PSS335: The total volume of rain has been bigger, but the total duration has also been shorter. That obviously means it has more intensity: Food Security, Ethics and Law Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

Question 1

The total volume of rain has been bigger, but the total duration has also been shorter. That obviously means it has more intensity, leading to a greater frequency of urban flooding.

Today, the average sea level around the island today is 14cm above pre-1970 levels, said the Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS) in March this year in its annual climate assessment.

Such trends will come to affect the way Singapore produces food – be it eggs, vegetables or fish, in outdoor or indoor farms, according to Professor Paul Teng, an adjunct senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.”

• Compare the impact of climate change on traditional farming relative to high-tech farming in Singapore, and describe the strategies that each farming method can implement to mitigate such impact.
• Illustrate the extent to which growing food locally helps make Singapore’s food system more sustainable.

Question 2

Purpleland is a country of 8 million people. Its economy is largely based on agriculture, with a nascent tourism sector in its southern coastal region where several world-renowned beaches are located.

The country has a largely rural population of smallholder farmers who are engaged in traditional farming, where children often have to work long hours on family farms in order to produce enough food for basic food security. As a result, their families cannot afford to send them to school. Furthermore, such farms, being small in scale and labor-intensive, suffers from low productivity.

The country has an unemployment rate of 15% due to poor economic management in the past 20 years. It has also run up a large external debt and now needs to increase its foreign exchange earnings to repay the debt in order to avert a debt crisis.

The country’s newly elected government has put forth several proposals to increase foreign exchange earnings. These include:

• Expanding the tourism sector by changing the law to allow foreign companies to build a large beach resort theme park. The planned resort will be built by clearing mangrove swamps that help protect against coastal erosion due to rising sea levels. It is expected that up to 10,000 jobs will be created through this project.
• Boosting productivity in the agricultural sector by allowing investments from foreign agriculture companies to grow cash crops for export. This proposal will also involve allowing such companies to build industrial farms by buying land from smallholder farmers.