Put the land back in Hong Kong farmers' hands

Hong Kong has long branded itself "Asia's world city", with some justification. It was ranked first in Ernst and Young's 2012 Globalisation Index, and leads the world in the trend towards greater integration of goods and services, technology and capital.

Its resource consumption is equally globalised. With an ecological footprint 150 times greater than its carrying capacity, it is essentially living off the natural resources of other countries. But if everyone in the world were to lead the same lifestyle, we would need the equivalent of 2.6 earths to meet our needs.

This ecological overshoot is a result of the belief that, in a globalised world, we can always import our resources, including food, energy and materials, from somewhere else at low cost. Yet, in the reality of a resource-constrained world, cities such as Hong Kong must start looking inwards and asking what it means to be sustainable.

The single largest factor in Hong Kong's consumption footprint is the household consumption of its 7.2 million residents, which accounts for 78 per cent of the total. Within household consumption, food accounts for 23 per cent of the total, and is the second-largest factor after goods and services.

With the decline of local agriculture, Hong Kong now relies heavily on imported food, especially from mainland China. As recently as the 1970s, Hong Kong, with a population of four million, was still able to meet 82 per cent of its vegetable demand through local sources. In 2011, that figure was 2.3 per cent.

Hong Kong's departure from its agricultural roots has been startling. The amount of agricultural land has dropped from 13,000 hectares in 1961 to 5,100 hectares in 2011, or about 5 per cent of total land area. Unusually for a Chinese city, Hong Kong has had no policy to promote local production of food since the handover.