Introduction
In 1903, Stanley Arden, Superintendent of the Selangor Experimental Gardens near Kuala Lumpur, noted how it was almost impossible to entice local youth — especially those educated in the English schools — into agriculture as a career, a fact that he ascribed to the low wages and the array of more appealing white-collar alternatives now available to Malayans. He proposed a possible solution: embedding hands-on agricultural training into schools. This, he argued, would pique pupil’s interest when they saw the fruits of their labour, not least the ability to sell the literal fruits on afterward.Footnote 1 Arden’s proposal was less concerned with creating holistic school curricula however than with tackling what was increasingly seen as a dangerous inability to adequately feed the population of Malaya.
Over the next 50 years, fears for adequate food supply rose and fell. Food supply was heavily reliant on imported foodstuffs and the turbulence of two world wars, a series of economic downturns affecting the colony’s chief export industry and multiple severe flood and drought episodes easily interrupted the colony’s ability to import, or to grow, ample food. Notwithstanding, it took little to tip the balance between sufficient and insufficient because of underlying systemic vulnerabilities in Malayan society.
First, there had been a significant shift in land-use. Without wishing to pander to an old-fashioned pastoral idyll, with a low population, the mainly rural pre-colonial Malayans had been largely self-sufficient, relying on subsistence agriculture — usually of the staple rice — alongside hunting, fishing and small-scale fruit and vegetable growing to deliver their dietary requirements. Commercial economic activities had been based on available forest resources and handicrafts which could be bartered or traded on a local scale, including for additional rice imported regionally.Footnote 2 The arrival of the English East India Company (EEIC) at Penang Island in 1786 had set in motion changes that would erode this traditional way of life. As Anna Winterbottom has argued, the EEIC ‘was an agent of environmental change that proved catastrophic to many environments and animal habitats that it came into contact with’.Footnote 3
The EEIC’s long-term goal was to commercialise agriculture for export, and so began a process of experimentation with local or introduced crops to see what could be grown and exported successfully. Rarely were these foodstuffs for local consumption — with the exception of vegetable farming for the towns — and, initially at least, it was assumed that local and Indigenous rural populations would carry on providing for themselves as before.Footnote 4 Rice did continue to be grown in the northern Malay states — especially in Kedah — but the extent of this rice growing land did not expand in line with new population growth, in part due to political instability in the late nineteenth century, but more so the ongoing problem of soil erosion and the transition of newly deforested land to commercial agriculture, not food production.Footnote 5 Only Province Wellesley, Krian and later, Kedah and Perlis focused almost solely on rice growing.Footnote 6 By the time of the transfer of power to the British Colonial Office in 1867, a considerable amount of traditional subsistence farming culture had been swept away, a process that was consolidated by the early 1900s after the rubber boom and many estates exchanged their crops for the new gold. As Lim Teck Ghee noted, the turn-of-the century peasant economy had become a tripartite cash-based system of modified traditional subsistence, mixed subsistence-commercial and fully commercial production.Footnote 7
The expansion of rubber almost eclipsed any other crop in Malaya. Between 1900 and 1920 the number of acres under rubber cultivation increased from around 1,750 to 450,000 but by 1933 a survey of Malayan listed some 2,301 estates covering more than three million acres.Footnote 8 This transition in land-use took spaces and resources that might otherwise have been available to produce locally consumed foodstuffs, such as rice, fruit, vegetables and spices.Footnote 9 Occasionally double cropping might take place on a rubber plantation to make the most of years when rubber trees were not producing latex but the food grown — often pineapples — was usually also for commercial export, especially after the advent of the local canning industry in the early 1900s.Footnote 10
Over-reliance on rubber also had secondary impacts — such as the rubber crisis of 1923 — many plantations reduced tapping and even ceased work altogether for a time. While this would not have affected food production per se, wages decreased. The plantations had attracted large numbers of migrants seeking opportunities as estate lands expanded, creating a new body of people reliant on a cash economy, but living in rural areas with limited access to methods for self-subsistence. Although many estates provided a basic rice ration, workers relied on a cash economy to supplement their diet. Estates were encouraged to have allotment schemes where estate workers grew their own fresh produce, so during the several rubber crises, workers would devote their time to cultivating food instead of tapping rubber simply to subsist. That said, it could take several months to grow new foodstuffs, even fast-growing tubers such as cassava can take at least six months to reach maturity.Footnote 11 As Lynn Hollen Lees has argued, ‘the ability and commitment of the British state to support the welfare of its most vulnerable subjects rose and fell with the rubber industry’.Footnote 12 While Hollen Lees’ reference was to state aid, the statement holds a mirror to the everyday lives of rubber’s workforce.
Second, the growth of towns. The port settlements of Singapore, Penang Island and Malacca were the immediate focus of British colonial power, and they attracted migrants from home and abroad looking for new opportunities, much created by the commercialisation of agriculture. Singapore’s population for example, grew from just over 10,000 in 1824 to over 418,000 in 1924.Footnote 13 From the 1870s, an expanding tin mining industry led to the growth of small settlements like Ipoh or even the development of new towns, such as Kuala Lumpur. The commercial mining of tin and farming of rubber and other crops such as coconut and pineapple also facilitated small satellite towns that developed in tandem with the rail and road infrastructure to transport these goods to the manufactories and ports.
