Price ceilings risk destroying Singapore’s hawker heritage

It pains me to see our precious hawker heritage being destroyed by senseless rulings. The prices at which hawkers sell their food should not be dictated to them. (“Foodfare to review price caps at hawker centre if necessary”; July 30)

We get what we pay for, and good food made with high-quality ingredients cannot be too cheap.

If we were in their shoes — waking up at 4am daily, making so many fish balls until we get tendinitis and slogging over the stove for hours — how much would we price a bowl of handmade fishball noodles?

A $2.70 price cap is an insult to the hawker’s honest, hard labour and lowers the survival odds of hawkers selling, say, handmade fish balls, not forgetting that they have a family to support in high-cost Singapore.

The winners would be those who source from central factories, instead of making the fish balls, because of the imperatives to keep costs low and remove labour or skill input.

Eventually, fish balls at hawker centres would be dominated by the preservative-boosted, perfectly shaped and artificially springy white spheres sourced from the same few factories. It would be lamentable.

There have been food-safety scandals in Taiwan because many consumers are unable to discern quality and want everything cheap, leading to businesses cutting corners to make decent profit margins. It is a cautionary tale for Singapore.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) is not supporting our hawker heritage with barriers to entry such as economically unviable price caps and 12-hour days excluding food-preparation time.

Preserving our rich hawker heritage means preserving food quality, and not forcing hawkers to cut costs or, worse, cut corners to sell at low, set prices, leading to undifferentiated, low-quality fare.

The new NEA-appointed hawker-centre operators should adopt the issuance of concessions for seniors and low-income individuals to keep food affordable for them in place of price caps.