食物供應：由本地稻田到進口米與監管

1. Before the colony: harvests depended on weather, and famines were recorded

Before Hong Kong became a British colony, food risk was recorded mainly in the famine and disaster entries for Dongguan and Xin’an counties. In the autumn of 1461 flooding damaged crops in Dongguan, and the area faced shortages again the following spring. In April and May 1565 a severe drought there pushed the price of one dou of white rice to one qian of silver. In 1587, during a drought in Xin’an, Deng Yuanxun of Cen Tian donated two thousand shi of rice; in 1596, after another drought, Chan Hei of Tsing Yi donated one thousand shi of millet for relief.

These entries are not a continuous production series. They record when disaster struck and who provided relief, showing that food supply depended on weather and transport and that relief rested mainly on local gentry donations. By the 1840s, farmland on Hong Kong Island totalled about fifteen hundred mu, roughly two-thirds of it planted with rice. That was the starting point at the time of cession: a small grain base concentrated on rice.

2. After the cession: markets, rice merchants and cross-border supply

On 16 May 1842 Hong Kong’s first public market opened in Central, and the Government began managing food sales through markets and licences. On 31 July 1858 Governor Bowring issued a Chinese and English proclamation condemning the Qing government for demanding that Chinese residents leave Hong Kong and for stopping food supplies to the colony, calling the Qing government an enemy of Britain. Food supply was already cross-border: Hong Kong did not grow enough to feed itself and depended on the south China hinterland and maritime trade.

Local farming shrank at the same time. About 1,100 people on Hong Kong Island worked in agriculture in 1845; the number rose to 1,290 in 1851 and fell to 463 in 1855. Rice merchants expanded instead: between 1864 and 1866 the number handling Southeast Asian rice re-exported to mainland China rose from 102 to 114. Hong Kong was not a rice granary but a transhipment and financing node. As local fields withdrew, the urban population was fed by imported rice.

Market rules tightened too. In May 1858 the Government passed a market ordinance setting out what licensed hawkers could sell in markets; another provision that year allowed boat people to sell fresh fish to other boat dwellers at least 300 feet offshore. These rules wrote “who may sell, and where” into law, making the market radius and the licence basic units of urban food administration.

3. The early twentieth century: rice shortages, requisition powers and rationing

On 26 July 1919 a typhoon halted work and 300 coolies seized white rice from several rice shops in Wan Chai; similar incidents spread to Causeway Bay, Central and Sai Wan. On 19 September the Government enacted an ordinance giving the Governor power to requisition rice when necessary and to regulate rice merchants. Food had become an emergency controlled commodity: the state acquired not only price powers but also the power to take physical stocks.

On 23 May 1941 the Government established the Rice Monopoly Bureau and intervened directly in supply. In January 1942 the Japanese military administration introduced rationing at four taels of white rice per person per day; on 15 March the ration was adjusted to six taels four candareens. Hong Kong had 98 rice ration stations, 57 on Hong Kong Island and 41 in Kowloon. The number of stations and the daily ration show food distribution being used to control population and order.

4. After the war: public trading retreats and farming turns to vegetables

On 1 January 1955 the Government stopped trading in white rice itself and granted exclusive rice import rights to 29 merchants. This was not a free market: importers still had to register and the state retained supply and price tools. Day-to-day trade passed from a public trader to private merchants, and the administration shifted from operator to regulator.

Local farming turned from rice to vegetables. From the 1960s vegetable growing became the main direction of Hong Kong agriculture, generally using intensive methods. In August 1962, 70 per cent of vegetable-growing areas in the New Territories were damaged, showing how fragile the city’s reliance on local fresh vegetables could be. By the 1970s rice cultivation had almost completely ceased. Local farming did not disappear; it concentrated on fresh vegetables and poultry, while rice was left entirely to imports.

Farming’s role in the wider economy kept shrinking. Through the 1960s and 1970s the share of agriculture, fisheries and mining in Hong Kong’s economy fell steadily. Local farmers faced imported vegetables, land development and labour outflow, and could not easily expand output or income. The state’s role shifted from supporting production towards regulating food safety and wholesale markets, a shift that later explains the creation of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department and the Centre for Food Safety.

5. Prices, disease and liberalisation

From 1 November 1979 the Director of Trade and Industry was authorised to set the selling price of white rice and to supervise sales by registered importers and wholesalers. This price-control regime continued past the handover. On 20 August 1997 the Department of Health announced the first discovery of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in humans in Hong Kong, the first such case in the world. Food safety had expanded from “is there enough food?” to “is the food safe?”.

In 2003 the Hong Kong SAR Government abolished the rice import quota system and adopted an open policy for the rice trade, retaining only a small number of regulatory measures. From two-thirds of farmland growing rice in the 1840s to the abolition of import quotas in 2003, Hong Kong moved from a locally productive food system to a “cross-border supply plus regulation” system. Its weak points are no longer in the fields but at the border, the port, the wholesale market and the laboratory.