These new town dwellers had limited means for subsistence farming and were reliant on imported rice and on the market gardens of new peri-urban districts for vegetables, salads and fruits.Footnote 14 These gardens had emerged symbiotically and organically, as entrepreneurial Malayans saw the towns as commercial opportunities.Footnote 15 However, when there was a major regional drought, such as that which had occurred in 1911, local supplies and regional imports tended to fail together, with imports taking longer to bounce back, often affecting availability and prices for up to two years following an especially severe event.
With a focus on the period 1900 to 1950, this article therefore examines the colonial government’s attitude toward food production and its various efforts to increase production of vegetables and fruits as a means of mitigating scarcity. The subject of small-scale gardening and market gardening as a means to mitigate food scarcity in times of crisis has been explored to some degree in various studies on wartime gardening, new town gardens and allotments, as has vegetable gardening as a means of everyday subsistence, but most of these studies have focused on European, British and US contexts.Footnote 16 When scholars have directed their attention to Asian gardens, it has usually been the formal, elite or botanic gardens that have been the subject of their studies.Footnote 17 Most studies of Malayan agriculture more broadly have looked at commercial crops, like palm oil or rubber or, at agriculture’s relationship to deforestation and land-use change.Footnote 18 Only more recently has food and food production been considered for its own sake. As Choo Ruizhi argued in his study of imperial fisheries and fish farming in Malaya, the study of food production is a way into understanding the relationship between the colonial government and local communities, as they worked together (or did not) to improve food outcomes.Footnote 19 This article intends to move into this space by exploring vegetable gardening in colonial Malaya.
This relatively untapped history of gardening for food also provides insight into the relationship between the colonial authorities and the different people of Malaya in the context of environmental and economic change and race. It combines discussion of the relationship between the urban, peri-urban and rural within this narrative, revealing the pressures that existed within this system. It argues that although food scarcity was in many cases triggered by out-of-the ordinary events such as war or climate-related harvest failures, the situation was seriously worsened by underpinning aspects of imperial rule, in particular, the policy of pushing commercial exports above all else. This industry in turn made Malaya a strategic hub in a new geopolitical era, intimately affected by global economic fluctuations and a focus of overseas attention. Although these circumstances created much wealth, they also contributed to some of the longest and deepest food insecurities known across Malayan colonial history. To help fill this gap, encouragement of market gardening or small-scale subsistence farming became more of a priority for government, together with persuading more people to take up staple crop production in rural areas.
Building from this, the article further suggests that British policies to produce more food resulted in the reaffirmation of racial and cultural stereotypes and, in some cases, increased intimidation of certain racial groups. Looking at the colonial binary of Chinese versus Malay in particular, it reveals how for example, entrenching food education and gardening tuition in school curricula reified a stereotype of Malay people as benevolent agriculturalists while, on the other hand, fear of itinerant vegetable growing Chinese squatters led to persecutory policies despite that groups rising centrality to local food production, especially for towns and mining communities. Colonial era food production is thus worthy of investigation because it sheds a new light on the systemic socio-economic vulnerabilities that existed under imperialism, reveals how racial ideas were embedded into policy and policy outcomes and offers insight into the relationship of the urban, peri-urban and rural food supply systems.Footnote 20
Promoting self-sufficiency: Embedding stereotypes into education
Stanley Arden’s proposal to embed agricultural and gardening education into school curricula was, as noted earlier, less about improving educational outcomes than trying to encourage Malay children to take up farming as a career. There existed a general impression amongst the colonial service that the extant rural Malay population, traditionally agriculturalists ought to be encouraged to produce the quantities of basic foodstuffs needed to feed the new non-self-supporting Malayan populations in towns and plantations. However, their culture was less about commercial production and more about subsistence, as it had been from time immemorial. There was little incentive to produce more than was needed for their immediate community. The colonial government also believed that Malay farming methods were neither high tech nor sufficiently intensive to produce quantities of food which, while retaining an element of truth, also demonstrated how the colonial government eschewed traditional methods in favour of Western agricultural practices and technologies. Thus, increasing food production by encouraging agricultural education and careers was not only a way of tackling food shortages but also of managing how local people practiced agriculture.
