In Lim Chu Kang, in northwest Singapore, seventy farms have been pushed out to transform the area into a high-tech agricultural zone. Isabelle Lim documents land transformed, and unrecognizable. But the vestiges of these places still exist under layers of cement: the Punggol District pig farms, the gambier and rubber plantations.
Originally published in Mynah, “On Farms” marries illuminating writing with comprehensive reporting — a delicate and assured dance scrutinizing different ideals with the rigor born from a writer who demands thoroughness and won’t accept less. This essay confronts the image of an Edenic land central to the romanticization of farming, and turns to possible futures for foodways in a place tangled within its own web of desire for perpetual reinvention.
— Alexandra Valahu for Guernica Global Spotlights
The gates to Green Circle Eco-Farm on Neo Tiew Road are padlocked shut now. Behind them lies a plot of land filled with verdant greenery, multilayered canopies, fruit trees, and wild herbs that grow on and around a haphazard walking path zigzagging across the property. As you move along the path, branches that bear ripening jambu stretch overhead. At some point, you are forced to duck under a fig tree or risk butting your head against boughs that heave with fruit.
It’s an unorthodox farm. Along this stretch of road, Green Circle’s riotous growth cuts a sharp contrast among other farms of strictly rowed monoculture crops. The farm, or “food forest” — as Evelyn Eng-Lim, its owner, would prefer it to be called — had been operating for more than two decades before the land was taken back by the state for military use.
In 2022, when the lease was expiring, the food forest was at its most mature, spread over 2.2 hectares and largely independent of human intervention. Its produce was driven not through intensive human cultivation but through strategies like the planting of perennials — plants that live longer than two years and don’t require replanting with seeds — and the deliberate scaffolding of a multilayered forest structure. This consisted of an overstory, shorter trees, a shrub layer, an herb layer, a ground cover, a vine layer, and roots, each insulating and supporting the others from extreme weather. Evelyn claims that by the time it closed, the food forest produced some 120 plant varieties — a diverse, resilient crop suited for the tropical climate.
Green Circle was one of seventy farms in Lim Chu Kang that were told to move. It’s a tale as old as Singapore has been independent: the state, convinced of its centrally rational plan for land use, has often issued directives to uproot. Sometimes there is resistance, but more often than not, such orders are greeted with resignation. In the cycles of renewal, whatever knowledge, practice, or intimacy has been cultivated between hands and soil is cemented over for a fresh slate.
While each farm represents a loss, perhaps what is most appealing about Evelyn’s is that it symbolizes the most extreme form of a kind of seduction for the Singaporean city slicker — effortless, chaotic natural abundance. For the urbanite cynical about concrete and manicured greenery, what Evelyn’s farm offered was a return to a blessed form of pre-urban ruin, a kind of Eden. One only needs to read the multiple journalistic lamentations that have been penned in the wake of the farm closures to see this hunger: “For most of us who only know of living in urban Singapore, of landscaped surroundings crisscrossed by asphalt and cookie-cutter shopping malls, it’s hard to imagine what it could have been like to run bare feet across exposed earth, to jump into muddy pools left by passing storms, or to tumble in grass teeming with insect life; to wake not to the dreary drone of traffic but to the cacophony of birds and bugs beginning their day in wild abandonment. This was the reality of Chai and her siblings — a childhood led not by the relentless march of progress but by the instinctive rhythm of nature.”
What we hear of, again and again, is a romanticized notion about what farming in Singapore is and was — waking to the sound of birds, soil and sole in perfect communion. Back-breaking labor is absent from this picture, traded in for a perfect salve to contemporary malaise. For most Singaporeans, a visit to the farm presents an escapist fantasy. Local travel websites advertise farms as “idyllic countryside haunts,” with articles on novel weekend activities asking:
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For a country that has lost touch with any mainstream practice of farming, what does it mean for us to want to farm again?
Despite present-day notions of working the land as a casual countryside romp, a look back at colonial history will present a reality that was anything but. Instead of a romantic commune with nature, colonial cash crop cultivation was extractive, both in terms of land and labor, and not biodiverse. About twenty gambier plantations existed when the British occupied Singapore in 1819, with cash crops like nutmeg, pineapple, and coconut also becoming common. While gambier and pepper plantations took an extensive toll on the soil, with patches lasting approximately fifteen years before the land was rendered infertile, rubber plantations extracted a more human cost.
