Authoritarian, controlled style of development the new in?

Aug 9, 2008
Why they hate Singapore
Western detractors are getting the jitters as others copy our model
By Chua Lee Hoong

SINGAPORE is small enough to be a suburb in Beijing, but it has something in common with the mammoth People's Republic. The little red dot and Red China are both countries the West loves to hate. There are those who wish bad things to happen to the Beijing Olympics. Likewise, there are those who have had it in for the Lion City for years.
What's eating them?

The easy answer is that both China and Singapore are authoritarian states. The freedoms taken for granted in the West - freedom of speech and assembly - come with more caveats in these two places. But things are not so simple. There are plenty of authoritarian states around, but most do not attract as much attention as Singapore and China.

The real sin: Singapore and China are examples of countries which are taking a different route to development, and look to be succeeding. Success grates, especially when it cocks a snook at much-cherished liberal values.

As Madam Yeong Yoon Ying, press secretary to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, said last month: 'Singapore is an example to other countries of how the free market plus the rule of law, and stable macro-economic policies, can lead to progress and success, but without Western-style 'liberal' democracy.'

Don't believe her words? Read these lines from British journalist John Kampfner, writing in The Guardian last month, lamenting the spread of what he calls the Singapore model.

'Why is it that a growing number of highly-educated and well-travelled people are willing to hand over several of their freedoms in return for prosperity or security? This question has been exercising me for months as I work on a book about what I call the 'pact'.

'The model for this is Singapore, where repression is highly selective. It is confined to those who take a conscious decision openly to challenge the authorities. If you do not, you enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as you wish, and - perhaps most important - to make money. Under Lee Kuan Yew, this city-state built on a swamp has flourished economically.

'I was born in Singapore and have over the years been fascinated by my Chinese Singaporean friends. Doctors, financiers and lawyers, they have studied in London, Oxford, Harvard and Sydney. They have travelled across all continents; they are well-versed in international politics, but are perfectly content with the situation back home. I used to reassure myself with the old certainty that this model was not applicable to larger, more diverse states. I now believe this to be incorrect.

'Provincial governments in China send their brightest officials to Singapore to learn the secrets of its 'success'. For Russian politicians it too provides a useful model. These countries, and others in Asia and the Middle East are proving that the free market does not require a free society in which to thrive, and that in any battle between politics and economics, it is the latter that will win out.'

Mr Kampfner seems in a genuine intellectual funk. He cannot quite understand why otherwise normal, intelligent Singaporeans would trade certain freedoms for economic progress, and accept the Singapore political system for what it is.

But perhaps he has got the wrong end of the stick. The problem lies not in the Singaporeans, but in his own assumptions. Namely: If you speak English, if you are well-educated and well-travelled, you must also believe in Western-style democracy. They are a package.
I was on the receiving end of similar assumptions when I was in the United States in 1991-1992. When Americans asked me, 'Why is your English so good?', often it was not out of admiration but bewilderment. Their next question revealed all: 'Why then do you (i.e. your Government) ban chewing gum?'

Another telling indicator of Western assumptions about Singapore comes from a remark by Singapore's Ambassador to Washington, Professor Chan Heng Chee, who went to the US at the tail end of the Michael Fay saga.One year into her posting there, in 1997, she arranged for a retrospective of the late choreographer Goh Choo San's works. Her Washington audience was awed.

'People suddenly remembered Choo San was a Singaporean. They may have known about Goh Choo San, but to connect him with Singapore was not so obvious for them,' she said.
Sub-text: World-class choreography does not fit their image of a country with corporal punishment.

So the real difficulty for the West is this: We are so like them, and yet so not like them. We speak, dress, do business and do up our homes very much the same way as them. Yet when it comes to political values, we settle - apparently - for much less.

One observer draws an analogy with Pavlovian behavioural conditioning. So conditioned have Westerners become to associating cosmopolitan progress with certain political parameters, they do not know how to react when they encounter a creature - Singapore - that has one but not the other. So they chide and berate us, as if we have betrayed a sacred covenant.

Adding to the iniquity is the fact that countries - rich and powerful ones too, like Russia and the Gulf states - are looking to the Singaporean way of doing things to pick up a tip or two.
I can imagine the shudders of Singapore's Western detractors should they read about a suggestion made by Mr Kenichi Ohmae this week.

In an interview with Business Times, the Japanese management consultant who first became famous as author of The Borderless World, said Singapore should 'replicate' itself in other parts of the world. What he meant was that Singapore should use its IQ, and IT prowess, to help organise effective economies in other regions, as its own had succeeded so well.
To be sure, his reasoning was economic, not political. But for those who hate Singapore, a Pax Singaporeana would be something to work against and head off.

Never underestimate the "small things" in life

Escaping Poverty

By Abigail Tucker
Photographs by Ray Ng
Smithsonian magazine, August 2008

Paul Polak has been helping people escape poverty in Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and elsewhere for 27 years. In Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, the 74-year-old former psychiatrist and founder of International Development Enterprises—a nonprofit that develops low-cost equipment for farmers—argues that simple tools such as a $25 water pump can do more than large cash donations to aid many of the world's "dollar-a-day" people, of which there are an estimated 1.2 billion.

Why did you switch from psychiatry to poverty?

In working with mentally ill people in Denver, I learned that their poverty was a bigger contributor to their state of mind than psychiatric illness. We found them housing and access to employment. Those things helped so much. But I was curious about people who lived on $30 a month or less, so I went to Bangladesh.

You tell the story of a farmer in Nepal.

