Singapore's resources

No doubt about it, Singapore is an urban nation. But if all this concrete and all these buildings weren’t here, this would be a rainforest jungle. We’re only 1degree north of the Equator, and it’s humid too (weather.com says 70% today). My room stays a balmy 84 degrees, and when I woke up from a nap on Sunday evening, my bed was wet with sweat; I looked at the thermometer on my alarm clock, and it was 90degrees. Typically, when I’m in my room, I wear just gym shorts, and an unfortunate consequence of frequent sweating is that shorts start to smell. I’ve never had stinky shorts before, but I know now that if you wear them too often and sweat too much, they start to stink – even after just one or two days. There’s an annoyance/reward trade-off with rain. Rain cools the air but is annoying. Singapore wasn’t so hot earlier this month when it rained every day for two weeks, but walking in the rain, umbrella or not, sucks. Now it has rained very little for the past week, and it is hot.

On maps of Singapore, in the geographic center of the island, you’ll see a large patch of green. This is the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. Lonely Planet calls this “one of the world’s only patches of primary urban rainforest.” Some of you may know that I don’t much care for jungles or wild animals. I’m not afraid; they just annoy me, and I don’t trust them. Supposedly, there are more species of tree in this nature reserve than on the entire North American continent (for more fun facts, click here). There is a zoo in the nature reserve and a “Night Safari,” where they drive you around in cars at night and try to shine lights on animals. Sounds like the ultra-fun hoosier activity of “deer spotting,” where you walk around the woods at night and try to shine a light on unsuspecting deer. I don’t care much about night safaris, but I’ll go someday to Singapore’s because it seems requisite.

Also worthy of note, Singapore is the largest exporter of ornamental fish in the world and supplies 25% of the world’s entire market. There’s much talk about Singapore not having any natural resources to exploit, yet the nation remarkably went from poor to rich in 30 years. Thomas Friedman said in The World is Flat that nations like Singapore and Taiwan with few natural resources end up as success stories because they are forced to rely on human ingenuity and hard work, and these are more sustainable than floods of royalty checks sent by the governments for, I don’t know, exploitation of oil reserves, rather than any work you did. Of course there are many national examples for and against Mr. Friedman. But the point is, Singapore does have a natural resource: ornamental fish.

Singapore was formerly a colony of British plantations growing rubber trees, but I think they’ve mostly left by now. There are, however, still rubber factories, that turn the raw latex produced in Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia (Wikipedia says they account for 72% of worldwide production), into rubber for tires, erasers, and whatever else you use rubber for. At the Singapore Commodities Exchange there is a futures contract for rubber traded. Singapore is “the world’s largest natural rubber trading center,” the Singapore Commodities Exchange website says.