WORLD’S FOOD SUPPLY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19947, 15 November 1926, Page 15

WORLD’S FOOD SUPPLY.

MISTAKES OE THE PROPHETS. The prospect of the world’s population overtaking- its food supplies was seriously discussed at the Oxford meeting of the British Association, Sir Daniel Hall and others arguing that the remaining margin of development would he exhausted in a relatively short period. “Ths world is very wide, and there are vast tracts in all the great divisions of it which seem to promise abundant harvests with settlement and with suitable methods of farming,” said The Times, discussing their gloomy prophecies ‘Tn truth, the real remedy for the pressure of the mouths upon the loaves appears to lie in a judicial combination of the settlement and development of new lands with better methods of production on all lands, new and old It would have seemed incredible in the Middle Ages that an acre in England could bo brought to yield the number of bushels and the quality of corn which it has been producing with constant improvements in both since the end of the eighteenth century. It would have seamed more impossible still that we should one day import the greater part of our daily bread from uiiciiscovered lands beyond the seas. As metnods have improved and nsw sources of food supply have been found in the past it is reasonable to expect that they will be improved and tapped in the future. l-rofessor MacGregor comforts us by the reflection that all the great economic prophecies of the nineteenth century went wrong —a chastening thought for the prophets of the twentieth. There were, for instance, the confident predictions that Ereetradc would be universally adopted, that gold would become scarce, that coal would be exhausted, that no abundant supply of wheat could be grown in Canada. Lord Bledisloc testified to the same effect. In his youth he had been taught that the wheat supply from the United States would cease, and he had heard the British farmer fed upon this hope. He had Jived to see the prophecies made void, to find the wheat area in the United States trebled, the production more than trebled, and the exports more than quadrupled, the latest increase being that at the highest rate. Ho, too, instanced Canada with her 240,000,000 acres awaiting development, and laid stress upon what had been done there in the discovery of new wheat lands and of new varieties of wheat. ’