Singapore’s hawker culture Unesco listing shows what’s missing in Thai street food scene

By Sirinya Wattanasukchai

December 21, 2020

Singapore has done it again! The island state's hawker culture has finally won United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) recognition as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

After almost three years, this island state has successfully made its people's everyday life — officially indicated on the list as "community dining and culinary practices in a multicultural urban context" — gain global acceptance through this prestigious list.

In a Facebook post, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong thanked the people who have worked very hard to get Singapore's hawker culture inscribed on the list.

"The biggest thanks must go to the generations of hawkers for nourishing a nation's stomach and spirits. This recognition would not have come without their sweat, toil and dedication to their profession," said Mr Lee.

He shared a few photos of hawker dishes and encouraged people to celebrate the week by ordering their favourite hawker dishes and sharing a photo under his post.

I'm sure many Thais would be jealous of their Association of Southeast Asian Nations neighbour, as they think their street food culture is second to none.

Sink Cities

[Two stories on "sinking cities" - Jakarta and Bangkok.

The challenges for either is considerable. But for Jakarta, "a city that can't deliver basic services is a failed city,... On top of conventional issues like flooding and urbanization [there's] climate change, tipping the scale. And at this rate, people will be fighting in the streets for increasingly limited resources like clean water and safe living spaces."

Bangkok has similar problems. Drawing of ground water has led to subsistence and "The wet places will become wetter, and the dry places will become drier,... What we used to call a one-in-a-hundred-year event is happening more frequently."]

Thai turmoil: Lessons for S'pore

Jun 16, 2010
THINK-TANK

By Kishore Mahbubani

AS I watched the dramatic developments in Thailand over the past year or two, I often asked myself what Singaporeans thought as they watched these developments.

Did they think: 'Thank God we are not like Thailand. Such political instability could never characterise Singapore.' Or did they think: 'We should watch out. What happened in Thailand could also happen here.'

[I think Singaporeans who thought about it were thinking: dammit! I wanted to go shopping/for massage/for holiday in Bangkok!"]

Unless an opinion poll were taken here, we will never know the answer. In my view, it would be unwise for Singaporeans to dismiss the events in Thailand. There may yet be lessons in them for us.

Superficially, Thailand and Singapore could not be more different. Thailand is an ancient kingdom. It has a more ethnically and religiously coherent polity, with the exception of its southern provinces. It has also been blessed with a monarchy that has for several decades provided it with social stability.

By contrast, Singapore is a truly modern republic with little of the history that Thailand has. We have had a Westminster-style parliamentary government since independence. In short, there is little in common, superficially, between Thailand and Singapore.

However, we do share one attribute in common: For a long time, Thailand was perceived to be the most stable society in South-east Asia. It was the only South-east Asian state to escape colonial rule. This took great political wisdom on the part of the Bangkok establishment. And after South-east Asia was decolonised, Thailand remained stable despite the military coups that came and went.

From time to time there was unrest in the southern provinces, but the heartland of Thai society remained stable. The reverence that both the Bangkok establishment and Thai peasants had for King Bhumibol Adulyadej served as a stabilising force. After a failed coup in 1991, Thailand had a pro-democracy uprising that led to several peaceful transfers of power, making it one of the first countries in South-east Asia to experience this.

Thailand was seen to have safely crossed a political threshold to achieve modern political stability. Through all this, the Thai economy continued to grow, attracting valuable long-term foreign investments. Remarkably enough, though Thailand went through a wrenching economic and financial crisis during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, it remained stable. Thais accepted peacefully great economic deprivation. Contrast this with the social and political upheavals that Greece is experiencing today.

So what went wrong in Thailand? The full story is too long to be told here. And the roles, for good or bad, of key personalities, like former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, have to be recorded in full too. But while the full story is complex, the systemic or structural explanation may be quite simple.

For decades, despite all the political ups and downs, the Bangkok establishment had dominated the political system of the country and assumed that this was its birthright. This establishment never understood that Thaksin had used all the instruments of democratic electioneering to wake up a rural electorate that had been politically quiescent.

Once this political genie was let out of the bottle, it could not be put back in. The old socio-political contract between the Bangkok establishment and the rural masses broke down. In its place, a new socio-political contract needs to emerge. This is what Thailand is struggling to achieve now. And it does not help that King Bhumibol's health is poor at this moment of great political need.

Like the Thailand of the past, Singapore, too, is perceived to have one of the most stable political systems in South-east Asia. The question for Singapore is: Will such political stability continue naturally? Or will it require, like Thailand, new socio-political contracts as society changes with modernisation and growth?

As a student of politics, I have come to believe that political stability is not a natural development. It requires great effort and often great political wisdom - especially the wisdom to make changes ahead of time.

And Singapore suffers from unique political vulnerabilities: It is the world's only city-state with a very diverse ethnic population. It also has the most globalised economy in the world, making it vulnerable to external shocks.

I have no doubt that in 2015, we will celebrate 50 happy years of independence and peace and prosperity. There are no imminent dangers at our doorstep. But we must also think beyond 2015 and of how Singapore would fare if it is subjected to new strains and stresses.

