the “laans,” or middlemen, who controlled the marketing of farm and
fishery products, paying the producers as little as possible and cutting
themselves a thick slice of profit for the relatively simple process of
taking the goods to market. They advanced money to farmers and fishermen
at extraordinary usury rates, further tightening their strangle-hold. The
Japanese Occupation, by grinding the farm and fishing population into
desperate poverty, unintentionally broke the grip of the laans.
When the British Military Administration took control in the fall of
1945, it acted decisively to save the primary industries. Two men,
Father Thomas F. Ryan, Jesuit missionary and the colony’s first Acting
Superintendent of Agriculture, and Dr. G. A. C. Herklots, naturalist and
author, were designated for the task.
Many years later, Father Ryan, who had long since returned to teaching at
the Jesuit Wah Yan College on Hong Kong Island, said when asked about his
1945 assignment:
“I really knew very little about agriculture, but Dr. Herklots and I were
asked to help with the vegetable and fish marketing. It was obvious that
the laans were beginning again to take all the profits.”
The Jesuit priest and the naturalist learned a lot about marketing in a
hurry. The vegetable and fish marketing organizations they set up under
government control ended the dominance of the laans, but not without some
anguished howls from the displaced profiteers. For a standard ten percent
commission, the vegetable marketing organization transported and sold all
vegetables grown or imported into the colony at the government wholesale
market in Kowloon. A Federation of Vegetable Marketing Cooperative
Societies grew out of the original organizations. It extended credit to
farmers and has progressed steadily toward ultimate control of the market
by the co-op societies. As the co-ops take charge of organization work,
three percent of the ten percent commission is refunded to them. The
Vegetable Marketing Organization also distributes fertilizer in the form
of matured nightsoil, i.e., human excrement treated to reduce its germ
content.
The Fish Marketing Organization, established along the same general lines
as the Vegetable Marketing Organization, controls the transport and
wholesale marketing of marine fish, charging a six percent commission on
sales. It created loan funds to help fishermen rehabilitate and mechanize
their boats. Evolution of the Fish Marketing Organization toward a
wholly cooperative set-up has been impeded by the fact that only fifteen
percent of the fishermen can read or write, compared with a colony-wide
literacy rate of seventy-five percent. Living and working aboard their
boats, fisher folk could not attend school. This ancient pattern has
been altered in the last few years because more wives and children of
fishermen are living ashore. About 4,000 children of fishermen attend
schools on land, and there are special classes for adult fishermen.
Father Ryan and Dr. Herklots laid the foundation for the first Department
of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, which came into existence in 1950
after a series of preparatory steps had been taken. Father Ryan initiated
a survey of the colony’s primary industries and personally directed
the renovation and replanting of the Botanic Garden and other public
park areas, as well as the first postwar reforestation of the scalped
hillsides in the reservoir catchment areas. In 1947, he relinquished his
colony post to become the Jesuit Superior in Hong Kong. In recent years
he has conducted a local radio program of classical music as a sideline.
Long-term assistance to farmers came from another private source in
1951: Horace and Lawrence Kadoorie, two Jewish brothers who shared
positions of prime importance in the Hong Kong business community. Sir
Elly Kadoorie was a former official of the colony government and one
of its early business leaders. His two sons were members of a family
which came to Hong Kong from the Middle East in 1880 and built a large
fortune. The brothers were partners in the business house named for
their father and directors of more than thirty other companies. Both had
earned reputations as shrewd, tough businessmen; but Horace, the bachelor
brother, had acquired a special fame among ivory collectors as the author
of the seven-volume book, _The Art of Ivory Sculpture in Cathay_.
The Kadoories, observing the general poverty of colony farmers and the
even worse situation of the refugees who crowded into Hong Kong in the
late 1940s, decided to do something to help these displaced persons get
on their feet. Knowing the Chinese to be a predominantly agricultural
people, they chose a form of help that would make impoverished farmers
self-supporting; that of raising pigs donated by the Kadoories.
Pig-raising is a fairly simple venture that makes good use of marginal
land, and pork is always in demand at local markets.
