PRIMARY PRODUCTION
99
Much of the best land is owned by clans established for hundreds of years. By tradition a proportion of the rent raised from clan land is set aside by the clans themselves for the upkeep of ancestral halls, religious observances, clan welfare and the maintenance of schools. Such land may not be disposed of without the consent of the clan members (sometimes numbering many hundreds) and the permission of the district officer.
Rents and values of agricultural land in the New Territories are customarily reckoned in paddy; if crops other than rice are grown, the rents are convertible into money at the market rate of a specified crop. Crown rents, however, are collected in cash at a rate fixed when the lease was granted. Most Crown rents have thus progressively declined in relation to the customary value of agricultural land, and in some cases are now hardly worth the trouble of collection.
An average annual rent for two-crop rice land would be about 1,600 pounds of paddy an acre, or about 40 per cent of the total annual yield from two crops. Though much of the land is owned by clans, individual holdings are all small, averaging under two acres. There are very few farmers who cultivate more than five acres. Where land is rented it is usually on annual tenancy, and often the arrangement between landlord and tenant is oral.
LAND UTILIZATION
The Agriculture and Forestry Department began a land utiliza- tion survey in 1953. The-compilation of preliminary data was completed in 1955 and maps were prepared on scales of 16 inches to one mile and 32 inches to one mile. In 1954 Dr T. R. Tregear, senior lecturer in Geography at the University of Hong Kong, made an independent reconnaissance study of land utilization in the Colony. Dr Tregear had full access to the work of the Agriculture and Forestry Department and produced a report from this data, Land Use in Hong Kong and the New Territories, published by the University in 1958.
The total land area of the Colony and its component parts was recomputed in 1959. Although the areas for the various classes of land had not changed appreciably, some slight modification of the original figures resulted. Using the same classification of land use, the following data was accepted for 1962: