NOTE ON LETTER No.53666/38 DATED 3 NOVEMBER, 1938 FROM THE UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES
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On the limited information available in this correspondence, and without personal knowledge of conditions in Hong Kong, any
comments offered must be of a very tentative order: statistical data of the right sort are lacking. I found recently that the Empire Forestry Conference organization had lost touch with the
Hong Kong Botanical & Forestry Department, with the result that the usual statistics collected for the conferences periodically held are not available for Hong Kong: the Secretary of the
Standing Committee is now re-establishing contact with a view
to Hong Kong's participation in the next Conference in 1940.
If the Department finds it possible, in its next annual report,
to adopt the scheme recently circulated for standardizing the statistical data accompanying the annual reports of colonial forest departments, it will become easier to form a judgment; but meanwhile, without data on such points as the areas of forest of different types, the objects for which they are managed, the cost of planting and tending, the absorptive capacity of local markets for timber and firewood and so on, one cannot form
a clear picture of the activities of the Department or of the
objectives it has in view.
2.
The impression received - and I would emphasize that it
is no more than an impression is that the Department is well advanced in silvicultural practice, but that the economic possi- bilities of forestry in Hong Kong may not have been sufficiently
explored. On the face of it, a revenue of $12,357 from 'Timber Sales' and 'Forestry Licences' (Table III) seems a rather inade- quate return for the expenditures on forestry indicated in Table V, and a disappointing figure to have attained in fifty-eight years of afforestation work. In a densely populated region, with a climate like that of Hong Kong, even small plantations should be capable of yielding a satisfactory profit, besides con- tributing to amenities and preventing soil deterioration, provided