Henry Ridley, Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens from 1888 to 1912 and a prolific researcher on all matters relating to plantation and commercial agriculture, had long realised the poor state of vegetable growing on the peninsula and provides us with some insights as to why this was so. Noting the visibility of Chinese market gardeners in vegetable production, he pointed out how (in his words) they had little incentive to plant more diversity of vegetables, even when given free seeds, given the small European market and the disinclination of Chinese or Malay inhabitants to buy any vegetables at all. Furthermore, he contended, the quality of vegetables was generally substandard. It was hard to grow many vegetable types in the tropics due to the huge array of blights, moulds, and insects that could destroy an entire crop ‘seemingly overnight’.Footnote 21
Arden had had similar sentiments. ‘Agriculture—so far as it concerns the natives’ he claimed in 1903, ‘is at the present time in a lamentable condition, and, so far as I can judge, shows little promise of improvement. Having regard to the future prosperity of the country … the present situation is, I submit, worthy of the most earnest consideration of the Government’. He proposed that while education was important, it had to be combined with top-down management of local markets to make them more accessible and attractive to smallholders, with incentives to increase yields, such as government grants to purchase agriculture machinery. The list of foods that Arden wanted to stimulate especially were staples: bananas (to produce flour and fibre), cassava, sago, arrowroot (starchy plants foundational to the diet when rice was scarce) and ground nuts as a source of oil and, essential oils such as lemongrass and cinnamon.Footnote 22
Not everyone was convinced, however. Responding to Arden’s proposals in 1904 for example, was L.C. Brown, whose official role was Inspector of Coconut Trees for the Federated Malay States (FMS). He was sceptical because — in his experience — ‘the natives’ were just not that interested in agriculture. To make Arden’s scheme work he argued, there would need to be more incentives, such as free seed, and cheap land-rents would have to be negotiated. Coconuts and rice might be the exception to this rule as, in his view, ‘he has great faith’ in the natives’ enthusiasm for cultivating these crops. He also advocated a robust education in Western agricultural methods as a means of supporting these ventures.Footnote 23
As result of this colonial narrative, agricultural education was brought forward into the Malayan school curriculum but, only for Malay schoolchildren. In 1917, the Assistant Director of Education (for Malay schools), Richard Winstedt, had been tasked with investigating how to improve Malay vernacular education across the Straits Settlements and FMS. His resultant report reshaped Malay education across the peninsula with a new curriculum that would place agriculture, gardening and husbandry alongside foundational reading, writing, arithmetic and religious education. His report tapped into a rural idyll of Malay kampong (village) life, where children would be brought up equipped with the practical skills to safeguard and strengthen their place as the nation’s cultivators. A European Agricultural Instructor would be attached to every teacher training college and a raft of European Agricultural Inspectors, seconded from the new Department of Agriculture, would regularly inspect schools’ horticultural work, and monitor the curriculum. All boys would be taught gardening skills at new school gardens and would be expected to undergo an examination there, and on home allotments. It was expected that these school and home gardens would also contribute to local fruit and vegetable supplies, ensuing a renewable supply of seeds and fresh produce that were sustained by locally available manures from horses and buffalo, the latter a common farm animal in traditional Malay culture. Agricultural instruction, Winstedt argued, drawing from the example of the American system then extant in the Philippines, would also have a ‘far-reaching moral influence … all children must be led to recognise the dignity of manual labour’.Footnote 24 Winstedt’s new direction was, in his opinion, empathetic to traditional Malay livelihoods, enabling kampong communities to be self-supporting and thus more resilient, ensuring their more sustainable future and that of Malaya in turn. The revised educational policy also helped to ensure that Malay children would be typecast into the role of farmer and unprepared for potential other avenues of study.
At the same time, the insistence of colonial officials that agricultural and horticultural education should be provided by European or European-trained instructors educated in Western agricultural science, downplayed Indigenous or traditional methods of farming and gardening. The Agricultural Department considered it of vital importance that the work being undertaken by European research officers and at the European-led experimental stations should be brought to the local planting communities and to the smallholders. In 1914, two Agricultural Instructors were hired, with the specific remit of bringing teaching and demonstrations on agricultural improvements developed by the department, such as pest control, to local populations. The Instructors would also be expected to take charge of Winstedt’s School Gardens scheme and would disseminate (Western) scientific information in a targeted Malay-language periodical, Warta Perusahaan Tanah (Land Company News). This was not entirely a one-way knowledge exchange, it was also recognised that by going out into communities, Malay farming methods and needs would be communicated back to the Agricultural Department.
Another vital form of outreach was the distribution of educational pamphlets and posters in different languages through the medium of the local penghulu (chieftain). By using local languages and employing Malays in the roles of Inspecting Officers, it was hoped that a ‘bridge will have been built across the wide gap separating the research officer from the Asiatic cultivator’.Footnote 25 Ironically, due to the First World War and the drafting of many European men to the war effort, the extant body of Malay Inspecting Officers were asked to take on many of the teaching instructor’s duties as well.
Education was also one of the chief reasons for Arden’s call for regularised annual Malayan agricultural and horticultural shows from 1902.Footnote 26 Although locally organised events had been taking place in the Straits Settlements since the 1880s, in the words of D.G. Campbell, Acting British Resident for Selangor and President of the first Agricultural Show to be held in Kuala Lumpur, regular events would provide stimulus to native industries and valuable educational opportunities and incentives through demonstrations and competitions.Footnote 27 He expected that better and more regular organisation (by a European-led standing committee) would offer chances for ‘natives and for European planters, though he recognised that ‘…Malays look on the shows as an amusement and learn nothing from them’ although the ‘Chinese are more quick to learn from shows, both of produce and tools. Indeed, there is no better way of improving the implements of cultivation than by exhibiting them for competition’.Footnote 28 Campbell’s opinions were typical of the colonial service typecasting of the agriculturally productive abilities of the Malay and Chinese peoples and serves as a reminder of the division of labour amongst the population that the British government actively promoted. While Malay inhabitants were being encouraged into rural agriculture and gardening, Chinese populations were seen as the market gardeners to feed the towns.
