"This Land is My Land" - an assessment of the responsibilities of the Singapore Government for concerns in the sand trade

Abstract

Singapore engages in extensive land reclamation projects, but information about the source of sand used for them is largely unavailable to the public. With the sand trade being one of the most profitable illegal trades due to opaque supply chains, more investigation is warranted about where the land we live on comes from. Inspired by Kalyanee Nam’s short documentary, “Lost World”, which traces the displacement of land from Cambodia to Singapore through the eyes of a Cambodian villager, this paper seeks to use the case study of Singapore’s land reclamation to determine what responsibilities its government has for concerns that arise from the sand trade.