The Geopolitics of Dirt: An Unregulated, Uncontrolled Environmental Nightmare
14. Say Hi to Singapore.. and many others (8 min read)
The Singapore growth story is what macroeconomic legends are made of: From a poor former British colony backwater in the 1950s, it enjoyed a consistent 6% economic growth rate for 30 years straight, which transformed how its citizens saw their nation. Singapore’s economic revolution led it to being one of the most financially and technologically developed countries in the world, with an open, free-market economy with low taxes and massive foreign investment. It became one of the four “Asian tigers”, a no mean feat for an island nation smaller than New York City, while also being responsible for its own defense, foreign policy and trade.
While not taking away from the massive strides it has made in competent governance (which was a rare commodity among former colonies), Singapore’s story has always been one of geography and location: The Strait of Malacca, which is the shortest shipping route connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Nearly 25% of the world trade passes through this narrow strait, that Singapore has virtually complete dominion over, and is a choke point. Does China, Korea or Japan need oil from the middle east? Make sure the Singaporeans are happy to let the tankers through1.
For an island nation with the highest population density in the world (18 times denser than India, a fairly densely populated nation) one quantity matters more than anything else: Land. Dirt.
Welcome to this week’s Climatonomics.
Seeing the map above was a jaw-dropping moment for me: The dark brown is Singapore’s land area nearly a decade before its independence. But in the next 50 years, Singapore grew. Not just metaphorically, but literally.
Nearly One-fourth of Singapore’s land today has been created artificially on water. That is around 130 square kilometers, and the effort continues to this day.
The process? Land reclamation, which is a sanitized euphemism for dumping thousands of tons of sand into water, to create new land. At the end of this fairly ugly process, something as mundane as a bay turned into the beautiful Marina bay islands, with Singapore’s iconic skyline constructed upon it, featuring a huge casino and the world’s largest rooftop infinity swimming pool.
But all this impressive development comes at a cost of a material that is so ubiquitous in modern life, yet unregulated and legal in most countries. And… definitely finite. We don’t yet know how to replace it, if it were to run out, and the bad news is it will.
Most of us have been conditioned to not give a second thought about sand as a “resource”. It is a material we use to build anything from houses to skyscrapers. We melt it to produce pure silica that is the foundation of our semiconductor-based information economies, and of course, the material most of us ate as dumb kids. Like I said, ubiquitous. How many of us have truly given a thought to where all this sand comes from, and for how long?
We may soon have to because we may be running out of sand. This sounds incredulous at first glance. Isn’t there a lot of sand in the middle east? Sahara?
The problem is that desert sand is too smooth and too fine that individual grains have little friction. If you use this sand to mix with cement, it will not bind to produce concrete, and therefore useless. But a different sand - which is rough, high-friction and liable to stick with water and cement, is just perfect for concrete. But we can get such sand only from river and ocean beds. This also explains why UAE and other Arab countries import sand from places as far away as Scotland.
Still, river sands are of higher quality. Ocean sands have to be washed thoroughly to remove salt, because it can corrode metal beams and rods when used in construction projects.River sand doesn’t have that issue, and is valuable for construction projects. Sea sand is perfect if you want to dump it back into the ocean and create new land.
And that takes get back to Singapore, which I believe is the canary in the coalmine, when it comes to understanding the shortage of sand.
The (Not So Mysterious) Case of the Missing Islands
Umm… Indonesia, Can you sell me your land?
Although these exact words may have never been uttered, and Indonesia most certainly wasn’t intending to sell its territory, the net effect was effectively the same.
Singapore, in a massive spree of post-independence construction and land reclamation, quickly exhausted its own reserves over 50 years ago. Its ravenous appetite far from satisfied, it started importing sand from Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia and Myanmar. Indonesia is a massive archipelago made of 17,500 islands, of which 7000 have no population. Islands are rich sources of the sand Singapore is hungry for, and the sand miners were happy to ship off as much sand as they could get out. They were apparently a bit too successful, and in the tragicomedy that ensued, Indonesia lost 24 islands before it realized what was happening.
Furious, alarmed and embarrassed, the country banned all sand exports in 2007. Since demand was high, Cambodian sand miners started filling the market with water from the pristine Mekong river, one of the earth’s mega-diverse biodiversity hotspots where new species continue to be discovered. Next, the Cambodian government issued a ban. Malaysia has been the largest exporter to Singapore since, but in 2019 banned it, citing security and geopolitical concerns. After all, these two nations have multiple border disputes, and selling your neighbor sand to build more territory closer to you… is probably not a smart move.