Encouraging market gardening?
As the towns grew over the nineteenth century, market gardens developed in tandem. By the end of the century, many of these gardens were large in scope and scale and were often Chinese run, catering in the main for large urban Chinese populations, with sweet potatoes, cucumbers, gourd, okra and Chinese greens grown from seeds imported from China. The gardeners also kept pigs and poultry which supplied meat and eggs to the urban market as well as the manure for the gardens. By the early twentieth century, they faced growing competition from imported goods as transportation improved and refrigeration technologies were introduced. At the same time, they faced pressure on land availability, ironically because of urban growth.
In Singapore, for example, there had been large areas devoted to market gardens in the nineteenth century at Bukit Timah, to the north-west of the town and at Lavender and Kallang, to the east. These areas were gradually eaten up by building projects and pushed further out. The government, anticipating urban growth and the associated escalation in land value, had only allowed market gardeners to purchase Temporary Occupation Licences (TOLs). This deeply unpopular system meant little long-term stability for farming communities established on what had once been rural peripheries.Footnote 29 TOLs benefitted government however as they could evict farmers whenever they saw a different use for the land. The gardens at Singapore’s Bukit Timah, for instance, were bought up by the government in the 1880s to augment the newest Botanic Garden venture under Superintendent Nathanial Cantley. This land was — with some irony — to become the Economic Gardens, a government-led endeavour to experiment and propagate commercially viable species.Footnote 30 To the east, the gardeners simply expanded further eastwards into Potong Pasir, Toa Payoh and Paya Lebah, and endured greater longevity into the later-twentieth century. Arguably, while competition from imports had meant more competitive pricing and the land was being squeezed, the farmer’s intensive gardening methods and the series of economic depressions meant that many gardeners could still make a good living. Indeed, unemployment in sectors such as tin mining and rubber in the 1920s, augmented by the crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression of the early 1930s, meant that many Malayans turned to vegetable farming rather than estate work, as a means of economic survival.
The government’s support of these groups was ambiguous at best. On the one hand, the government lifted restrictions on migrant labourers’ employment law, so that plantation workers were not bonded to original contracts, enabling many people to become gardeners, some becoming farming communities for several generations.Footnote 31 Harold Tempany, head of the Agricultural Department for the Straits Settlements and the FMS, was to write in praise of such farmers in 1934, noting how their ability to turn ‘worked-out tin-mining land’ into fertile gardens was quite remarkable, as too the self-sustaining and inter-dependent practice of cultivation with pig-breeding. Indeed, Tempany was to note just how far these farmers formed an integral part of the Malayan economy.Footnote 32
An interesting development was also taking place in Selangor where the Agricultural Department had appointed a Chinese Sub-Inspector of Agriculture, Lau Sing Nam, whose task it was to run a model Chinese market garden, part of the larger Agricultural Station recently established at Cheras, just outside of Kuala Lumpur. Lau, trained in Western and Chinese agricultural methods, was hoped to be able to combine the best practices from both traditions and, or so the British hoped, stop the Chinese practice of using human nightsoil as manure.Footnote 33
The authorities had also tried to offer support to these communities by setting up market garden reserves after 1918, partly because of the pressure to increase local food production as well as the recognition of the difficulty of the TOL system. Nonetheless, they did not remove the TOLs, so many farmers continued to be considered squatters on gardening land until well into the 1950s. While the continuation of the TOLs seems at odds with the conterminous narrative of food scarcity, the temporary holding of land meant that the government retained the right to resettle any of these farmers with little notice or indeed compensation, something that happened fairly frequently when government wanted to development land, protect hill slopes from erosion or, from 1948 onwards move resettle Chinese communities that they felt were either in the way of development plans or were supporting the ongoing communist insurgency, a situation the British government termed the Emergency.
Even where politics were not immediately apparent, there was a tense relationship between market gardeners, the government, and other interested parties, including mine operators. At mines, farmers had been allowed to cultivate land earmarked for the future expansion of mining operations — a situation that benefitted everyone in the short-term as it provided mine workers with a local supply of food and gardeners with work — but when mines were expanded, the gardeners were expected to leave. They proved increasingly difficult to push out in the 1920s and 1930s — for reasons including growing resentment toward British rule and high unemployment — and cited custom and long-term occupation as reasons to stay. In Selangor and Perak for instance, where mining was the key industry, these tensions were especially acute. In the former state, the British Resident placed hard rules on TOLs in the mid-1930s, which bounded the length of time that a farmer could stay and even the types of foodstuffs that they could grow, the result that many farmers were forced out.Footnote 34 The was no change in policy until 1940, when wartime pressure on food meant that the government had to actively encourage, rather than discourage vegetable growing. Paradoxically, this meant giving out more short-term leases and encouraging TOLs, a situation that was continued immediately after the war under the British Military Administration (BMA).
Information on small-scale market gardening in Malaya is limited however, as much went under the radar because of its subsistence and ad hoc nature, often season or economy dependent. The government only began to collate statistics on economic market gardening from the 1930s, partly because of concerns over food supply but, interestingly, also a desire to protect gardening for Malay populations, over and above any other group, especially the Chinese, a distinction that says much about the government’s confusing attitude toward Chinese squatters and market gardeners.
