172 Ka-ming Wu
In 2010, a small group of activists decided to do something, and they founded
the “Ma Shi Po Community Farm” (also called the Ma Po Po Community Farm).
With a stated goal of “No Moving and No Demolition,” they initiated a series of
campaigns to galvanize social and media attention for tenant farmers who want to
keep their farmland and farming livelihoods. One major activist, Becky Au, whose
parents are tenant farmers of Ma Shi Po, and Choi Kai Kai, a college graduate
with a geography degree, are the foremost spokespersons of the campaign. In
the following sections, I delineate three major strategies that have been adopted
by the rural activists of Ma Shi Po: special farm tours, rights-based nature
workshops, and a permaculture farming workshop. I show how these strategies
have successfully engaged citizens, captured media attention, and changed public
opinions. Using media reports of the Ma Shi Po Community Farm along with
interviews conducted with activists and participants, I show how this new form
of rural activism has challenged the established values of developmentalism and
the almost exclusively urban orientation of Hong Kong. I argue that the campaign
has for the first time made visible the importance of urban farming in the city and
linked the issue to real estate dominance, regional autonomy, local history, and
community building and the identity politics of post-1997 Hong Kong.
Special Farm Tours: Learning about the withering of agriculture in
Hong Kong
The barb wire is done by Henderson. The land developer is acquiring land
in the area. They send farmers away and demolish many housing structures.
They turn farmland into land that is full of weeds. Uncle J thinks it is a waste
of land and uses it for sheep grazing. The land developer, however, would
come and check the land and drive the sheep away. The forceful removal of
villagers happens here every day. [said Choi Kai Kai, tour guide of Ma Po Po
Community Farm]
(Law On Kei 2013)The struggle for preserving Ma Shi Po village did not start with the angry pitching
of farmers against land developers or the government. Quite the opposite: The Ma
Shi Po activists have from the very beginning framed their campaign with a much
broader purpose—to promote the importance of having farmland in the city. In this
section, I show how the Ma Shi Po campaign was initially introduced to the general
public through farm tours and a farmer’s market. First, the Ma Po Po activists
persuaded Becky Au’s parents (who are tenant farmers), to switch to farming
without using chemical fertilizers and to sell directly to retail customers rather than
to a wholesale vegetable market. Becky’s brother quit his job as an office worker and
began work on the farm in order to increase crop production. Their understanding
of organic farming does not include a plan to achieve full organic certification but
is rather more practically about replacing chemical fertilizer with organic fertilizer
and using netting against pests.^1 The idea of switching to organic farming is related
to their concern for farming as a community—and an environmentally friendly