ENG-1964 — Page 79

6

Primary Production

Ir is frequently and properly said that Hong Kong has no natural resources and that the people depend for their livelihood on selling the products of their manufacturing industry. The 1961 census showed just under ninety thousand people as directly employed in farming and fishing, and another ten thousand in mining and quarrying. Yet little more than five per cent of Hong Kong is actually built up and Hong Kong's industrial explosion, however dramatic, has by no means overwhelmed the traditional life of the farmer and the fisherman. 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 country-side 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 im- migrants renting land for intensive vegetable production or poultry farming. At the same time rice farmers have been encouraged to diversify by vegetable planting even after the harvesting of a second rice crop. These trends, and parallel improvements in the fishing industry, are in line with government policy which is to stimulate the production of food where this is compatible with the best use of the resources of land or sea.

AGRICULTURAL LAND IN THE NEW TERRITORIES

The scarcest resource is indeed land itself and many of the agricul- tural developments of recent years have been stimulated by the extreme pressure on land. Almost all of the cultivated land in Hong Kong is in the New Territories and the changes being made in land use are further affected by the special circumstances of land tenure there. When the New Territories became part of the