OCCUPATIONS, WAGES AND LABOUR ORGANIZATION
55
A sharp change occurred after the war. While the natural rate of rural population increase rose steeply, China coast shipping, due to international restrictions on trade with China, declined sharply, throwing many former seamen out of work. Less favourable conditions in the West Indies cut off emigration opportunities. Younger men, who would nor- mally be reaching the age to follow in their fathers' footsteps and go to sea or to settle abroad, had to stay in their villages. At the same time there was a reflux of former emigrants from the West Indies, and even from urban Hong Kong. Quite suddenly, the land was insufficient to maintain its own population. The long-neglected higher terraces and coastal fields had by this time been lost-the former by erosion, the latter by invasion of the sea,-and, in general, to repair the damage was beyond village resources.
Gradual progress is now being made, with Government assistance and encouragement, in repairing these several decades of neglect, and agriculture, which had formerly been sinking into a subsidiary to other more exciting and profitable jobs, is gradually regaining its proper importance.
The main crop is rice, grown in all the valleys and, wherever possible, on irrigated hill terraces. New Territories rice includes some varieties of a very high standard, and it is the general practice of villagers to take their own rice to town and barter it for a larger quantity of cheap imported rice, of lower quality, for their own use. Where sufficient water is available, the fields are made to produce two rice crops per year, but in salty land, and where no water can be stored in winter, only one crop (the second) can be grown. The principal winter crop is sweet potatoes, but wherever there is quick transport to town and a sufficient supply of fertilizer, there is an increasing tendency for green vege- tables to be grown. These include most of the best-known European summer vegetables, the season for which in Hong Kong is the winter.
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