GROWING OF RICE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 39, 15 February 1930, Page 29

GROWING OF RICE

CHINA AND AMERICA

DIFFERENT METHODS USED

Primitive .as;it. niay seem,;a bowl of rice is one of1 the compelling examples of the value of niaehine civilisation. If any !pne ; . ihihg^isl., popularly .identified with the. Orient, -it,is ;I ricc.' .More than 80 per cent. of :: that-product is. grown and eaten in China, India, and Japan. If cheap labour were sufficient to produce cheap rice, surely China might ere now have taken to itself tho world's markets for this cereal.

Yet when effectiveness of production is measured- by tho question of which countries supply the markets of nations lacking in rice production of their own, it is found that farmers of the United States, most of them in Louisiana, California, Arkansas, and Texas, furnish a considerable part of the rice which moves 'in international trade, says the "Christian Science Monitor" in an editorial. During tho last three years they have exported an average of approximately 250,000 tons annually, of which they sold an average of more than 12,000 tons to China's next door i neighbour, Japan.