ENG-1966 — Page 108

PRIMARY PRODUCTION

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crops, such as peanut, millet, soy bean and sugar-cane, are culti- vated mainly for local consumption. Fruit production, although not yet substantial, is expanding and includes lychees, lung ngan, wong pei, lemon, orange, tangerine, Japanese apricot, guava, papaya, and pineapple. Accurate statistics are not available, but approximately 50,000 hundredweights of assorted fruits, valued at over $4 million, were harvested during the year. There is a small but useful export trade in some fruit and field crops to overseas Chinese.

Since 1954 the area of land under two-crop paddy has fallen from 20,190 acres to 13,000 acres. A further 2,000 acres are used for one- crop paddy in brackish water. With a milling average of 68 per cent, the estimated crop was 11,300 long tons of polished rice; at an average wholesale price of $68 a picul the crop was valued at $12,645,000. In a normal year the average yield of paddy from an acre of two-crop land is about 1.2 long tons, but with seed of improved varieties, good irrigation and the use of fertilizers, pro- duction may reach 1.8 long tons on average land, and over two long tons on better soils. The first crop is sown into the nurseries in early March, transplanted in April and harvested in June and July. Second crop seedlings are nursed in June for planting out by the end of July and the crop is harvested during October and early November.

VEGETABLE MARKETING ORGANIZATION

Vegetables produced in the New Territories for sale in the urban areas are sold through a marketing scheme which was set up in 1946 on the lines of the successful fish marketing scheme. The present Vegetable Marketing Organization operates under the Agricultural Products (Marketing) Ordinance 1952, which provides for the appointment of a Director of Marketing (the Director, Agriculture and Fisheries Department) who is made a corporation sole with power to acquire and dispose of property and use the assets of the organization for the development and encouragement of vegetable farming. It provides also for a Marketing Advisory Board composed of unofficials to assist the organization. The controls imposed by the ordinance, however, apply only to the New Territories and Kowloon area, for there is little vegetable cultivation on Hong Kong Island.