Reaction to the idea was chilly; other businessmen considered it
unworkable and farmers regarded it skeptically, looking for a catch
in it. The Kadoorie brothers agreed to put it to a test, choosing 14
families with no farming experience for the experiment. The group
included a handyman, a carpenter, a beggar, a semi-invalid and a
stonebreaker. The Kadoories gave them cement, bamboo straws and a few
hand tools and invited them to build their own pigsties.
“Every one of those families made good,” Horace Kadoorie recalled in
a 1961 interview. “Today they all have excellent farms. Their success
in proving that you can really help people who are willing to help
themselves was what convinced us we were on the right track.”
The brothers, working independently at first, and then in close
collaboration with the officials of the Department of Agriculture,
have given various forms of assistance to over 300,000 people in 1,092
villages.
They functioned through two allied agencies, the Kadoorie Agricultural
Aid Association, which makes outright gifts, and the Kadoorie
Agricultural Aid Loan Fund, which makes interest-free loans. The two
Kadoories and colony agricultural officials are jointly members of
the boards of directors of the two institutions. The Association has
donated the equivalent of $3 million-plus in agricultural gifts. The
Fund, established by the Kadoories with an initial gift of $44,000, has
been increased to $306,000 by the government. The J. E. Joseph Fund,
another farm-loan fund, established in 1954, is also administered by the
government; its initial capital of $79,000 is loaned at three percent
interest.
In an economy like that of the United States, $3 million in gifts would
disappear like a pebble in a lake, but with that amount the Kadoorie
philanthropies have changed the face of the New Territories. The list of
improvements is awe-inspiring, and it is no exaggeration to say one can
hardly walk a mile anywhere in the rural district without seeing evidence
of their eminently useful contributions.
They contributed junks and sampans to isolated villages, and then built
27 piers to accommodate them. Dirt paths were the only routes between
many villages and farmers either walked or sloshed through the mud,
sometimes using bicycles and carrying five or six members of the family
or possibly a live pig lined up on the fenders and handlebars. The
Kadoorie Association has provided 150 miles of concrete paths, six motor
roads and 142 bridges to make the going easier.
Often villages depended on mountain springs for their drinking water, but
these had an unfortunate habit of sinking back into the ground before
they had served the thirsty villagers. The Association disciplined the
vagrant waters with thirty miles of concrete channels, 293 dams, 400
wells, 51 sumps and 8 reservoirs. Rogue rivers and the invading sea had
eaten away valuable farmland, and the Kadoorie Association produced
restoratives with 29 seawalls, 30 retaining walls and a variety of
culverts and floodgates. Odds and ends, helpful in diverse ways, ranged
from rain shelters to compost pits, poultry sheds to outhouses.
Pigs were popular because, as Horace explained, “It’s the only animal you
can see expanding daily.” Thousands were given away, and advice on caring
for them was supplied by the agricultural stations.
One group that was the especial beneficiary of pig gifts were farm
widows ranging from seventeen to ninety-six years of age. Horace, as the
roving scout of the Kadoorie Association, had noticed that hundreds of
women whose husbands had been killed by the Japanese or had died natural
deaths had not only lost the family rice-winner, they lost the “face”
or community status they enjoyed with their husbands. Custom frowned on
their remarriage, so they could do little but linger disconsolately on
the fringes of village life. The Kadoories talked it over and decided
that a gift of pigs, cows, ducks or chickens would give these widows
something to occupy themselves with and enable them to earn some money.
In a period of two years 10,000 widows received these animals and
enclosures for them. Feed they obtained through the Kadoorie Agriculture
Aid Loan Fund. Blind and elderly women were able to care for flocks of
chickens; younger ones received pigs and cows. The usual pig gift was
six purebred Chinese sows from the Kadoorie Experimental and Extension
Farm at Pak Ngau Shek; all pigs were inoculated against disease and the
Agricultural Department specialists showed the widows how to care for
the animals. Many women tripled their small incomes by breeding pigs and
selling their offspring. As the owners of livestock, they became persons
of consequence in their villages.