By 1940, rubber plantations covered almost 2.1 million acres of land in Malaya. They also existed within a system of racialized colonial ownership and labor exploitation. An analysis by the data journalism outlet Kontinentalist showed that by 1922, plantation ownership for rubber was heavily skewed toward European companies, with more than half of all acreage being owned by joint-stock companies. Notably, the systems of employment that they used from the latter half of the 1800s to the early 1900s were marked by working conditions so poor as to be “akin to slavery.” Workers on rubber plantations were primarily Chinese and Indian laborers who, while employed under distinct systems, were united in facing a litany of labor abominations that included low wages, unsafe working conditions, overcrowded living conditions, infectious diseases, and even death.
This was not a Malayan exception. Plantation slavery also existed in Africa, in Latin America, in the Caribbean (where sugar plantations were a major part of the economy throughout the eighteenth to twentieth centuries), and in North America, from when the first enslaved Africans were trafficked to Virginia in 1619 by the British. To look at this episode of Singapore’s agricultural history, imbricated as it is within a complex web of colonial resource exploitation and human cruelty, would therefore be to immediately shatter the effect of simplistic nostalgia for the past. But what of the rest of Singapore’s agricultural heritage and foodways?
In Khir Johari’s book on the history and culture of Malay cuisine in Singapore, he emphasizes the interconnectedness and cosmopolitan nature of Singapore as reflected in trade ledgers of the 1800s. Khir writes, “Already Singapore had the makings of a food emporium, serving as a distribution node for edible products and ingredients from around the world: vermicelli from Siam, dates from Arab ports, tea from China, and ghee and dhal from the Indian subcontinent.” Importantly, Singapore also saw robust traffic in foodstuffs within the Malay Archipelago, including “sea products like salted fish, spices, preserves like belachan, and raw staples like sago throughout the region.”
Food farming on the island then existed in conjunction with such realities, a complement to a vibrant trade in foodstuffs that connected Singapore to the Malay Archipelago and beyond. It’s still a far cry from any notion of a self-sufficient homestead that can often figure so strongly in today’s imagination of organic, back-to-nature farming.
In more recent times, Firdaus Sani, a fourth-generation Orang Laut descendant whose ancestry can be traced to the Orang Pulau of Singapore and the Riau Islands, recalls the growing of basic ingredients like common ginger and galangal in islanders’ home gardens on Pulau Semakau. This was before the community was displaced and the government slated the island to be converted into a petrochemical facility and, later, a landfill site.
Even the island farming that Firdaus describes was never an unsullied fantasy of native self-reliance. Small patches of land were farmed by Chinese merchants, and a pineapple plantation was established in the 1960s, he estimates. However, what was grown was generally less for commercial purposes than for personal and communal use. The settled areas on Pulau Semakau then consisted of three parts: Kampung Tengah, Tanjong Penyalai, and Tanjong Romos. Among the islanders, Firdaus explains, those who lived farther inland would have had more land to grow herbs, vegetables, and large fruit trees, and the bounty was often shared or traded.
“These individuals would own really big trees — mango trees, or trees that can really bear fruit. I remember that my mum would tell me that they would go to specific houses and say, ‘Hey, I can help you with some chores, and in return, we can get some fruits from you.’ It could be jambu or mango.” Even now, Firdaus says, that sense of communal sharing exists among the displaced islanders living on mainland Singapore. As a child, he recalls being asked to snip off stalks of daun serai from a neighbor’s plant, told by his mother that the neighbor, an ex-islander, would fully understand the practice of generosity.
Food figures, then, within a slightly different calculus than that of a commodity. “I think what’s being lost right now is the idea [that] food is free for all, the idea of people potentially coming from a place of hardship, and that we know that food is for sustenance and is a basic right,” Firdaus says.
On the island, he explains, about 30 percent of the islanders’ food needs were grown, but the vast majority were sourced from fishing and foraging, significant elements of the Orang Pulau’s cultural heritage and that of Singapore’s as well. These practices included advice that is only now being articulated in contemporary sustainable local fishing guidelines, such as catch-and-release fishing, the letting go of juvenile fish so that they can reproduce and replenish populations, and the collecting of only enough for personal consumption when foraging for animals like sea snails.