Government-planned market gardening was a different matter. As urban expansion in the early twentieth century placed more strain on food supplies, it was considered that towns ought to have market gardens incorporated into new urban design and planning initiatives. The arrival of New Zealander Charles Compton Reade (an advocate of the garden city movement) to run the new Malayan town planning department in Kuala Lumpur in 1921 was an important step.Footnote 35
From the nineteenth century, experiments in vegetable growing in the cooler highlands of peninsula Malaya had demonstrated the potential for cultivating the types of soft fruit, vegetables and flowers that appealed to European markets. Charles Curtis, Assistant Superintendent of Forests and Gardens for the Penang area and first Curator of the Penang Botanic Gardens from 1884, grew vegetables on Penang Hill. Despite some setbacks and limited transport options, beets, artichoke, carrots, leeks, tomatoes and lettuce, tended to grow well.Footnote 36 At Taiping, in Perak, Hugh Low had supervised a hill garden where fruit trees, tomatoes and English vegetables were grown.Footnote 37 Many of these non-native fruits and vegetables had been introduced via the Singapore and Penang Botanic Gardens, where experiments had been conducted on the suitability of the climate and soil, before the seeds were marketed across the peninsula. Tomatoes, watercress, capsicum and artichokes, for instance, were brought from Europe and India and distributed.Footnote 38 However, these were small-scale ventures and something larger was needed to fulfil Malayan food needs.
The idea of developing the Cameron Highlands and Lubok Tamang region of peninsula Malaysia for commercial crops, fruit and vegetables had been vaunted by William Cameron, Government Surveyor, in 1885 but the area was then a relative unknown to Europeans, only traversed in parts by explorers and botanists, including Henry Ridley of the Singapore Botanic Gardens. In the early 1900s, many more colonial officers visited the area to assess its viability for food production, including Herbert Robinson, Director of Museums for the FMS and William Sands, Assistant Economic Botanist. Aside from the tea that the area subsequently became famous for, it was considered that the Cameron Highlands would make an excellent market garden, for root vegetables, strawberries and tomatoes.Footnote 39
In 1925, the government inaugurated a Highland Development Committee, which consisted of the Secretary for Agriculture, the Conservator of Forests, the Perak State Engineer and the local Health Officer but much of the Committee’s planning was in fact directed by a report written by Sir George Maxwell, Chief Secretary of the FMS from 1920 to 1926.Footnote 40 Maxwell had supervised, authorised, or even taken part in the many expeditions to the highlands, including the last in 1925.Footnote 41 It was under the guidance of Maxwell and the Committee that the highlands were developed, with market gardening intended to supply the need of the new settlements and beyond.Footnote 42
Scholar Robert Weebers has argued that the new development was based loosely on the garden city ideals popularised by British social reformers, such as Ebeneezer Howard. This is where we turn back to Reade, a proponent of the garden city movement.Footnote 43 His plan was for self-contained urban communities that each incorporated residential, agricultural, commercial and scientific zones, with plenty of reserved green spaces, parks and recreation areas. Closely modelled on the renowned Baguio hill station in the Philippines which Reade had visited, he laid out plans for small highland townships and their surrounds across the highlands.
Ringlet would host a market and vegetable gardens, the valley of Sungei Bertam would be devoted to farms and Lubok Tamang would have an agricultural school.Footnote 44 Tanah Rata would be the administrative hub and residential district for the government workforce and would host an experimental field station — opened in 1926 and run by the Agricultural Department — where European-style fruits and vegetables were grown, alongside experimental commercial crops such as cinchona.Footnote 45 There would also be a laboratory and a meteorological office for agricultural and agrometeorological research.Footnote 46 The latter turned out to be essential as the early years of the project were marred by problems including pests, soil acidity, and a multitude of leaf diseases but throughout the Agricultural Department persuaded a sceptical government to keep market gardening as a necessity due to their successful research.Footnote 47 Certainly, by 1930, the chief agriculturalist was to report how strawberry and tomato varietals were relatively easy to grow and that ‘good hill vegetables may be raised where the land is systematically cultivated and manured. It is anticipated that … supplies of vegetables in quantity will become available for sale in the large towns of the peninsula’ before long.Footnote 48
By 1934, Tempany was to note the exciting shift away from rubber toward more diversity of crops across the peninsula, ascribed no doubt in his opinion, to the excellent research being undertaken at the experimental plantation.Footnote 49 The highland market gardens would, unlike earlier hill station schemes, also be able to take advantage of new and improved railway networks and the introduction of refrigerated carriages for transporting fresh produce across greater distances from the late 1920s and early 1930s. That said, the cultivation of the highlands also had the unintended effect of removing land formerly used by Indigenous tribes, including the Temiar and, to a lesser extent the Semai, a fact that was little considered in the steady advance of progress.Footnote 50
Growing more food: A two-decade campaign
Global economic and political tensions during the 1930s meant that the problem of securing enough food became worse, rather than better, despite the efforts of the government to boost food production. The global depression had caused a significant reduction in demand for Malayan export goods — especially tin and rubber — two big Malayan employers. Unemployment, high prices and mounting fears that Japan’s newfound naval power in the region might lead to an import blockade, all meant that securing a local, internal and reliable food supply was deemed ever more essential.Footnote 51 The government responded by trying to stimulate internal trade and employment and decreasing reliance on imported foodstuffs. They initiated a Grow More Food campaign, targeted at individuals, families and communities, long before such efforts were considered essential because of the outbreak of war.