Yes, Krishna Bahadur Thapa invested $26 to buy a 250-square-meter drip [irrigation] kit. He learned horticulture, and he worked hard to raise off-season cucumber and cauliflower, and all of a sudden he made $256 in one season when he was used to making only $50 to $100 a year. He went from that first tiny plot to a whole acre of irrigated fruits and vegetables. He bought himself a buffalo and made almost $700 selling milk. Then he bought two-thirds of an acre of oranges. He raised goats and sold the kids for meat. Farmers improve in bits and pieces. By that method you can get as big as you want.

You say we can't "donate" people out of poverty.

Right. Poor people have to make an investment of their own time and money to move out of poverty. You can help them by removing constraints. Many of the current approaches to poverty assume you have to give them a large number of things. But there are no sustainable impacts once the money stops.

You have great hopes for a $100 house.Virtually all "dollar-a-day" people in rural areas own their own houses. But the walls are made of mud and wattle, usually there's a thatched roof, and the floor is a mixture of dung and clay. The house has no value. You can't sell it and, even more critically, you can't go to a bank and use it [as collateral] for a loan. But for $100 you can build a 20-square-meter house—a skeleton of eight beams and a good roof that they can add bricks or cinder blocks to. Then they can go to the bank and borrow against it.

What's an example of a tool that might help America's urban poor?

One thing I learned in Colorado is that homeless people need a secure place to store their stuff. The railroad station had 75-cent lockers, and that's where [a homeless man named] Joe kept his stuff. Well, there were thousands of homeless people in Denver. It would have been a fairly simple matter for someone to finance a loan for a locker facility.

Your family left Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis when you were a child.

My father sold everything at 10 cents on the dollar to accumulate 2,000 bucks to get a visa to Canada. We arrived as refugees. We worked for a while as migrant farm laborers, and then three of us—three families—bought a farm. My dad worked hauling molten pig iron in a factory, and in the evenings and on weekends he had a landscaping business, and then he started a nursery and made a very good living. I learned about seeing things with open eyes, and about being an entrepreneur.

Having your own farm in the backyard?

Green entrepreneurs are helping America's backyards produce vegetables. Leonard Doyle reports
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Go Independent.co.uk Web

Anne Vollen jokes that when she began running her own business from her San Francisco home, "the backyard was soon more neglected than my husband and children". But then a man called Trevor Paque bicycled into her life and everything changed. He turned the overgrown tangle of bind-weed into a productive organic garden. Trevor or his partner now shows up once a week to plant, weed and maintain it for a modest fee. He harvests what's grown and discreetly places a basket of home-grown fruit and vegetables on her back porch, before closing the gate behind him.

Americans are suddenly deeply worried about food. An unidentified salmonella outbreak, initially blamed on tomatoes trucked thousands of miles to supermarkets, gave rise to a massive scare this summer. As more than 1,100 people fell desperately ill, the jalapeno pepper was then blamed but tomatoes have somehow lost their appeal. The advice from around the office watercooler is to eat locally grown food. But who has time to get to the farmers' market or plant their own garden?

And what about the perfectly clipped lawn of America? For generations, they have been a symbol of middle-class respect-ability. Are they to be dug up as well? A recent Nasa satellite study determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the US cover nearly 50,000 sq miles – an area more than half the size of England. Growing this vast lawn requires an amazing 200 gallons of water per person, per day (a third of all residential water use in the US goes on gardens) as well as vast amounts of herbicides and fertilisers. For much of America, the acme of middle-class living is the perfect green sward. There are even laws to ensure that they are properly maintained. An outfit called The Lawn Institute once declared: "Some feel that a person who keeps the lawn perfectly clipped is a person who can be trusted."

But the American lawn may have had its day. Last summer, a 70-year-old widow in smalltown Utah was taken off in handcuffs after letting her grass go brown. The Lawn Lady became a pin-up for America's first grassroots anti-lawn movement. Calling itself the Wild Ones it has chapters in 12 states from coast to coast and is dedicated to turning lawns into "edible estates." If America is good at one thing, it is finding convenient solutions to the problems of consumers. Something called the "lazy locavore" problem has been identified as awareness about the environment grows by leaps and bounds. Everyone wants to be part of the slow food movement but few have the desire to get mud under their fingernails and grow it for themselves.

Starting in Portland, Oregon, two years ago, two university graduates Donna Smith and her partner Robin began "backyard farming" to produce food for those who either cannot be bothered to grow it or can't afford to buy it from Wholefoods Market.

Driving around the city, they realised how much land was being wasted in gardens and started a company called Your Backyard Farmer. Within a year, they had dug up 25 lawns to create what Ms Smith describes as "farms". "We never had to look for people, they found us," she said, "and now we have a waiting list of 67 people who want our service, so we are hiring two more farmers to work with us next year." It costs about $1,300 (£600) to have a garden supplying enough for two people, year round. "That compares favourably to the supermarket and you know what you're eating," she said. She and Robin do all the work, including trucking, bringing in soil, setting up the irrigation system and maintaining it. They also run a consulting service for those who want to go it alone. "Both of us are passionate about urban food security," she said, "and there are lots of like-minded people out there who are concerned about their food source and the damage being done to the land and their bodies by the pesticides being used."

"What we find is that people are really interested in getting pure real food and this is a way to make it happen. My vision is that an acre of land be set aside with every new housing development, so that a farmer can be hired to grow food for the local householders."
Ms Smith stresses that her customers in Portland are mostly poorer people rather than the wealthy homeowners she expected to be hired by when she launched her business. "Only a couple of our customers are professionals," she said, "most of our farms are in lower income neighbourhoods. In some cases, students prefer to hire us to grow their food rather than spend it in the grocery store. We are delighted to discover that we are not a service for the rich."