Abstracto

Shifting Roles and Development of Agriculture in Hong Kong

Xue Bai, Juan Wang and Sungming Chow

In recent decades, agriculture is never to serve for food subsistence and food security functions in Hong Kong. It plays more important roles in leading healthy or green lifestyle, promoting green leisure or even for urban development such as Northeast New Territories, thus it has drawn increasing research and policy attention in the past 15 years. This study presents an overview of the shifting roles and development of local agriculture in Hong Kong from a historical and developmental perspective. Based on an extensive literature review of published papers, magazines and newspaper articles within the past 15 years, this study has identified the nine themes and several focal issues. These themes include food subsistence, food security, land grab, organic food, green lifestyle, green leisure, green activism, green modernism, agroecology. The results show that the functions of agriculture have being changing and new trends of agriculture development in Hong Kong speak to its great potential of serving for other functions. Findings of this study also suggest that the development of agriculture is not a linear process while the role of agriculture is changing greatly in different social and economic contexts. The identification of the nine themes regarding the development and shifting roles of agriculture can inform the formulation of policy and practice strategies for further fostering a more balanced, modernized and sustainable development of local agriculture in Hong Kong.