The Guardian TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1931. NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LII, Issue 32, 21 April 1931, Page 4

The Guardian

TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1931. NOTES AND COMMENTS

Printed at Leeston, Canterbury, New Zealand, on Tuesday and Friday afternoons.

POPULATION AND FOOD.

The conclusion that there is, throughout the world, a disproportion between population and food supplies is expounded in the Spectator by Dr R. A. Fisher, of the statistical department of Rothamsted Experimental Station. He refers to articles on the subject published by him in 1929, in which he formulated four tests to determine whether population is "pressing upon" the food supply. Briefly defined these are a progressive increase in the price of foodstuffs relative to the goods from which clothes, houses and other necessities are made; general prosperity of the food producing industry, agriculture, in contrast to other industries; the pro-j duction of staple foodstuffs more profitable than other branches of agriculture; and economic conditions for the agricultural labourer superior to those of the urban worker, and consequently an increasing proportion of the population becoming engaged in agriculture. "On every one of these tests," says Dr. Fisher, "it is clear that the modern world is experiencing, not increasing over-population, but, paradoxical as it may sound, increasing under-population. The price of food relative to that of materials other than food has fallen; not by a temporary fluctuation of small amount, but substantially and progressively, for the last fifty years. . . . Next, the profits of agriculture in return for capital and management are unquestionably less than in other industries, while the wages of agricultural labour for the same level of skill are equally unquestionably lower; where they come into competition the manufacturer, the transport service, or the local authority has the pick, and the farmer has the residuum of the labour market. Within the agricultural industry, the tendency to rely increasingly whenever possible on non-food crops rather than on food crops and, among foods, on luxury foods rather than on staple foods is, I believe, doubted by no one connected with the industry. Finally, I do not know of any country in the world in which the rural population is not a diminishing fraction of the total, and since the country dwellers have almost if not quite invariably the higher birth rate, it is clear that the current economic inducement is away from rather than toward food production. Relative over-population, in so far as it has occurred locally in the past, must be ascribed, not to the limited resources of the earth, but to

the incompleteness with which its resources had been made accessible. The great material progress of the last half century, especially in respect of transport by land and sea have, in fact flooded the market with unused resources and have brought civilised peoples, mentally prepared as they were to mitigate the evils of overpopulation, face to face with the totally unexpected evils of the opposite condition. To the increased accessibility of the unused lands must be added the great increase in potential yields brought about by the now unlimited supply of fixed nitrogen; and the recent abrupt halt in the increase of the white race in North-West Europe and North America However misguided the drift to the towns may' be from an aesthetic standpoint, we must recognise that it is the economic effects of under-popu-lation—of insufficient mouths to consume the food produced by land already under cultivation—that impov-j erish the idealists who still remain cultivators. These are the people who should be consulted, in my judgment, if the aesthetic argument is to be used, as to whether a countryside largely derelict and neglected is aesthetically more satisfying than one supporting a prosperous agricultural industry."