AFRICA DRYING UP

Southland Times, Issue 18818, 11 May 1920, Page 2

AFRICA DRYING UP

A SCIENTIST’S WARNING. PIETERMARITZBURG, March 30. As General Smuts does not fail to remind us, the agricultural industry of South Africa is progressing by leaps and bounds (says the correspondent of the Christchurch Press). The export trade of the Union—largely agricultural—ha;; expanded from £3,800,000 in 1898 to £17,000,000 in 1918. Wonderfully encouraging, and our only statesman is just the man to remind us of it. But there is always a fly in the ointment. And the fly in this case extends beyond our own particular ointment. Dr Peter Chalmers Mitchell, secretary of the Zoological Society of London, and a wellknown scientist. was one of those elvoard the London Times aeroplane that attempted, unsuccessfully with others, the Cairo-Cape flight. Dr Mitchell has given to the world his views on Africa from Cairo to below the Great Lakes. He considers that the. country' is drying up, that places apparently fertile are unwholesome and “living on their own corruption,” and that it would need a colossal upheaval to remedy existing conditions. On the top of this we have the following from our own East Griquaiand on the subject of soil erosion:—“As (including natives) there are fifty farmers who are encouraging soil erosion to one who is checking it, South Africa is drying up. Without afforestation and irrigation on a scale that has hitherto been only dreamt of, this fair land is destined to become a desert the same as Mongolia, huge tracts of Persia and Thibet, and, to come nearer home, the Western Karroo.”