In August of 2020, the nonprofit group Marine Stewards launched the first series of guidelines for recreational fishermen in Singapore, with the advice of conservationists, marine scientists, and local fishermen. The guidelines included recommendations to release juvenile fish, avoid critically endangered species, and keep certain non-native species that are caught. One wonders if there would have been a need for such “official” guidelines had we retained a deeper cultural memory or recognized the ecological merits of Indigenous practices.
Yet the knowledge that Firdaus describes can’t be distilled to just its scientific validity. Alongside practices that now closely adhere to sustainability-approved regulations, he also discusses those that are deeply metaphysical — greeting the land and sea when foraging in intertidal zones, for instance, or certain fishermen’s beliefs that fishing in waters with ancestral ties will grant them larger catches.
“It’s not only about understanding nature but . . . about understanding that there are protectors and guardians of the space. So I think we need to take into consideration [that] the idea of respect doesn’t look into only nature, but it looks into the invisible barriers of the guardians and the protectors of the space,” Firdaus says. The Orang Pulau’s farming and foraging practices, while informative from a sustainability standpoint, are also deeply embedded in a spiritual ecosystem that can’t simply be transplanted into the secular. It defies the utilitarian exercise that we may be tempted to enact — to look to Indigenous practices for “key learnings” that conform to an already accepted worldview while dismissing or discarding their more unwieldy elements. But this should also warn us against the fetishization of Indigenous practices as perfect or cast in amber, even as living members of the community deal with the stark realities of state intervention, displacement, and continued disruption of their cultural practices. For the Orang Pulau, for instance, decades of land reclamation and industrialization have rendered vast swaths of Singapore’s coastline and waters inaccessible to fishermen and foragers. One of the few coastal foraging zones that remains accessible is Changi Beach, on the northeast of the island. Just two years ago, as the global pandemic saw borders close and Singaporeans turn to natural spaces for recreation, concerns emerged as crowds descended on the intertidal zone.
Pictures shared online showed hordes with buckets and tongs gathered on Changi Beach on a Sunday in June of 2021, collecting sea anemones, crabs, and shellfish with seeming abandon. The response from authorities was swift. The National Parks Board (NParks) issued a statement noting that while Changi Beach was currently beyond the purview of the agency, under the Parks and Trees Act, “offences, including the picking of shellfish, carry fines of up to $5,000 in NParks-managed parks, and up to $50,000 in nature reserves.” While a blanket ban was never imposed, the emphasis on punishment made clear the threat to Indigenous communities’ practice of foraging. In Firdaus’s words, “To tell everyone that you can’t forage anymore . . . it’s a big ‘screw you’ to everyone, especially the Orang Pulau community.” The episode also underscored the harm that could occur when foraging was removed from cultural practice, unmoored from a knowledge system that understands one’s place within nature as being beyond a consumer.
Singapore’s history of farming and foodways has never been one that lends itself easily to a sojourn into an idyllic lost past. To this day, it remains a complex and continually contested heritage.
The heyday of twentieth-century farming in Singapore arguably lasted from the postwar period to the 1980s. Then, neighborhoods like Potong Pasir, now occupied by housing blocks, were dedicated fields for vegetable farming. Pig, poultry, and egg farms were common. A 1959 newspaper article proclaimed that the industries were “flourishing as they have never flourished before.” By 1967, agriculture provided for the livelihoods of more than twenty thousand families, took up nearly 20 percent of all land use in Singapore, and contributed to 4 percent of its GDP.
Significantly, and perhaps unimaginable for Singapore today, the country was also self-sufficient in several key foodstuffs — pork, poultry, and eggs — from the 1950s through the 1970s. The population was much lower back then: about 1.5 million people lived on the island in 1957, and in the first postindependence census of 1970, that figure had grown to only about 2.1 million. Contrast this with the 5.5 million people living in Singapore today. In 1967, an article in The Straits Times noted the government’s realization of “the need for self-sufficiency in food production.” At the time, farming toward the national goal of providing for oneself was a viable, even attractive, option.
