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.