/AgroTechParks/Farming+in+Singapore-Miscellaneous.htm#submission. Accessed on Oct 30, 2008. xix For example, Nyee Phoe Flower Garden had to pay over $100,000 for 4 chalets for a lease with only 10 years remaining. (Raised during the 14 September dialogue) xx Adapted from the “Brief on the Differential Premium System”, Singapore Land Authority (SLA). xxi Personal correspondence, Eng Yee Peng (Director of Diminishing Memories), and farmers Ivy-Singh Lim and Chuo Sing Kwong. xxii From “Waiver on Building Premium”, press release by the Ministry of Law (embargoed till 10 am Monday, 1 September 2008): http://www.sla.gov.sg/htm/new/new2008/new0109.htm. Accessed on Oct 25, 2008. xxiii One such programme is currently run by local NGO, Ground-Up Initiative (www.groundupinitiative.org) every weekend at Lim Chu Kang, in partnership with organic farms.