It was a direction that the predecessor to the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), the agency responsible for governing the farming sector, took up in earnest. The Primary Production Department (PPD), created in 1959, was meant to “provide a coordinated approach to developing and regulating the local farming and fishing industry.” It concerned itself with improving production (read: raising yields) and introducing new methods to farming processes. The kind of farming it pushed was one steeped in the language of modernization, technology adoption, and efficiency: breed improvement of the local pig population was carried out through the artificial insemination service, the livestock-pig multiplication scheme, and the boar performance testing unit.
The department’s Pig and Poultry Research and Training Institute helped farmers identify their production problems and gave them the benefit of its practical research findings. Pig and poultry recording schemes were introduced so that farmers could be assisted in assessing the productivity and general performance of their farms. Farmers responded by abandoning traditional farming methods and intensifying production, an outcome that the authorities described with pride. An article from 1981 has the PPD stating that the pig-farming system in the Punggol pig-farming estate was “among the most intensive in the world,” with “about 350,000 pigs kept in the estate of only five hectares.” The strides toward an industrialized state of agriculture were underway, sheathed in the language of high technology and corporate rationalization so characteristic of the 1980s.
And yet modernization ultimately could not save farms from the chopping block. In March of 1984, despite decades of investment and commitment to a specific technologically charged vision of farming, the government announced that the entire industry of pig farming was to be phased out, self-sufficiency be damned. The main reasons cited for the decimation of the industry were environmental and economic. Pig waste was a highly toxic substance, and one that was being produced in grand quantities given the level of intensification that farms had undergone in Singapore. Besides, there was a chance that imported pork could be cheaper too.
At face value, the shift made sense. Singapore was land-scarce, so farms often abutted residential areas, and there was a concern about potential pollution of water sources. What was strange, however, was how sudden this shift was. Up until the early 1980s, the authorities were still planning on building vast waste treatment plants for all pig farms. In newspapers, they lauded “a new breed of farmers” who would raise pigs “the scientific way” and extolled a vision of Singapore’s farming future in that decade as “a most productive unit, engaged in large-scale intensive pig and poultry farming, high-value hydroponic horticulture, such as orchid and mushroom cultivation, and sophisticated aquaculture and aquarium fish-rearing.”
At least one contemporary researcher argues that environmental challenges had plagued the industry for years prior and that there were already “many innovative solutions for them.” Choo Ruizhi, a former senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), posits that what really lay behind the government’s decision to phase out the industry was the contentious relationship it had with business. On at least six notable occasions between 1972 and 1984, organizations such as the Singapore Pork Merchants’ Association (SPMA), which represented local pork retailers and butchers, had clashed with authorities over pricing and supply issues.
Supposedly hard-won through the sacrifices of farmers and the laborious efforts of authorities to coax and cajole the shift toward high-tech farming, the goal of pork self-sufficiency had been abandoned in so quick a time frame as to seem flippant. Perhaps what this episode revealed most clearly was that there was nothing quite sacrosanct about the goal of self-sufficiency after all. Though the state drum was repeatedly beaten to the tune of producing more with less, when push came to shove, all it took was a nudge from the gods of demand and supply for official endorsement to turn on a dime.
As early as 1987, or three years after the phasing out of pig farms was announced, the output of Singapore’s farming sector for fresh primary produce, including poultry, eggs, and vegetables, dropped to just 10 percent of total consumption. The new goal for primary produce was placed at a conservative 30 percent. Another three years later, as the push for high-tech farming hit a new fever pitch, authorities set aside three hundred additional hectares of land for high-tech orchid farming, which meant effectively dedicating about a fifth of Singapore’s agricultural land at the time to growing a nonedible ornamental plant.
In 2019, after several decades of steadily reducing agricultural land use, Singapore’s government announced its “30 by 30” initiative — a national goal to produce 30 percent of the population’s nutritional needs locally by 2030 in order to secure the country’s food supply. Inherent in the idea was the same picture of farming — one built in the developmentalist, modernizing tradition, a step closer toward a technological utopia with the SFA’s announcement of plans for Lim Chu Kang to become a 390-hectare “high-tech agri-food zone.”