Can a socio-political contract that did well in the first 50 years of our independence serve us equally well in the next 50 years? And will our HDB heartland continue to accept this old contract? Or will it at some point demand more? Who knows?

And why do I ask such uncomfortable questions? Because the very first minister I worked with was a great man called S. Rajaratnam. He told me: 'Kishore, we must think the unthinkable.' And political instability is now unthinkable in Singapore.

All these thoughts about potential political instability have also come swirling into my head because I have just finished reading Meira Chand's brilliant new novel, A Different Sky. It is a gripping read. It captures well all the stresses and strains that Singapore experienced in the turbulent period from 1927 to 1956.

Although I was alive for only eight of those years, the novel nonetheless surfaced in my mind a rush of childhood memories I had forgotten: gangsters ripping one another apart with broken beer bottles in Joo Chiat Road; me creeping inside a monsoon drain in violation of a curfew imposed because of ethnic riots so I could buy bread from a bakery; watching a Malay neighbour return home with blood on his shirt after being beaten up by a Chinese mob.

Chand never lived in Singapore during this period. Despite this, she has successfully resurrected memories of a turbulent period I had long forgotten. This is why I believe her novel - which will be launched by President S R Nathan on July 8 - should be read by all junior college students in Singapore.

I say this despite the sex in the novel. Come to think of it, given Singapore's procreation problems, I should say 'because' of the sex in the novel. No, it is not a steamy read. But it does not flinch from describing brutal realities. Scenes of torture are always difficult to describe. But Chand has succeeded. My stomach turned with each scene.

She did not intend to write a didactic novel. This is not a book about good and evil. It provides a vivid description of the messy world that Singapore experienced for more than three decades from 1927.

We have not experienced political messiness for almost 50 years now. So the obvious question we need to ask is: How will we handle it if political messiness returns again to Singapore, as it has to Thailand?

The writer is the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Think-Tank is a weekly column rotated among eight leading figures in Singapore's tertiary and research institutions.

When natural disasters are only human

Feb 4, 2010
When natural disasters are only human
By Andy Ho, Senior Writer

AMONG the most embarrassing reports from Haiti are those about its elite. The Jan 12 quake which destroyed much of Port-au-Prince spared its wealthy eastern suburb of Petionville. The mansions there were simply better constructed than most other buildings in the capital.

For Petionville residents - mostly fair-skinned descendants of the French colonialists who controlled the slave plantation economy until independence in 1804 - the genteel life continues. Meanwhile, the black denizens of the shanties in downtown Port-au-Prince who survived the temblor are still on the streets. Relief aid isn't arriving fast enough and most of it will go to Petionville residents, in any case, 'through their government connections, trading companies and interconnected family businesses', as The Washington Post noted.

This unequal distribution of the consequences of the quake is quite typical of natural disasters. In ancient times, a disaster - from dis + astro or 'bad star' - was believed to involve the baleful forces of nature striking humans. But though natural hazards may be unavoidable, they become tragedies only when human decisions result in the most vulnerable bearing most of the suffering.

There are various economic and political factors which cause the consequences of natural disasters to be unequally distributed. But only limited progress has been made in analysing them, which could be one task for the multi-disciplinary Institute of Catastrophe Risk Management that Nanyang Technological University launched last month.

In the 1970s and 1980s, disaster studies focused on how human extractive activities like logging led to deforestation, the silting of rivers and so on. In the 1990s, experts recognised how the consequences of such tragedies were non-randomly distributed by race and income.

In the last decade, their causes were also recognised to be non-random too. Thus, almost all toxic emissions in the United States and Japan come from 5 per cent of their economic activity, almost all located in the poorest communities. Who makes these location decisions? The rich and powerful, of course.

Because natural disasters are assumed to impact just those who happen to be caught in their paths, researchers neglected to look for the social, economic or political factors influencing their impact on people. Instead, their focus has largely been on emergency preparedness, disaster recovery and the like.

The places that are historically prone to quakes or hurricanes are already very well known. Thus when people build in such locations, they do so hoping not to be struck in the near future. Or perhaps they believe they will survive the disaster should it occur.

It was Yale sociologist Charles Perrow who introduced the notion of 'normal accidents'. That is, given the extent to which we depend today on complex systems - power generation, for example, or sewage disposal - multiple catastrophes just waiting to occur are actually built into the fabric of our lives.

Professor Perrow further argues in The Next Catastrophe that instead of assuming a natural disaster is naturally a tragedy, we should look for human causes that turn it into one at any particular location.

On Aug 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept down on New Orleans, breaking the levees on the Mississippi river. Some 1,300 people perished in the floods that destroyed 69,000 houses and racked up US$100 billion (S$140 billion) in losses.

In 1965 and 1969, respectively, hurricanes Betsy and Camille took the same path as Katrina did but caused much less damage. Betsy saw a quarter of the city flooded but only 76 people perished. Stronger levees were then built - but Katrina flooded 80 per cent of New Orleans.

While Katrina stories usually focus on the broken levees, the fact of the matter is Louisiana had more public funding for levee construction than any other state in the five years before Katrina occurred. What mattered more was the building of a 122km long, ramrod straight, deepwater canal that directly connected the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the freshwater of the Mississippi River.

