IRRIGATING THE GARDEN OF EDEN.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 28 May 1915, Page 2

IRRIGATING THE GARDEN OF EDEN.

Not many people, we fancy (says the Globe), have yet appreciated what the irrigation of Mesopatamia—blessed word! —will mean to the world's wheat supply. The area of the TigrisEuphrates delta is something iike twelve million acres, and it promises to be among the best wheat-growing lands in the world. Under the scheme which Sir William Willcoeks submitted to the Turkish Government in the days when it was still comparatively sane, the irrigation of about a third of this area was provided for, and land worth nothing the acre would have risen in value to a hundred millions sterling, with a gross annual output of about forty millions. Cotton as well as foodstuffs can be grown in this soil, which yields two crops a year, and it is rather more than suspected that beneath it is an immense lake of oil, whose value may altogether dwarf that of the agricultural products. It seems a curious thing to "be irrigating the Garden of Eden for wheat and boring it for oil, but if these'are to be done at all —and done they certainly will be—it is Great Britain who must do them. The fact that the land has been coveted by Germany is another reason for controlling it.