Singapore’s current population has more than doubled since the last time the country could securely pledge self-sufficiency. And with the amount of land available for agricultural use plummeting, many acknowledge that it is virtually impossible for Singapore to even attempt food self-sufficiency. The SFA’s limited goal of meeting only 30 percent of the national nutritional needs says as much. Regardless of how productive farming becomes, self-sufficiency and the path it would take to get there — to maximize yields at all costs — is illusive, naive, and not being adhered to anyway.
What history shows us is that self-sufficiency as a goal has been far more malleable than the existentialist rhetoric would have us believe. While initially valid for a newly independent nation, it could be summarily devalued in the face of capital gains and limited when faced with competing needs, like environmental protection. What of other priorities, then? Instead of being browbeaten by state claims of existentialist anxiety in a country where nearly all discussions — on housing, the economy, education, finance — bear the cross of being existential, what would happen if we dismissed the illusory goal of maximizing self-sufficiency and unshackled ourselves from the narrow focus on yields? What else — community, culture, practice — could farming come to mean in Singapore?
With the expiration of Green Circle Eco-Farm’s lease in 2022, Evelyn and her husband moved to Old Upper Thomson Road. Their new home is an extension of the same philosophy on which they built Green Circle. For the interview, Evelyn brews hibiscus tea from the flowers in her garden and sits in a living room littered with books on organic farming, natural healing, and, concerningly, a pamphlet on fighting COVID-19 with natural remedies. Her front driveway still houses crates of soil, farming tools, and saplings at various stages of growth, some ready to be transplanted to the roadside slivers of land outside the boundaries of her house (much to the chagrin of some neighbors).
“A farmer can make money but, of course, not so much that in the end you sort of don’t stick to your principles,” Evelyn tells me. For her, those principles are rooted in a particular strain of organic farming exemplified by Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese pioneer of the alternative food movement. In her conservation proposal, Evelyn cites him as an inspiration for her own farming practice, describing the philosophy as “aimed at streamlining farming efforts by relying on the course of nature with minimal human intervention and optimum output.”
When she first started Green Circle, Evelyn had concentrated on planting vegetables familiar to the Singaporean palate, like choy sum and bok choy. Crop turnover was fast, and it meant a steady monthly income for her. But the delicate plants required cover from intense rain and sun, careful watering, weeding, and constant vigilance for pests. They entailed significant effort and labor. As the climate grew hotter and the weather more extreme, yields dropped precipitously; the plants were battered by torrential rains one day and intense sun the next. Climate change, whose effects are perhaps not yet fully appreciated by the urban dweller, hit Evelyn’s farm and its bottom line with a vengeance. It was then that she switched to planting perennials, like Brazilian spinach, and indigenous plants, like native watercress. These required less watering and care and were far more resilient to the increasingly erratic tropical weather. She also focused on building a food forest, a unique proposition evident to anyone who entered the space or saw it from a bird’s-eye view.
While there were scattered crop beds within Green Circle, it was largely a free-form space whose contours were dictated by the natural growth of plants instead of the most economical use of land. The forest structure enabled a diversity of crops to coexist, far more than would have been possible with conventional farming.
“Nature is never excessive. With a food forest, you realize that nature has worked on it for millions of years and it is the most stable, natural system of growth,” Evelyn says. It’s a practice that she puts forth as both nutritionally and environmentally superior. In particular, she concentrated on the quality of the soil in which her crops grew, believing that building ecosystems, both below and above ground, with microbes and soil life such as earthworms and ants was essential to the eventual crop quality and the resilience of her farm overall.
While there is much to be admired about Evelyn’s farming methods, they also harbor an aversion to modern artifice and technology. She tells me that her motivation for starting the farm stemmed from not wanting “to eat chemicals or synthetic, chemically tainted vegetables.” Her explanation for why these are harmful borders on conspiratorial; she describes them as “foreign chemicals” and says that “when anything is foreign in your body, it’s like you’re introducing a lot of toxins in, and your body is under stress to get rid of the toxins.”
It’s a tirade that carries some truth. Studies have shown that in areas like Punjab, which adopted the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in the “Green Revolution” of the 1970s, the overuse of such chemicals has led to seepage into food, water, and soil, with at least ninety cancer patients for every one hundred thousand people in Punjab, compared with the Indian national average of eighty. Yet the argument also contains a suggestion of the rhetoric trumpeted by those who subscribe to a nature-first, natural healing–only, chemical-skeptical perspective, which more recently has been stretched to extremes to justify anti-vaccination stances.
