What the farm worker has, in one of the lowest-paid and most arduous jobs in the colony’s industries, is a place to live, enough to eat and an almost irreducible minimum of money for clothing and other expenses. In thousands of cases, his lean resources are supplemented by remittances from his relatives overseas, but he could not have survived in the postwar economy without the basic reforms in marketing, credit and research that began in 1946. One expensive event such as a wedding ($200) or a funeral ($100) could keep a tenant farmer in debt for years to loan sharks who charged him interest of eight to thirty percent a month. In numerous instances, it still happens. For generations Hong Kong farmers had lived in permanent bondage to the “laans,” or middlemen, who controlled the marketing of farm and fishery products, paying the producers as little as possible and cutting themselves a thick slice of profit for the relatively simple process of taking the goods to market. They advanced money to farmers and fishermen at extraordinary usury rates, further tightening their strangle-hold. The Japanese Occupation, by grinding the farm and fishing population into desperate poverty, unintentionally broke the grip of the laans. When the British Military Administration took control in the fall of 1945, it acted decisively to save the primary industries. Two men, Father Thomas F. Ryan, Jesuit missionary and the colony’s first Acting Superintendent of Agriculture, and Dr. G. A. C. Herklots, naturalist and author, were designated for the task. Many years later, Father Ryan, who had long since returned to teaching at the Jesuit Wah Yan College on Hong Kong Island, said when asked about his 1945 assignment: “I really knew very little about agriculture, but Dr. Herklots and I were asked to help with the vegetable and fish marketing. It was obvious that the laans were beginning again to take all the profits.” The Jesuit priest and the naturalist learned a lot about marketing in a hurry. The vegetable and fish marketing organizations they set up under government control ended the dominance of the laans, but not without some anguished howls from the displaced profiteers. For a standard ten percent commission, the vegetable marketing organization transported and sold all vegetables grown or imported into the colony at the government wholesale market in Kowloon. A Federation of Vegetable Marketing Cooperative Societies grew out of the original organizations. It extended credit to farmers and has progressed steadily toward ultimate control of the market by the co-op societies. As the co-ops take charge of organization work, three percent of the ten percent commission is refunded to them. The Vegetable Marketing Organization also distributes fertilizer in the form of matured nightsoil, i.e., human excrement treated to reduce its germ content.