ENG-1968 — Page 102

5

Primary Production

LACKING natural resources, Hong Kong depends heavily for its livelihood on a wide range of manufacturing industries using imported raw materials. As a result, a comparatively small propor- tion of the working populace is concerned with primary production. The 1966 By-census showed just under 73,500 people as directly employed in farming and fishing, and another 4,200 in mining and quarrying. Plans for new satellite towns at Castle Peak, Tsuen Wan and Kwai Chung are well advanced, but so far little more than 10 per cent of Hong Kong is actually built up and the 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 countryside 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 planting vegetables after the harvesting of a second rice crop. These trends, and parallel improvements in the fishing industry, are in line with government policy to stimulate the production of food where this is compatible with the best use of the resources of land or sea.

LAND UTILIZATION

From a farmer's viewpoint almost all of the readily cultivable land in Hong Kong is being exploited and what is left, apart from land alienated to industrial and urban use, is marginal or inacces- sible. Pressure comes on land from two directions--the continued and steady demand for land for industry and housing, and the