With the aid of government experts, the brothers bought hundreds of
foreign pedigreed pigs, and bred Berkshires, Yorkshires and middle whites
with the local animals to produce a larger and hardier strain. Cows and
water buffaloes, indispensable as draught animals, were distributed by
drawing lots in the villages, and the drawings became lively public
gatherings with soft drinks and cakes served all around. Gifts or loans
financed the construction of numerous fish-breeding ponds, with the seed
fish supplied gratis.
The 25,000 loans made through the Fund covered livestock, seeds and
fertilizer, building materials, insecticides and spraying equipment, land
development and other purposes. Over 95 percent of the loan applications
are approved, and the repayment rate has remained very high.
Creating new land for farming has been an important part of Kadoorie
efforts. Horace came upon a group of squatters who had been moved
from the city to make room for a new road; he found them moping about
forlornly on a rocky field which was the site of a cemetery from which
the bodies had been removed. Horace suggested that they use the rocks
to build pigsties, promising them the needed cement and two pigs for
each sty. On his next visit he found many pigsties completed, but was
temporarily baffled when the settlers asked him to buy for them a nearby
hillside rock, fully 100 yards wide and stretching from the bottom of the
hill to the top. He acquired the rock, and the settlers, working from the
bottom upwards, covered it with terraced growing lands.
At Nim Shue Wan village, a hillside settlement along a steep shore, the
Kadoorie Association built a seawall, mixed the sticky red earth of the
hillside with beach sand, and produced a good soil for vegetable-growing
which now supports 100 families in the area. At Pak Ngau Shek, the
Kadoorie farm on the high slopes of Tai Mo Shan, highest (3,140 feet)
mountain in the colony, the brothers began to experiment with plants and
animals, chiefly because the land had been judged worthless for farmers.
If they could make anything thrive there, they believed, it might teach
them some way to utilize the colony’s heavy proportion of wasteland. They
had many failures, such as typhoons uprooting all their shallow-rooted
peach trees, but they discovered that even trees and vegetables
considered unsuitable for high lands did very well. Some vegetables,
growing more slowly on the mountainsides, reached the market when lowland
crops were less plentiful, and therefore brought better prices. The farm
operated at a financial loss, but gave full value as an agricultural
testing site.
The Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association meets once every two weeks,
considers 50 to 100 applications for help, and tries to assist about 15
new families every day. It has given away 7,000 pigs in less than three
months. Many situations won’t wait for committee meetings; some farmers
in dire straits have walked up to Boulder Lodge, Horace’s home at Castle
Peak, to ask for help in the middle of the night. Horace, who often works
a 13-hour day and spends Sundays roaming around the farm districts, is
more flattered than annoyed by these occasional late-hour callers.
“Speed is of the essence in this work,” he said. “When a typhoon heads
this way, we assemble building materials for repair work and all the
quick-growing seeds we can buy; then we’re ready to help the farm people
get back into operation and plant vegetables as soon as the flooding
subsides.”
Fire is often a total disaster to the rural poor, wrecking their homes
and frequently killing their livestock. When an entire village was wiped
out by fire in 1960, the Kadoories threw a round-the-clock emergency
staff into a four-day rescue operation, providing new furniture, clothes,
two months’ food supply, extra cash, livestock, bicycles and rebuilding
all the houses.
Hundreds of artificial limbs donated by Kadoorie Association have enabled
crippled people to earn their living as farmers and fishermen. The
Association doesn’t scatter its benefits recklessly; all applicants are
thoroughly investigated to discover whether they will work to improve
themselves when they receive aid. When a man or woman receives a gift of
livestock, he may not sell it for one year without Kadoorie Association
consent; if disease or unavoidable accidents kill the stock, the
Association replaces them free.
“Our idea has been to find out the wants of those in need,” Horace said.
“It is worth more than anything else.”
The contributions of the Kadoorie brothers and the many other religious
and philanthropic bodies working in the colony serve as a valuable
supplement to the main task of directing and improving the primary
industries. The principal responsibility lies with the Department
of Agriculture and Forestry, and with the Department of Cooperative
Development and Fisheries, which was separated from Agriculture and
Forestry in 1961.
