5.6 Food Supply

Under food rationing during the Occupation, those holding a ration card were entitled to 6.4 taels (242 grams) of rice a day.

In 1944, when stocks of rice were exhausted, the government did away with rationing, leaving consumers to fend for themselves in the free market.

Sugar, salt, cooking oil, vegetables, meat and fuel were in extremely short supply and prices rocketed.

The poor were reduced to subsisting on peanut bran, cassava flour and roots of trees.

So desperate were the starving that food-snatching was a common occurrence.

Credit : History Museum of HK.