ENG-1959 — Page 105

PRIMARY PRODUCTION AND MARKETING

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New Territories Administration is primarily concerned with pre- serving a balance between the sometimes conflicting needs of agricultural production on the one hand and of urban develop- ment on the other.

Some account has to be taken of the fact that much of the best land is owned by clans established in the area 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 and observances, for purposes of clan welfare, and for the maintenance of schools. Such land may not be disposed of with- out 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, convertible into money, where other crops are grown, at the market rate of a specified variety. 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 rent for two-crop rice land would be about 1,600 lbs. of paddy per acre per annum, or about 40% of the total annual yield from two crops. Though much of the land is owned by clans, individual holdings are uniformly 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 verbal. A general description of land policy is to be found in Chapter 10.

LAND UTILIZATION

In 1954 Dr. T. R. Tregear, Senior Lecturer in Geography of the University of Hong Kong, made a reconnaissance study of land utilization in the Colony and his data on a scale of 1:80,000 were published by the University of Hong Kong. In 1953 the Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Department commenced a Land Utilization Survey of arable land. This work was completed in 1955 and maps prepared on a scale of 1:20,000. The work of both teams forms the data for a new report entitled Land Use in

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