Growing food in a post-colonial Chinese metropolis : Hong Kong’s

Down-To-Earth Civil Society

Introduction

This address the food and agriculture movement among the

younger generation in Hong Kong in recent decades based on
ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 2016 and 2017 with more
than one hundred interlocutors. The original research plan attempted
to focus either on a village, an organisation, or a district. However, pre-
fieldwork investigations at farms in the New Territories as well as at
farmers’ markets in the downtown manifested the arbitrariness of
drawing lines within a movement which is connected by an organic
solidarity that transcends geographical or administrative boundaries

Food growing in an urban setting has become a global agenda. In

countries affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the risk
of food shortage led to the development of local agricultural
production and urban farming.

Civil society is depicted by Habermas as groups of people who

spontaneously organise discussions or even movements to react to
societal problems. Habermas (1996) positions civil society at the
interface of public spheres and private spheres. Public sphere emerged
in Europe in the eighteenth century as a buffer as well as a bridge
between the state and society in 1989. According to him, from their
readings in the private spheres like households, the ‘educated classes’
among the bourgeoisie, such as judges, doctors, pastors and scholars,
were influenced by political liberalism.

Uneasy urban living and the low-income middle class

 As Hong Kong is largely covered by high-rise buildings, only in the
New Territories is it possible to farm on real land; on Hong Kong Island
and the Kowloon Peninsula, except for little plots of gardens between
the concrete jungle, food is planted up in the air on rooftop farms.
Currently, there are around fifty rooftop farms according to 2016
cencus and 139 farms in the New Territories, excluding farms which are
not recognized by the Hong Kong SAR government. During the course
of Hao Tzo Hu fieldwork, it became evident that ‘farmer’ was becoming
a chic identity for urban office workers. Some farmers are retired
people, now amateur farmers. Some farmers are ‘holiday’ farmers who
engage in farming as a hobby and see it as an effective way of de-
stressing, sharing food grown by themselves to friends and families,
feeling the joy of watching things grow, or appreciating the beauty of
nature. They prefer to consume organic food even paying much higher
prices. Many of them support organic food not only due to the concern
of food safety but also the consideration for discourses of sustainable
development such as environment protection. This is a typical image
that studies on urban farming and organic food movement have been
presenting.

The rhetoric of local food and self-sufficiency

Construction of good food

Food safety has always been the central issue of the agriculture and
food movement in Hong Kong. During the 1990s, thousands of Hong
Kong residents were impacted by an array of toxic vegetable accidents:
to reduce the cost of production and increase marketability, imported
vegetables were cultivated with poisonous amounts of pesticides and
irrigated with industrial waste water polluted with heavy metals in
1993. Today, interlocutors of this research always put food safety first
when asked about their motivation for growing food by themselves.
Even people who do not intend to grow food prefer to shop at farmers’
markets or choose organic food from supermarkets. Many of them
reflexively told me that this might be the consequence of food scandals
reported via mass media every now and then, including imported
vegetables overly dosed with pesticides, or ‘fake food’ made or
supplemented with chemical ingredients. This haunting concern creates
a ‘risk society’ in which the loss of security invokes a reintegration into
social relations in 1992. There have been numerous pieces of research
justifying an emerging market of quality food in China in 2011. A
research project focused on the ‘Good Food Movement’ in Chinese
cities Beijing, Xi’an and Wuhan finds that the exploration of a reliable
food system is an initiative to establish new social relations and
community resilience in reaction to profit-driven food production in
2017.

In the long history of agriculture, there were no such thing as

‘inorganic’ farming. Methods and principles that fit into organic
standards including fertilization, tillage, and irrigation system are easily
found in traditional East Asian societies such as China, Japan and Korea.

During the 1960s and 1970s, organic agriculture was associated

with the worldwide environmental movement; at the same time,
organic agriculture was popularized by the counter culture and a back-
to-the-land movement, primarily initiated in Europe and the US in
2010. Since the 1990s, in the retail market for organic food, consumer
demand has been increased by concerns for food quality and safety,
and also environmental damage caused by conventional agriculture.
There is no consensus on whether organic farming and sustainable
agriculture are synonymous or separate notions; organic farming is
sometimes regarded as the transitional stage from conventional
farming to sustainable agriculture in 2001. Both terms are used as core
concepts of current local agriculture initiatives in Hong Kong.

From the Hong Kong government’s point of view, reliable food

means that the production procedures, pesticide and herbicides
management, quality of soil and irrigation water are monitored and
certificated by governmental or organic certification sectors it is said by
Vegetable Marketing Organization in 2008. Only a handful of Hong
Kong’s food supply is local. According to government statistics, 90 per
cent of the total food supply is imported; in 2010, 92 per cent of
vegetables come from mainland China, while major sources of fresh
fruits are the US, followed by mainland China and then Thailand.

Bottom-up renaissance of local agriculture

This addresses a resurgence of interest in local agriculture, which

was the most important economic activity during the middle of the last
century but now regarded as an unlikely topic in highly urbanised Hong
Kong. From the perspective of the younger farmers who have no
agricultural family background and are not expected to become farmers
given the education they receive, this study analyses the social and
economic structure which the movement is cultivated in, and
demonstrates how reflections on the food system transformed into
hands-on food growing.

People who were born during the era of economic boom in Hong
Kong were promised that good education would guarantee decent,
well-paying jobs, and good quality of life. But when they are nearly
there after years of commitment to the goal, they suddenly realize that
the world has changed. This paper therefore argues that although there
are many other qualities which attract people to be urban farmers,
daily struggles and the pursuit of alternative lifestyles are essential
factors of the current agriculture movement among the young
generation. Being completely urban dwellers, almost all interlocutors of
this research lacked for agricultural knowledge and had absolutely no
farming experience. They had no choice but to accept stable and well-
paying jobs to pay for their food and other living costs. This paper has
argued that political discourses of nationalism should not be forced on
the initiatives of local agriculture and food self-sufficiency. Food
movement is often associated with food imports from mainland China
and exaggerated to an assertion that influences from China to Hong
Kong.

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