Farming against real estate dominance 171they bought into car parks and dump sites or simply fenced up areas in order to
change the land use from agricultural to non-agricultural.
The experience of Ma Shi Po village is representative of the broader trend of
vanishing farmland in the New Territories. As a result of aggressive acquisitions by
real estate developers, 80 per cent of farmland in Ma Shi Po has been sold. Henderson
Real Estate, one of the four major land developers in Hong Kong, is now the largest
landowner in Ma Shi Po village. About half of Ma Shi Po’s total area was turned into
a middle-class residential area 16 years ago. Today, one enters Ma Shi Po via a newly
constructed road for vehicles. South of this road are two middle-class residential
developments that each have 20 blocks of apartment buildings that are 30 stories
high, and are associated with club houses, swimming pools, shopping malls, and
so on. North of this road one sees another world: a vast expanse of green farmland.
In July 2013, the Hong Kong government announced the “Northeastern
Development Plan,” which is a blueprint for a new satellite city in the New
Territories. The plan claims to provide many apartments that would help to meet
a serious housing shortage and would notably supply public housing that could
accommodate 1,700 members of the lower working class. The plan covers 28
hectares of farmland and six villages, including Ma Shi Po village, which would
affect about 1,000 residents. Like many of the remaining farming villages in the
New Territories, Ma Shi Po’s farmlands are not worked by “indigenous inhabitants”
but by non-indigenous inhabitants who came to Hong Kong in the 1950s after World
War II and could only rent farmland to survive. The government has promised to
move the affected residents, mostly non-indigenous and elderly inhabitants, to
public housing, with some compensation for demolishing their housing structures.
Indigenous inhabitants who are landowners enthusiastically support the plan as
they will benefit through the land compensation deal (948 HKD/sq ft for farmland
and 1,878 HKD/sq ft for residential areas). By contrast, non-indigenous residents,
although offered public housing as compensation, did not want to see their farmland
and spacious housing structures demolished. Many also did not want to move to a
public housing estate, which would mean living in a small apartment in a high rise
with no green environment and little opportunity of maintaining their crops and
agricultural income. And since most affected residents were tenants, the government
did not include them in the consultation process and notified them only recently of
the demolition plan. Many of them were unhappy with the fact that the government
plan did not take tenants’ rights and interests into consideration.
Land developers, who have acquired much of the unused farmland in the area,
have waited for years for this official development blueprint. Inside Ma Shi Po,
they have fenced up the acquired land with plastic ribbons and erected signs
warning off trespassers. The few patches of still-active farmland can be found
only alongside abandoned pastures and empty houses. While the village once
had a population of about 700 people, the majority of the original Ma Shi Po
residents have moved out, and only 10 households now remain. Among these 10
households, only five are professional farmers who continue to struggle to grow
and sell vegetables. In short, without a campaign against the development plan,
Ma Shi Po would have disappeared from the map with little fuss.