Through the years, Evelyn’s belief in soil-based organic farming has been steadfast, almost militant. She shrugs off criticisms about her farm’s productivity when compared with high-tech or conventional farming, an especially sore point for her, as a major part of the criteria for the preservation of farms in Singapore is their yield. The future of farming, at least according to the SFA, is a “high-tech, highly productive and resource-efficient agri-food cluster,” a string of multihyphenated buzzwords that more readily conjure up images of robotic arms harvesting lettuce than they do Evelyn’s haphazard food forest.
The ideological experiment that Green Circle represented was by no means perfect, but it was also no more or less idiosyncratic than any other farming philosophy. What it had aimed for — a sustainable way of farming informed by nature’s deeper knowledge — scored well on metrics like climate resilience and plant biodiversity but more poorly on those like yield and market viability. Its demise begs the question of what alternative farming beliefs, practices, and knowledge Singapore discards in the attempt to economize any and all processes, itself a kind of ideological militancy.
Upon what values, ideas, and practices do we build the future of farming in Singapore? The question is an open one and can perhaps be applied to Singapore’s broader development. What is clear is that our ideals can be as much wrought through soil as through the steel of buildings by which the city has so far defined itself.
If farming were to once again grow as an industry, a significant part of the conversation would have to address the labor it uses and its conditions. Currently, foreign laborers are allowed to work in Singapore’s farming industry under the Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM’s) Agritech Work Permit Scheme. Under the rules, migrant workers come from a range of eligible “source” countries: Malaysia, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. But in reality, it is Indian and Bangladeshi workers who make up the bulk of laborers, much like in other sectors, including construction, where similar labor laws apply.
Regardless of ideological bent when it comes to farming — organic versus nonorganic, high-tech versus conventional — the commonality has been the difficulty in avoiding participation in the hyper-exploitative system of migrant labor. Even Evelyn, when asked about her otherwise idyllic farm, said that they employed at least one to two workers who lived in the adjoining quarters of her own spacious compound on the farm. Each was paid a basic salary of about $850 a month, which they could add to with overtime pay. Other companies, such as Edible Garden City, which describes itself as “a social enterprise that champions the Grow-Your-Own-Food movement in cities around the world to improve food sustainability and resilience,” told me in November of 2022 that its workers were typically paid $700 to $800 in basic salary per month, with overtime pay if “they worked, like, thirty days a month,” allowing them to reach the grand monthly sum of $1,200 in all.
For local labor, an ad put out by Edible Garden City in 2015 announcing the position of apprentice urban farmer listed the pay for the full-time, forty-to-forty-five-hours-per-week position as “$500 a month for the first three months, then $800 for the second three months, with a $1,000 completion bonus.” More recently, the estimated salary for an open position as an urban farmer at Edible Garden City is $1,800 to $2,400 monthly — an improvement but far from ideal for a comfortable existence in Singapore.
To say that the history of farming has been complex and full of contestation is not to assume a position of ethical neutrality, to throw up one’s hands and concede that all ideas are equally valid when they are not. Rather, it is to recognize that any claims of objectivity, practicality, and efficiency also need to be scrutinized. Ideals of intimacy, connection, respect for nature, and labor justice must also enter the calculus.
Singapore and its foodways have never existed as a cloistered entity, as some modern nostalgia-tinged visions might suggest. Nor can they be served well by the abandonment of history and cultural practice for a full-tilt run into a techno-utopian wet dream. What we leave behind when we selectively embrace progressivism and bludgeon alternative ideals with the hard, deceptive edge of existentialist anxiety will come to haunt us. The discussion surrounding what kinds of farms we have in Singapore can all too easily be shunted away as unworthy of national attention given the minor part of the economy and geography farming takes up today. But it is a matter as elemental as food, as close as the soil beneath our feet, and as fundamental to our being as any. It has left tracks in our history and will pave parts of our future. To stake our claim in this is to exercise the same muscle that will allow us to grow a space fitting of what we believe in and deserve.
What we sow will be what we reap.
“On Farms,” written by Isabelle Lim and originally published by Mynah, an independent magazine that describes itself as “interested in the Singaporean stories that have yet to be told.” Reprinted with permission.