As early as 1931, the year that the depression had really made itself felt in Malaya, the government had wanted to educate people to be equipped to run home gardens to become more self-sufficient.Footnote 52 The basis of this campaign was in many ways an extension of earlier activities though, rather than a reinvention of the wheel. For example, regional branches of the Malayan Agri-Horticultural Association (MAHA) and the Agricultural Department continued to organise agricultural shows, displays and exhibitions, but from 1934 they took these into schools — building in many ways on what Winstedt and other had hoped for the Malayan curriculum — but they pushed the competitive elements of the shows through extra financial incentivisation.Footnote 53 They also expanded the school visits and other efforts beyond the Malay communities, to encourage Chinese and Tamil communities to turn to gardening. In Singapore, for instance, the Agricultural Department developed a poster series in multiple languages to encourage rural squatters to grow their own fruits and vegetables and, if further encouragement were needed, ‘prizes were offered for the best lot of vegetables grown’.Footnote 54
By the late 1930s however, growing more food had become a public duty for everyone, especially town dwellers. The campaign had full government support — like the Dig for Victory campaign in wartime Britain — and was taken over by the new Food Supply Office in conjunction with Municipal Governments, the Department of Information, the Department of Agriculture and the Rural Board. In Singapore, Dr John Scharff, who had been appointed as Lecturer in Public Health there in 1936, directed much of the campaign. Scharff facilitated tasks such as running ‘demonstration plots … to stimulate public interest in vegetable gardening’ alongside poster awareness raising campaigns.Footnote 55
‘If everyone owning a garden in Malaya would devote only a small section of it to vegetable growing, our dependence on imported fresh vegetables would be very considerably reduced’ noted a correspondent for The Straits Times newspaper in 1940.Footnote 56 This was also the view of the MAHA which, by the same year, had almost entirely devoted its magazine and its radio broadcasts to the mission of home gardening and vegetable growing. The M.A.H.A. Magazine’s editor drew attention to how vegetable imports in Malaya were still far too high and were likely to become unsustainable in the event of supply breakdowns. Thus, it was imperative that all Malayans helped reduce dependency on imports.Footnote 57 Food Supply Officer for Singapore, Edwin Tongue maintained that all urban homeowners with any outdoor space should grow fruit and vegetables, instead of flowers. Homeowners with land ‘have an obligation to become more self-dependent … in a time of emergency’ to support ‘people living in populous city areas’ he argued.Footnote 58
Governor of Singapore, Sir Shenton Thomas, led by example (though probably not personally), with Government House gardens turned over to subsistence farming, with 20 types of vegetables, including lettuce, cucumber, onions, mint, radishes, cabbage and watercress grown in its 130-acre grounds. This enabled the central government buildings to be sustainable and any surplus was donated to the Child Welfare Centre.Footnote 59 Eric Holttum, Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, wrote a special leaflet, Practical Hints For War-Time Gardens In Malaya, which was published by the Department of Information. His advice encouraged growing sweet potatoes and tapioca, to close a staple food gap should a rice shortage occur, and it also disclosed how to cultivate 30 local vegetable types.Footnote 60 Inexpensive vegetable seeds were made available to buy from urban Food Production Offices.Footnote 61
Toward the end of 1940, the government had even begun to consider making it compulsory for anyone with a garden to grow food within the towns and suburbs.Footnote 62 This was in line with a new scheme inaugurated the previous year by which owners of large rural estates, regardless of the crop, would receive rebates on any land that they turned over to their labourers to cultivate food. Staples, starches and oils including groundnuts and cassava, sweet potatoes and vegetables of all kinds were encouraged. Rubber estate owners were encouraged to replace regular cover crops (plants that were introduced to ameliorate soil erosion) with foodstuffs, such as yams, sweet potato, tapioca and groundnuts.Footnote 63 In a rather unfortunate turn of events however, as efforts were scaling up in 1940, a severe drought took hold. This reduced market garden yields and quality and increased prices for town dwellers, especially in Singapore and Malacca.Footnote 64 The drought likewise led to the inopportune postponement of a new raft of schemes by the Food Supply Office to increase food productivity and improve self-sufficiency in urban and peri-urban areas in the event of future wartime trade disruption.Footnote 65 Publicity efforts continued however, with a new book issued by the Director of the Department of Agriculture, Vegetable Gardening in Malaya, more educational radio broadcasts and Grow More Food shows with exhibits and demonstrations designed to draw more people in.Footnote 66
Vegetables become the staple diet
From December 1941 until September 1945, Malaya was ruled by Japan as part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. During this time, war time trade supply disruptions and the breakdown of many regional and local agricultural activities meant severe shortages, formal rationing, escalating prices and a black-market for basic foodstuffs, chiefly in urban areas but also on some plantations.
