Singapore’s government is determined to keep hawker centres alive

Welfare is “a dirty word” in Singapore—or so a past prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, once approvingly declared. What the city-state prizes, he explained, was not handouts, but self-reliance. Workers do not receive a state pension, but pay instead into individual retirement accounts. Health care, too, must be purchased from mandatory savings, not dispensed by a spendthrift state. There is no minimum wage, and no subsidies for staples such as rice or electricity. Oddly, though, there is one aspect of everyday life that almost no other governments get involved in but that the Singaporean authorities are not willing to leave to the vicissitudes of the market: eating out.

Singapore’s government operates an island-wide network of 121 “hawker centres”, which together house more than 6,000 tiny, privately operated stalls. These state-run food courts are not mere vestiges of a more interventionist era: the government has built 14 new ones in the past nine years. The latest opened in September. The authorities take a minute interest in what the hawkers serve (there must be a mix of different cuisines, including halal options for Singapore’s Muslims), how much the food costs (some hawkers are obliged to offer at least one dish for around S$3.50, or $2.59), who cooks it (only Singaporeans or permanent residents may work in hawker centres, and no one may lease more than two stalls) and so on.

This being Singapore, there are also strict rules for how customers should behave. Parliament recently approved a new law obliging them to clear their trays and litter from the communal tables, or risk a fine of S$300. Politicians have since debated why the tray and crockery return rate (TCRR) remains vexingly stuck at about 90%.

Why maintain this vast bureaucracy of stir-fries and soups? Hawker centres were originally conceived in the 1960s and 1970s as a way to get food vendors off the streets, to reduce disruption to traffic, littering and poor hygiene. More recently the authorities have come to see hawker centres as “community dining halls”, providing an essential service by giving hard-up Singaporeans access to tasty meals at low prices.

Shrimp-paste patriots

The government also describes hawker centres as embodying the national spirit, because cooks and customers of many different races and creeds rub shoulders in them harmoniously. As the UN put it in 2020 when, at the government’s request, it added “hawker culture” to its catalogue of world heritage, “Hawkers and hawker centres have become markers of Singapore as a multicultural city-state.” (Hawker centres also reveal the limits of this integration: mixed groups at a single table are rare.)

Whatever hawker centres’ purpose, the government is determined to keep them going. That is not easy. Hawkers work long hours in hot and cramped conditions. Their average age is about 60. Singapore’s rapid development in recent decades has lifted the median income to more than $48,000 a year—higher than in Germany or Japan. Although vacancies in hawker centres are low, officials fret that younger people will not want to go into the trade, and that hawking will gradually die out unless the state intervenes.

The government’s response has been a smorgasbord of programmes and grants intended to entice young people to become hawkers. There is the “Incubation Stall Programme”, which gives new hawkers discounted rent on fully equipped stalls for 15 months, to try their hand at the business without incurring big upfront costs. There is the “Hawkers Succession Scheme”, which pairs veterans hoping to retire with neophytes learning the ropes, to allow successful stalls to keep operating when the stallholder stops working. There are “Hawkers’ Productivity Grants”, which reimburse hawkers for 80% of the cost of new labour-saving equipment, to make the job less gruelling.

School of hard woks

The most ambitious scheme is the “Hawkers’ Development Programme”, which provides training, an apprenticeship and mentoring to new hawkers, to help them find their feet. At a five-day course that seeks to convey the basics of running a business as well as cooking, an instructor pauses, wok sizzling, ingredients chopped, to explain how to give hokkien mee, a staple of hawker centres, a proper depth of flavour. The key is the braising of noodles in flavoursome stock, he confides, before he tosses in beansprouts, fish sauce, spring onions and prawns to complete the dish. Twenty students look on, rapt, some taking notes, others filming on their phones.

One of the students, Margaret, works in logistics for a furniture company. She has happy memories of cooking with her grandmother, and would love to do her bit to preserve Singapore’s own brand of culinary fusion, Nyonya cuisine, which blends Chinese and Malay techniques. She likes the idea of being her own boss and is willing to accept a reduced income—but she is worried about how low her earnings might sink if she takes the plunge and becomes a full-time hawker.

The family of another student, Kevin, has a business making fishballs, for a type of soup that is another staple of hawker centres. As a child, he used to help his parents by scraping scraps of fish off bones. Having worked for a fancy chef in Australia, he thinks he could freshen up old recipes with new techniques, such as brining protein before cooking. But he, too, is uncertain that he can make a lifelong career out of hawking.

The fundamental problem, argues Wee Ling Soh, a food blogger whose mother ran a fishball-soup stall for 20 years, is that the assistance the government is offering is not nearly enough to compensate for a lifetime of back-breaking work for low pay. The piecemeal incentives, she says, remind her of the various schemes the government has adopted to persuade Singaporean women to have more children. They are all helpful, but insignificant when weighed against the cost and difficulty of raising a child. (This year, for the first time, the number of children the typical Singaporean woman is expected to have over her lifetime fell below one.)

The statistics bear Ms Wee out. The Hawkers’ Development Programme has been running since 2020. By the end of April some 566 would-be hawkers had attended the week’s training course. Of those, only 120 had gone on to complete an apprenticeship with a hawker. A mere 29 had started a stall of their own, of which only 16 remained in operation.

The usually hard-headed Singaporean government would not normally persist with a scheme that yields a success rate of less than 3%. But then the authorities seem strangely conflicted over hawker centres. They want to preserve them, but not to coddle hawkers, most of whom must pay market rents determined by independent surveyors. By the same token, although the government is a big believer in market forces, it does not think Singapore’s 8,000-odd private food outlets and hundreds of thousands of culinary businesses should be allowed to make state-run hawker centres redundant.

City-state on a plate

“Singapore” declared Lawrence Wong, the current prime minister, in his most recent National Day address, “is like a plate of Hainanese curry rice”. The city-state, like the meal, he explained, is the product of many different cultures—Western, Chinese, Malay and Indian—all blended together. “Such a unique dish,” he continued, “can only be found in our inclusive and multicultural society.” Never mind that Singapore’s sizable Muslim minority does not really see itself in a dish whose main ingredient is a pork chop. Never mind that Hainanese curry rice is an obscure enough dish that the Straits Times, Singapore’s biggest English-language newspaper, felt obliged to publish an article explaining what it is and where it can be bought. Singaporean politicians, it seems, like hawker-centre metaphors even more than Singaporeans like hawker-centre food. ■