or returned emigrant. These include lichee, lungan, wong pei, carambola, Chinese olive, loquat and citrous fruits such as oranges, lemons and pomelos. The lichees are of excellent quality but lichee and lungan timber is valuable, being used in junk building, and many of these slow-growing trees were cut down during the Japanese occupation. Lemons and grape- fruit do well and their cultivation might be extended with advantage. The local pomelo is of poor quality but the trees are worth growing if only for the fragrance of their large flowers. There is considerable scope for scientific investigation in this field.
Next in importance to rice as a means of sustenance to the poor Chinese come vegetables, and this relationship is reflected in the activities of the farmer. Twenty years ago vegetable production in the New Territories was on a small scale. The New Territories Agricultural Association was formed in 1929 and as one of its principal activities it organized a show held annually until the war. At this show not only were there exhibits of paddy and pine seeds but also more bulky and exciting displays of vegetables, fruits and livestock. A Chinese theatrical performance and a troupe of Chinese acrobats helped to attract the public who flocked there in their hundreds. This show served to stimulate vegetable production.
Prior to the war it was estimated that approximately one- fifth only of the vegetables consumed in the cities of Kowloon and Hong Kong was grown in the Territories. It has been the primary object of the Agricultural Department to increase this fraction very considerably; some of the methods adopted are described below. That these methods have not been without success may be judged from the fact that even though the population of the Colony is vastly greater than in the autumn of 1937--when the war between China and Japan first affected Hong Kong and refugees poured across the border-the fraction of home-grown vegtables is now probably nearer half of the total consumption.
The Agriculture Department.
Before the war there was no agricultural department, though plans had been prepared in 1941 for such a venture. With the termination of hostilities, and the re-occupation of the Colony by the British, an unique opportunity was afforded for starting an agricultural department on a basis very different from that on which such departments have been built elsewhere. In most Colonies cash crops, e.g. cotton, tea, sisal and rubber, grown in large foreign-owned estates or by native enterprise, are the dominant feature of agriculture, and the primary policy of the department is to assist their production in order to aug- ment the revenue of the Colony and to provide the peasant with money for the purchase of consumer goods. In this Colony the
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