When the British returned, they set up an interim military government — the BMA — as a means of transitioning back to something resembling normal life in the aftermath of a devastating war.Footnote 67 Two organisations had been set up before the end of the war with the task of assessing and predicting post-war needs, the Malayan Planning Unit (MPU) and the Young Working Party on Far East Relief Requirements.Footnote 68 However, despite emergency relief efforts and free rice imports, the latter organised by an Anglo-American Combined Food Board, efforts to produce food at requisite levels in Malaya itself dragged.Footnote 69
According to J.S. Potter, who had been in Malaya working for Guthrie’s plantation company since 1934, Malaya immediately after the war was like a return to the ‘pioneering days’ of the East India Company. ‘The estates were overgrown with secondary jungle, supplies of all kinds including food were short and labour forces … were anaemic and suffering from malnutrition…’.Footnote 70 Oswald Gilmour, who had returned to Singapore in 1945 as part of the MPU, described ‘malnutrition … everywhere, great numbers suffered from beri-beri and almost all were deplorably thin and hungry. They had lived, for the most part, on meagre quantities of unpleasant tapioca with some greens of poor food value’. Many people were malnourished.
Moreover, coupled with a general shortage of supplies was an acute shortage of transport. This impeded distribution and curtailed the distribution of vegetables, even from mainland Malaya into Singapore.Footnote 71 During the war itself, food shortages had been so acute that every available scrap of urban land had been turned to farming, including what could have been economically productive plantations, alongside parks, roadsides, school playing fields, church grounds and wastelands. The British turned once again to Grow More Food campaigns encouraging vegetable growing and tapioca planting.Footnote 72 In the absence of good supplies of rice, meat and dairy, vegetables were one of the few things that could be grown and accessed with relative ease.
However, there is some suggestion that, after so many years of subsistence, Malayan people were tired of cultivating vegetable plots and had happily destroyed many gardens immediately the war ended. Despite government pleas, official figures detailing the area devoted to vegetable growing declined, though it is hard to say how far informal, back garden efforts continued.Footnote 73 It is tempting to think that they did.
An interesting sidenote here is the proliferation of illegal food vendors, known as hawkers, during and immediately after the war, some of whom had been, and still were connected to the wartime food black market.Footnote 74 The British government had attempted to licence hawkers to regulate the trade and inspect their food, but there were so many after the war that regulation proved an almost impossible task. Many of these hawkers were women or young people, selling homegrown vegetables or simple homecooked food from their own gardens to supplement their family income.Footnote 75 Despite government propaganda to Grow More Food and resistance to it, vegetable gardening was something that people had turned to anyway out of necessity.
Despite the obvious need to boost food production, the BMA’s attitude toward small-scale farmers was ambivalent to antagonistic — much like the pre-war colonial government — and their central policy was to move small-scale gardeners or squatters on as soon as possible, rather than supporting their vegetable growing. Despite a rural to urban shift immediately following the end of the war to find work, many urban dwellers had left towns during the war and stayed there, in part to escape intense scrutiny from the Japanese but more so, simply because it was easier to subsist in rural areas where land was open and available.Footnote 76 Many of these people were deemed squatters, illegally occupying land but with little choice in the matter.
The new BMA continued to take a harsh view of such people. In October 1945, for instance, Lieutenant Colonel D.M. McDiarmid of the Public Works Department, had reported how extensive jungle clearances around Kuala Lumpur was causing an alarming rate of soil erosion, which he blamed squarely on Chinese vegetable farming practices.Footnote 77 While McDiarmid was certain that the farmers would eventually leave to get back to their normal employment, others, including Lieutenant Colonel J.P. Mead, Officer-in-Charge in the Forest Department, felt that stronger measures would be necessary to get rid of the vegetable gardeners.Footnote 78 As Major B.A. Lowe of the Agricultural Department also argued, there was the possibility of a ‘major catastrophe resulting from the irresponsible clearing of land’.Footnote 79
Efforts to evict the gardeners were often met with resistance, however and tree felling continued, despite it being ruled unlawful. The government’s inability to prevent this was as much a resources issue, as it was one of law and order. In Selangor, for example, the post-war Forest Department had hardly any transport or the field staff available to make evictions. Moreover, staff morale was low, whether from the lack of resources, the potential of a violent response or simply lack of will to evict people after the hardships of the war, prompting the BMA Director of Forests, T.A. Strong, to request police support for difficult cases.Footnote 80
The problem of subsistence versus legalities and environmental protection was, in some cases, also closely connected to resistance towards the colonial regime. Immediately the war was pronounced over, a power vacuum came into being. The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army had been the main internal threat to Japanese power during the Occupation, existing for the most part in the jungles and carrying out a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese military. The British had broadly supported their efforts, despite their obvious alignment to communist China, as they served the same aims: to eradicate the Japanese from Malaya.
Once the war was declared over however, communism emerged as the single largest threat to British (and US) power in the region and, as the British took time to re-establish their forces and rule in Malaya, there was a period of internecine violence and uncertainty between a Chinese pro-China minority, the Malay population and, a less racially divided but more often than not Malayan Chinese anti-imperialist movement. Thus, while eviction of the mainly Chinese vegetable farmers may have been couched in the language of preventing erosion, it was also a way of managing peripatetic Chinese populations who fell outside of immediate government control, who were seen as a threat to law, order and, the survival of British rule in Malaya.
