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in Group B was unjustified.
Fourth, there was a possibility of over-
payment of compensation for the clearance of pine trees, because the
Director of Agriculture and Fisheries was not consulted.
25.
As regards the first point, Group A were fishermen for whom
the economic and social effects of the closure of the Kwun Mun Channel
were judged to be the most severe. The classification of fishermen
families into Groups A, B and C was done after a survey conducted
jointly by the Agriculture and Fisheries Department and the New
Territories Administration in 1971. The survey originally aimed
at assessing the direct economic effects upon individual families.
26.
With hindsight it can be said that a survey carried out
along these lines was not likely to produce a very accurate overall
picture of the situation. There are two reasons for this: first,
the social links within the fishermen's society are very complex and
give rise to high degree of economic interdependence, and second, the
very nature of the fishermen's activities for obvious reasons makes
it hard to say how much they will suffer as a result of losing one
particular fishing ground or anchorage. For these reasons the survey
by itself was not sufficiently definitive to be the sole criterion for
assessing compensation, and by the same token should not now be the
sole yardstick against which the compensation should be judged.
27.
Thus, during the survey the departments came to recognise
the inadequacy of the statistical facts of the survey, and gradually
they placed less reliance upon the figures thrown up by the survey
and paid more attention to the identification of the various groups
However, having decided on the grouping, it was
of fishermen.
impossible to introduce a multiplicity of compensation terms for
fishermen within each group.
/28.
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