Singapore’s green trump card

Source : Straits Times – 7 May 2009

SPRUCING up and greening Singapore with trees all over the island was a key economic strategy from Day One, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said last night.
In order to differentiate the country from its larger neighbours, one of his first tasks on becoming Prime Minister was to develop a Garden City with good infrastructure and telecommunications.

To woo investors from developed countries, ‘we had to make this a First World oasis in a Third World region’, he told some 600 guests from the public and private sectors, non-governmental organisations and the landscape and horticulture industry at a dinner marking the Botanic Gardens’ 150th anniversary.
MM Lee took part in a dialogue at the event on the greening of Singapore, moderated by Ambassador-at-Large Tommy Koh.
Professor Koh asked him at the start of the hour-long dialogue why cleaning up ‘dirty and smelly’ Singapore was a priority when it faced numerous other challenges upon gaining independence in 1965.
‘It was part of a bigger plan. After we were asked to leave Malaya, we had to work out a strategy which would allow a little island dependent on Malaya for its hinterland to survive,’ MM Lee said.
What could be done immediately was ‘to show investors that this was a well-organised place’, he said of what was effectively Singapore’s secret weapon.
Coming from the airport into town, they would pass by lush greenery, and when they visited him in the Istana, they would see well-maintained lawns and shrubs.
‘So without having to tell anything to the chief executive officer, I knew he would understand that when I say we will deliver, he knows we can deliver; that this is a country where the administration works, where there is a system,’ he said.

The fact is, he added with a laugh, ‘you can’t just plant a tree and walk away. The tree will die’.
‘You need tree doctors, you need to understand what soil and how much sunlight it requires. You put it under a flyover and you got to get forest shrubs that grow in shaded areas,’ he explained.
‘It’s a very complex thing that all people who run big organisations will understand,’ said the man who personally oversaw the greening process here.

He credited the British colonial administration for having ‘done the basics’ which Singapore’s landscape architects and park managers were able to build on.

Indeed, it was under British rule that the Botanic Gardens first started life in 1859, as a venue for flower shows and later where rubber was first cultivated.

Today it is one of Singapore’s top tourist attractions and a premier institution for botanical research, said National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan at last night’s event.
The dinner and dialogue with MM Lee raised $550,000 which will go towards scholarships for Singapore’s future botanists and horticulturalists.
Guests last night also paid tribute to MM Lee’s role in greening Singapore. Prof Koh said former National Parks chief executive Tan Wee Kiat, who was at the dinner, told him that he must have been ‘the only gardener in the world who reports directly to the PM’.
MM Lee stressed that planting and maintaining trees and parks was ‘the easy part’.
The tough part, once all the infrastructure was in place, was ‘to get people to change from Third World to First World behaviour’.

This led to ‘endless campaigns’ to tell people ‘not to bring chickens and pigs into high-rise (buildings), not to pee in elevators’ and above all, he joked, ‘not to steal the plants’.
It took 30 or 40 years, but finally Singapore has reached the stage where its people feel a sense of ownership for the environment, he said.

‘It took some time to get them to understand (that) if you keep your environment nice and clean, your property values go up; if your environment is scruffy and dirty, then when you want to sell the flat, the price is down.’

MM Lee was so exercised by the ‘Clean and Green’ campaign that he told Mr Goh Chok Tong, upon handing over the reins as Prime Minister in 1990, that ‘if you lose interest in this, (Singapore) will go back to the bad old days’.