The Chinese farmers of the New Territories can grow a garden on the side
of a rock—as Horace Kadoorie found out for himself—but they know little
about scientific farming, and until the 1950s, there was no one to teach
them. Now the Agriculture & Forestry Department conducts three-week
general agricultural courses, followed by one-week specialized courses
in paddy cultivation, pond-fish culture and other phases of farming.
There are vocational courses, lectures to cooperatives, radio farming
broadcasts, film shows, guided visits to experimental stations and an
annual Agricultural Show at Yuen Long with prizes for the best farm
products.
At the Sheung Shui Market Garden Experimental Station, only two miles
from the Red China border, S. Y. Chan, an assistant agricultural officer,
directs a five-acre center for testing every species of foreign and
domestic vegetables and flowers he can lay his hands on. Chinese white
cabbage, Taiwan radishes, sugar peas, chrysanthemums, 30 varieties of
English and American tomatoes, chives, and corn each have their small
test patch to show whether they can survive in Hong Kong’s climate.
Roses, for example, wilt and die in a few seasons, but the station is
seeking new strains with greater durability. Unlike plants and flowers in
most sections of the United States, the majority of Hong Kong vegetables
and flowers grow best in winter, the local summers being too wet.
At Ta Kwu Ling Dryland Experimental Station, the problem is how to get
some use out of the thousands of acres of former farmland abandoned
because of poor soil or insufficient water. The station, started in
1956, made little progress at first. Then it added compost of manures
and chemical fertilizers to the soil, and tried deep plowing to retain
moisture in the earth. Large white local radishes as big as yams did
well in this ground, and so did sweet potatoes. The department experts
found that windbreaks of sugar cane helped to offset the drying effects
of strong winds. Several types of fodder, including six varieties of
grasses, were tried out in sample patches. Five of the station’s eleven
acres are devoted to improvement of local pig breeds by crossing them
with exotic strains.
The Castle Peak Livestock Experimental Station, located in an area of
badly eroded hills, is the chief center for artificial insemination of
pigs. Semen from selected strains of Berkshire, middle white, and large
white and improved local boars is injected into local sows, producing
larger and hardier litters. Various breeds of chickens are crossed to
develop poultry which thrive under local conditions and are acceptable
to Chinese tastes. A complete laboratory treats and experiments with
every known disease of poultry, pigs and cattle. Pig semen is carried by
bicycle, truck and helicopter to outlying sections of the New Territories
to service local sows.
Artificial insemination of pigs, based on its highly successful use in
Japan, has become increasingly important in Hong Kong, with more than
1,000 instances of its use in 1961.
In the northwestern lowlands near Yuen Long, the department has developed
a fast-growing source of food in the fish-raising ponds. From the top
of a small hill, Yu Yat-sum, fisheries officer, is able to point to a
speckled, silvery expanse of such ponds, covering 700 acres in individual
ponds from one to 10 acres each. Each acre produces about a ton of fish
every year.
Mr. Yu explains that a five-acre pond, equipped with sluice gates and
surrounded by dirt embankments, could be built for $2,700. Usually they
are owned by a village or a co-op society. They are only five feet deep,
but packed with 3,000 to 3,600 fry an acre, each about the length of a
paper clip. The fish would all be crushed and battered if it were not
for their superior adaptation—big head and silver carp cruise near the
surface, grass carp favor the mid-levels, and grey mullet and mud carp
gravitate to the bottom. Fed on rice bran, dry peanut cakes and soya
bean meal, they fatten at a prodigious rate and are ready for the market
within a year, selling at 21 to 30 cents a pound. For the pond owners,
it’s a net return of twenty percent per year. There are more than 1,000
acres of these ponds in the New Territories, and they are increasing at
the rate of 60 acres a month.
The Chinese have their own strict ideas of what fresh fish means; to
them, the only fresh fish from a pond is a live one, so the carp and
mullet travel to market in tubs, still alive. The job of Mr. Yu and other
departmental experts is to see that the fish do not perish before their
time because of diseases or excessive salinity in the pond water.
