5
Primary Production
S
LACKING natural resources, Hong Kong depends heavily for its livelihood on a wide range of manufacturing industries using imported raw materials. As a result, a comparatively small propor- tion of the working populace is concerned with primary production. The 1966 by-census showed just under 73,500 people as directly employed in farming and fishing, and another 4,200 in mining and quarrying. Plans are well advanced for the establishment of new satellite towns in the agricultural hinterland of the New Territories, but so far little more than five per cent of Hong Kong is actually built up and the industrial explosion, however dramatic, has by no means overwhelmed the traditional life of the farmer and the fisher- man. Indeed the vigour of the farming and fishing industries is best demonstrated by the way in which they too are adapting to changed conditions.
The population influx of the nineteen-fifties had its effect upon the countryside as well as the city. While the growth of the urban population created new demands for the produce of the farms, new people and new methods were moving in to meet them. There has been a steady reduction in the number of people growing rice on their own land and an increase in the number of recent immigrants renting land for intensive vegetable production or poultry farming. At the same time rice farmers have been encouraged to diversify by planting vegetables after the harvesting of a second rice crop. These trends, and parallel improvements in the fishing industry, are in line with government policy to stimulate the production of food where this is compatible with the best use of the resources of land
or sea.
LAND UTILIZATION
From a farmer's viewpoint all the readily cultivable land in Hong Kong is being exploited and what is left, apart from land alienated to industrial and urban use, is marginal or inaccessible. Pressure comes on land from two directions-the continued and steady