That $40,506,000 farm-income figure has a momentarily impressive ring until one sees how it is divided. The average vegetable farm is about two-thirds of an acre, and the average “paddy,” or shallowly flooded unit of rice-growing land, usually runs to two acres, with an upward limit of five acres. There are several larger farms of 100 acres or more, but these are share-cropped by tenant farmers for exporters of special crops such as water chestnuts or ginger. The size of almost all other farms is dictated by the amount of hand labor one farm-owning family can perform; the only extra-human labor comes from the plow-pulling power of the dwarfish Brown Cattle and water buffalo. On these postage-stamp farms, tractors would be prohibitively expensive and as destructive as an army tank. Even a hand-operated power cultivator would be far too costly for a typical family farm.
By Western standards, any farm of less than two acres would barely qualify as a truck garden, but the Chinese of the New Territories cultivate the land with unique intensiveness. A fresh-water paddy produces at least two rice crops and often an additional “catch crop” of vegetables each year; six to eight crops are harvested annually on all-vegetable farms.
Farm income is as subdivided as the land. There are an estimated 30,000 farm families and a total of 250,000 persons who rely on farming for their living. The per capita income of the farming population therefore runs around $162 a year, or $13.50 a month, less the forty to sixty percent of crop value they must share with the landowner, leaving a meager net income of as little as $81 a year, or $6.75 a month. Things have been worse; in 1955 the annual per capita net income of farm people was about $30.
What the farm worker has, in one of the lowest-paid and most arduous jobs in the colony’s industries, is a place to live, enough to eat and an almost irreducible minimum of money for clothing and other expenses. In thousands of cases, his lean resources are supplemented by remittances from his relatives overseas, but he could not have survived in the postwar economy without the basic reforms in marketing, credit and research that began in 1946. One expensive event such as a wedding ($200) or a funeral ($100) could keep a tenant farmer in debt for years to loan sharks who charged him interest of eight to thirty percent a month. In numerous instances, it still happens.
For generations Hong Kong farmers had lived in permanent bondage to 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.