Hong Kong's farmland may yet flourish again
David Akers-Jones says after years of neglect, Hong Kong's agricultural land looks set to be given new life under a government push for farming
One of the recent clutch of government policy consultation documents is devoted to an exciting revolution. At long last, the sleeping beauty of our agricultural sector is to be roused and a new world of flourishing farmland will rise from forgotten fields.
In the 1960s, when I was first posted to Yuen Long as district commissioner, the exodus of farmers had already begun and Chinese restaurants had started to sprout in European cities. A fleet of jumbo jets, developed by an enterprising leader from San Tin in the northwest, carried farmers and their families to this new Eldorado in the West. In 1968, I painted a view of Pat Heung, yellow with ripening paddy, and every day I drove to work from Tuen Mun to Ping Shan through beds of water chestnut.
In distant Kowloon, at about the same time, another revolution was taking place. Kwai Chung valley was being reclaimed from vegetable fields and docklands were moving from Kowloon to container terminals lining the shores of Kwai Chung, known to old salts as Gin Drinkers Bay.
A crucial footnote in the consultation document mentions the ruling in the case of Melhado versus the attorney general, to the effect that the term "agricultural" was descriptive only, and thus agricultural land could be used for storage. After the conclusion of the case - after which, sadly, there was no appeal - agriculture no longer meant farms and fields, and it led to the landscape being piled high with containers, old cars and anything for which there was no home in urban Hong Kong.
Alas, there was no matching effort to make land available for container storage. Instead, we boasted that Hong Kong was a container port with a throughput the envy of the world, and not the worst despoiler of agricultural land in our part of the world.
The result of this failure is that, when we wish to develop our new town, Hung Shui Kiu, we have to get rid of, or resite, thousands of container boxes. The Melhado decision was a godsend to our landowners: no more back-breaking toil in paddy planting, our absent farmers were now able to lease out their ancestral land for container storage or dispose of it for land speculation.