The Tai Lung Forestry and Crop Experimental Station concentrates on the
expansion of the colony’s forests, which almost disappeared during World
War II. Here the six-inch seedlings of Chinese pine, eucalyptus, China
fir and other species are placed in polythene tubes and covered with soil
by patient Hakka women who do the work by hand. After a few months in the
shade and a brief maturing period in full sunlight, the polythene tube
is removed and the tree is planted on a hillside in one of the reservoir
catchment areas. Spaced about six feet apart on all sides, they go in at
the rate of 2,500 an acre. Tai Lung produces 1,500,000 of these plantings
each year. A month after they are placed on the hillsides, their progress
is checked by an inspector; if more than twenty percent have died, the
area is replanted. A second check is made a year later.
Four main forest areas stretching across the New Territories from Tolo
Harbor to Lantau Island now total more than 11,500 acres. In ten years
some of the lean China pines have shot up to 30 feet high. The overworked
forestry staff has been so busy planting trees and keeping a close watch
on forest fires that it has had little time for the next stage of the
reforestation, which is thinning overcrowded areas. Other complications
confront them when a firebreak is cut through the hillside forests; the
cutover strip erodes quickly in the summer rainstorms, damaging the tree
plantations and sending silt into the reservoirs.
If forestry is the youngest of Hong Kong’s primary industries, fishing
is indisputably the oldest, and for many centuries, the largest primary
income producer. Until fairly recent times, fishermen were inclined to
demonstrate their versatility and supplement their income by piracy.
Fast, steel-hulled naval ships with long-range guns have taken much of
the lure out of part-time piracy, especially for the crews of slow-moving
junks, and the fisher folk have become a law-abiding group. Today they
number around 86,000 and catch approximately $10 million worth of fish
every year. Not included in their ranks are the keepers of fish ponds,
who are regarded as farmers, or those who live on boats but earn their
living by hauling cargo, running water-taxis or selling merchandise from
their boats.
The fishing people, chiefly Tanka but including other Chinese like the
Hoklo and Hakka, are concentrated at Aberdeen and Shau Kei Wan on Hong
Kong Island and seven settlements in the New Territories. By environment
and preference, they are deeply conservative, disinclined to mix in the
affairs of landlubbers. Nevertheless, the irresistible winds of change
which have swept through the colony since World War II have shaken them
loose from their traditional moorings.
Like the farmers, they were able to free themselves from the iron grip
of the laans when the Fish Marketing Organization put the middlemen out
of business. The Fish Marketing Organization gave them a fair return
on their catch, established cheap credit to improve their boats and
equipment, provided boats and trucks to get their fish to the five
wholesale markets and founded schools for their children. CARE and
other relief organizations came to their aid. The Fisheries Division
offered classes in navigation, modern seamanship and boat design, marine
engineering and the use of up-to-date fishing equipment, with classes
being adapted to the fishermen’s working schedules. A fisheries research
unit from Hong Kong University became a regular part of the departmental
organization. The 240-ton otter trawler _Cape St. Mary_ cruised the
fishing grounds from the Gulf of Tong King, west of Hainan Island, to
Taiwan in the east, gathering data on ocean currents, water temperatures
and depths and the feeding habits of fish. A fishing master was appointed
and careful studies were made of pearl- and edible-oyster culture.
All these are routine procedures in present-day fishing centers, but
they were virtually unknown in Hong Kong until 1946. Since then, despite
harassment and inshore fishing restrictions enforced by Red China, the
tonnage and market value of the annual catch have almost tripled.
Red China has maintained a certain disinterestedness in its mistreatment
of fishermen. During the last five years the Communists demanded so great
a share of the fish caught by their own people that thousands of their
fishing boats never returned. Some sailed far out in the China Sea, then
turned back toward Hong Kong and became refugees; others slipped through
Chinese shore patrols at night and defected to the British colony.
Between 1957 and 1962, the new arrivals swelled the colony fishing fleet
from 6,000 to the present 10,550 units.