Completed in 1968, it allowed sea water to penetrate very far inland. The salinity killed plants in the wetlands around the river that had long buffered New Orleans from storm surges. Between 1965 and 2005, one million out of four million acres of wetlands were lost thus. Sans wetlands to sponge up hurricane storm surges, the straight canal provided an unobstructed path for and amplified the Katrina flood waters. The levees broke and the rest is history.

Researchers have established that the authorities knew before building the canal that it could destroy the wetlands and raise the risk of hurricane flooding. But it was built, nevertheless, to transform river town New Orleans into a seaport. Over the decades, however, the crooked Mississippi river still carried 250 times more freight than the straight canal. The latter was prone to silting and was re-dredged frequently, which obstructed traffic.

The background to Katrina shows how it was human actions that turned a natural hazard into a tragedy. Prof Perrow argues that spreading out populations now concentrated in hazardous regions will reduce the risks in case of another Katrina.

But the poor have few relocation options. Those trapped in New Orleans as the flood waters rose were mainly poor blacks with no transportation out.

Because Katrina led to significant silting, big vessels can no longer use the canal. By July last year, a rock barrier had been constructed to plug the canal, which will be closed. But should another hurricane make landfall before the wetlands are restored, which could take decades, the poor will bear its brunt - again.

andyho@sph.com.sg

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Bangkok sinking
February 04, 2010
Nirmal Ghosh hears experts warn that the city is unprepared for climate change.

IN BANGKOK
 
GOVERNMENT policies and regulations in Thailand still "do not take climate change into consideration at all" despite the clear risk to Bangkok, according to Dr Anond Snidvongs, one of the country's foremost experts on climate change modeling.
 
Most designs and plans for infrastructure and buildings, remain based on the premise that "everything is constant" he said at a panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT) last Monday. 
 
Dr Anond, director of SEA START — a research unit dedicated to predicting the impact of climate change in south east Asia — pleaded for an open and wide debate and exchange of ideas on how to secure Bangkok against the imminent risks posed by the combined forces of sea level rise, land subsidence and extreme storms.
 
With him on the panel was Prof Cor Dijkgraaf, an expert in urban planning currently based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands — a country below sea level that survives only because of its extensive system of dikes.
 
Prof Dijkgraaf drew some interesting comparisons between the Netherlands and Bangkok. And he had some interesting old pictures as well — of parts of old Bangkok under water decades ago before the city’s drainage system was upgraded.
 
If Bangkok wanted to prevent similar scenes in the future, "you have to start thinking of this now," he said.
 
"You can do all the research, make all the calculations, but if there's no political will you can't get it done. You have to ask if you can afford not to take measures to avoid the cost of doing nothing in the coming years," said Prof Dijkgraaf.
 
Much of Bangkok is at sea level or about 1 metre above it, and the land is steadily subsiding in nearby coastal zones, and in parts of the city itself. At the same time the level of the sea is rising. In a worst case scenario within the next 40 years, vital installations and tens of thousands of homes and offices and factories will face major floods.
 
While listening to Dr Anond I recalled the fund-raising dinner for prachatai.com which I had attended in December 2009, where Governor of Bangkok MR Sukhumbhand Paribatra had spoken about the challenges of the future.
 
I went back to the recording and sure enough he had mentioned climate change and the threat to Bangkok.
 
"For Thailand the most worrying problem a the moment is rising sea level which will definitely accelerate the rate of coastal erosion," he said.
 
MR Sukhumbhand said Thailand has lost 113,000 rai (around 45,000 acres) of coastal land over the last 30 years. In the province of Samut Prakarn alone, a few miles south of Bangkok, land loss had been to the tune of 10,000 rai (around 4,000 acres).
 
I remembered travelling in a boat in the area with Dr Anond in 2007, purring along through water several metres deep where a road had once been, complete with the telephone poles sticking up out of the waves.


The waters of the Gulf of Thailand lapping at the telephone poles of Bang Khun Tien, which were on dry land only 20 years ago. This low-lying region is fighting a losing battle against the rising sea level, clearly seen in this photo taken in 2007.
PHOTO: Nirmal Ghosh

Disturbingly, MR Sukhumbhand continued to say: "By 2050... large parts of Bangkok will be under water. We need a combination of short term and longer term measures (for drainage and coastal defence), which of course require massive investment — which we have not even begun to do."
 
At the FCCT, Dr Anond made another interesting observation — that the rate of subsidence of part of the coast, both on the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman sea, had increased after the December 2004 earthquake that had created the devastating Asian tsunami.
 
Up to 1.16 million buildings in Bangkok — 900,000 of them residential — were at risk from the worst case scenario of a coincidence of land subsidence, sea level rise and a storm surge, he said — and "ongoing efforts are not enough" to cope.
 
Proposed measures to deal with it include a large storage dam, a barrage across the mouth of the Chao Phraya river, storm surge barriers across the upper Gulf of Thailand, and diversion channels.
 
"Even in the scientific community we don't believe we have sufficient certainty to advise on what to do and what not to do," he acknowledged.
 
"But people in Bangkok need to start thinking of the future."