Singapore used to be the centre for ornamental fish and orchid. Anyone who has real interest in this area knows that it's bs. Taiwanese fish farmer, with no formal education was carrying out genetic manipulation to produce new breeds of discus while local chaps were still using crossing breeding. A few years back, local fish farmers must buy sea bass fries from Thailand as they were unable to hatch the eggs. Ava came in to help and they finally succeeded. The problem is, why other less developed countries already knew how to do it so long ago but we only discovered the know how so much later? Taiwanese was the first to concoct food for abalone which enable them to be the pioneer in abalone farming. We have nothing new to claim be our own.
I think the greatest evil lies in the attitude of the people. It is interest and passion that drive fish farmers in other countries to break new barriers and succeed, not pure desire for more money. Local chaps are only interested in profit. So they try to copy. However, life stock is a subject that cannot be easily duplicated because of differing environmental conditions. What works in another country may not work here. Only with good grasps of the fundamentals can one develop a system that suits the local conditions. Unfortunately, going back to basics is not in our blood. Since young we were exposed to ways and means for quick fit, quick money... Nobody cares about fundamentals. QH farm is a good example. Instead of being experts in fish breeding, most only knows how to import and re-export. When they see others making big money breeding arowana, they joined in and suffered losses instead.
The problem with the experts in AVA is too much education and too little hands on, coupled with over confident, thinking that they know more than the farmers, just because they have higher educational qualifications. Until the attitude is changed where passion becomes the driving force and the mindset change to relook at fundamentals instead of jumping readily to textbook solution, we shall remain as a country with good infrastructure for others to set up factories here and F off when things turn back. In the end we will have nothing that we can be proud off to call our own.