In early 1946, for instance, an ‘armed and uniformed band … equipped with automatic weapons’ was spotted in the jungle east of Kuala Lumpur. While the immediate danger was explained in terms of how groups such as these encouraged ‘indiscriminate bamboo and timber cutting’, the reality was that the government wanted to deal with social disorder. In many areas, mining areas especially, there was high Chinese unemployment immediately following the war. The numbers of Chinese squatters eking out a living through farming had risen exponentially, changing the traditional balance of Malay farming communities to Chinese in some places, especially in mining areas and around towns. The spate of prosecutions and violent removal that the British enacted to remove these farmers, especially after 1948, once it was considered the immediate post-war crisis was over and a civilian government back in place, was one of many reasons for the Malayan Emergency.Footnote 81
The BMA handed over to a civilian government in April 1946. This did not signal an end to food shortages or rationing, social dislocation or even violent demonstrations, but it did signal a shift towards targeted and more sustainable social welfare measures, rather than emergency action to provide food.Footnote 82 The Social Welfare Department, for example, established short-term People’s Restaurants with the aim of providing greatly subsidised meals for the poorest urban inhabitants and Singapore played host to a major international conference on food and nutrition that same year.Footnote 83 In an ironic conjunction with the ongoing campaign to remove illegal squatters in the name of combatting soil erosion, land clearances to make way for more cultivation by the Agricultural Department picked up pace, this time experimenting with machinery and the mechanical cultivation of rice on hill slopes to restore cultivation to pre-1941 levels.
Despite this, people were still reminded that it was their duty to ‘eat less … and grow more’.Footnote 84 The Agricultural Department and MAHA took back control of the Grow More Food campaigning from the military, writing educational articles and pamphlets as before, hosting shows and exhibitions and even publishing an ongoing advice series in the local press.Footnote 85 They also continued in earnest with experimentation and research into vegetable types and cultivation processes to boost local production so that Malaya could become more self-supporting, echoing the narrative of the pre-war era.Footnote 86 All this work continued well into the 1950s. However, the government never went so far as to take control of vegetable growing and marketing, such as it did in Hong Kong, likely due to Malaya’s different set of political concerns after 1948.Footnote 87
Conclusion
Vegetable growing offers a lens by which to explore colonialism in Malaya. The narrative surrounding growing more food was paradoxically connected to the major economic and land-use changes that the peninsula had been exposed to after the arrival of the EEIC in 1786, escalating across the nineteenth century and consolidated under the rubber boom of the early 1900s and greater urbanisation. The era of plantation agriculture and monocropping may have brought prosperity to many and certainly contributed to the development of modern Malaysia and Singapore, but it also greatly reduced the ability of both nations to have a sustainable food supply. This is not to romanticise the pre-colonial era, only to note the problems inherent in the changed economy which increased populations who were not self-supporting in terms of food, without necessarily investing in the infrastructure to reduce food scarcity in times of crisis.
The attitude of the British government toward the Malayan population can also be viewed through the relationship with food production, as preconceptions of what different social groups ought, or ought not, be doing were a component in production strategies reedifying in policy ideas and perceptions about who should farm, how and where. Certainly, while market gardening was to be encouraged, it was ideally to be under the purview of the government, who could maintain certain standards, encourage scientific research and, closely control outputs.
Despite efforts by the post-independence Malaysian and Singaporean governments to promote food production, the establishment of the Primary Production Department in Singapore in 1959, an organisation that had at its core the aim of supporting local farming, especially market gardening or, the New Economic Policy (1971) of the Malaysian government, for example, designed to eradicate rural poverty amongst Malay farming populations, today neither country is self-supporting in terms of locally grown food.Footnote 88 Indeed, modern Singapore is 90 per cent reliant on imports for food, with around 40 per cent of its fruit and vegetables coming from Malaysia, a country which imports 60 per cent of its own food supplies. Singapore’s infatuation with market gardening ended in the 1980s, as the economy turned toward international trade and commerce, such as shipping, banking and tertiary industries and the government phased out many of the family-run farms of the colonial and early-independence era.Footnote 89 That said, Singapore is not food insecure and has consistently ranked at the top of the Global Food Security Index, due to import resource diversification.Footnote 90
Malaysia, while retaining much of its rural agricultural economy, much is monocrops for export—especially palm oil and rubber—although the fruit and vegetable growing farms of the Cameron Highlands continue. This means that when Malaysian harvests are poor, such as in 2018 when vegetable production was curtailed by a strong monsoon, Singapore’s supply of vegetables from Malaysia decreased by about 20 per cent or, in 2022, when the Malaysian egg market was affected by chicken feed shortages and price hikes due to the Ukraine war, there was a knock-on effect on egg and chicken prices across Malaysia and Singapore.Footnote 91
Indeed, the combined pressures of global warming, climate insecurity and global political uncertainties, may push both countries and many others, towards a new narrative of increasing internal food production, especially for foodstuffs like basic vegetables. The basic drivers of food insecurity remain much the same and the Grow More Food concept remains conceptually and practically relevant.
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