ENG-1977 — Page 84

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Primary Production

菜花

童體

A SERIES of pelagic or mid-water fishery surveys, begun in 1976 to investigate the resources of the South China Sea within the range of the Hong Kong fleet, continued during 1977. This project follows earlier surveys and studies, which suggest that the traditional demersal or sea bottom fishing grounds have reached the point of max- imum sustainable economic yield, and that any increase in supply will have to be from the exploitation of other resources.

The aim of the surveys is to establish the temporal and geographic distribution of unexploited pelagic fish stocks in the Northern South China Sea to help determine what should be done to maintain an adequate supply of fish. By showing which are the most abundant species, the surveys also will help determine the most appropriate gear for exploitation.

The surveys are being carried out by the Agriculture and Fisheries Department research vessel Cape St Mary, on which a range of sophisticated acoustic equipment – some of it on permanent loan from the South China Sea Fisheries Development and Co-ordinating Programme - has been installed to locate shoals of fish.

In December, it was announced that the 26-year-old Cape St Mary would be replaced in mid-1979 by a 32-metre-long combination seiner/trawler to be built at a local shipyard at a cost of $10 million.

The new 867-tonne research vessel will have a cruising range of 8,000 nautical miles and be able to stay at sea for anything up to a month. It will be manned by a crew of 17 and five scientists, and be equipped with two laboratories.

In the production of fresh foods generally - such as vegetables, pigs, poultry and fish - Hong Kong already meets a significant proportion of the community's require- ments, even though only 11 per cent of the total land area is used for farming and less than two per cent of the working population is involved in fishing.

The 1976 by-census showed that farmers comprised only 1.36 per cent of the economically-active population, while fisherfolk made up another 1.19 per cent. Hong Kong's fishing fleet catches about 92 per cent of all fresh marine fish eaten in the territory, and local pond fish farmers produce some 12 per cent of the freshwater fish consumed. Agricultural production is limited by the availability of suitable land rather than by numbers of people in the industry. Farmers in the New Territories produce about 43 per cent of the vegetables consumed, about 65 per cent of the total live chicken requirements and about 17 per cent of all pigs slaughtered.

The sudden increase in Hong Kong's population that occurred during the 1950s, following a large-scale influx of immigrants from China, gave considerable stimulus