Which brings us to the present day. Vice news did an excellent documentary on this topic. Singapore is stockpiling massive quantities of sand as a strategic geopolitical measure, and claims all of this was legally imported from other countries. It is having a difficult time sourcing new sand, because other nations now need it for their own projects. There is a looming global shortage which Singapore is seeing ahead of most nations. The reason?
We are extracting sand at twice the rate of what is available2. If this was oil, we would have had a major international intervention to figure out a solution, but we decided that sand does not deserve that attention, despite it being virtually irreplaceable for modern civilization. This leads to our biggest problem…
The State of the Sand Market: Unregulated, Unmeasured and… Unknown.
If there was ever a part of international economic enterprise that is still truly the wild west in terms of regulation, law and trade… it is sand mining and exports. The extent of irregularities and lack of oversight in sand mining makes even crypto mining and marijuana look like models of well-run institutions with supervision and data reporting obligations.
Sand is globally a legal material to trade. We can extract wherever we find it, and if you mine more than what you said you would, it’s difficult to figure out. Do you live by a river bank and are short on cash? Pick up a shovel, load the sand in a truck, and sell it to a construction company. Unlike other resources like oil, gas, metals and diamonds, the barrier to entry for sand mining is so low that anyone can make a quick buck. This is how sand mafias that terrorize river delta populations in many developing nations got their start. It is an informal industry.
We don’t have clear data on how much sand is mined (most of it is in the fertile river deltas of Asia and Africa) and how much of it is exported. In fact, Vice news reports that Singapore claims it imported its sand legally. When Vice looked at the UN trade data, Cambodia reported sending 2.8 million tonnes to Singapore.
And how much did Singapore claim they imported from Cambodia? 80 million tonnes.
Therefore, they concluded that most of the Singapore sand reserves are from unreported, unverified sources. For a nation whose financial institutions are an integral part of the global maritime trade, losing track of such a commodity is unthinkable… unless it’s intentional.
It gets worse. Vice news questioned the folks in the know about the sources of sand. They got their answer: It is classified. Yes, in Singapore, divulging the exact sources of their totally-legal-don’t-ask-any-questions sand will get people thrown in jail for violating national security laws.
Singapore is not alone. Other nations discover that infinite construction projects has its limits. Case in point: China. Yale University estimates that China used more sand in 3 years than the US did in the entire 20th century, to finance its massive construction projects and ghost cities that no one lives in. It is also believed to operate the largest sand mining operation in the Poyang lake in the Yangtze river delta, before shutting down parts of it because of land erosion and - get this- change in the river course. Indiscriminate illegal mining reportedly continues.
UAE ran out of sand for its Burj Khalifa vanity project and had to import it from Australia (someone finally managed to sell sand to an Arab). And there is Bahrain, which has also been creating land out of water, as seen in the satellite imagery above. Ditto with Dubai.
The Consequences And Outlook
Massive construction and infrastructure projects are still a major signal of a country’s growth rate, especially with the global population increasing. While we can always blame politicians for turning a blind eye and corruption, we do not yet have a technologically viable alternative, and none of us want to live with poor infrastructure. While crushed recycled glass, rubble, ash and stone are possibilities, they are not cheap enough to make it a complete substitute to sand.
Sand mining is devastating to coastal communities3. It causes the collapse of river banks, river ecosystems and, most times, flooding and entire changes in river flow paths that cause severe damage to property and people’s livelihoods. This is the reality of many river systems in Bangladesh, India, China, Cambodia, Vietnam and large parts of coastal Africa, where sand mafias commit egregious crimes and violations go unreported. Since most of these nations are undergoing major infrastructure development projects of their own, there is not much public or political will to crack down.
But the first step to even begin solving a problem is to understand how bad it is. And here is our key challenge.
We know so little about the global sand trade: how much is extracted and by whom, who uses it, and where it comes from. The situation for such a crucial commodity is so opaque that the UN calls it a strategic resource that must be urgently regulated and conserved to avoid major economic shocks.
Will we do it? Time will tell. What do you think? Are there new regulations being considered in your country?
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Contrary to the popular narrative, it is Singapore (and not the United States) that is the poster child of modern globalization and free-market capitalism. Without it, Singapore’s vast wealth makes little sense, considering the island is scarce in nearly every resource that makes an independent nation.
I've come across this issue before and it's staggering. Fascinating, thank you.
Wow. This was such an eye opener. I'm familiar with the sand mafia operations in India but did not realize that it was so widespread and in so many countries. Also, did not know about the land reclaimation happening in regions other than the UAE.
Thanks for sharing this and if you're okay with it, I'd like to include this in my next issue :)