EGYPT COTTON BOOM.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 15222, 21 May 1920, Page 8

EGYPT COTTON BOOM.

*. _ — __ STARVATION MENACE AS A RESULT. i A special , correspondent m Cairo de- ' scribes the situation that has led Lord Allenby, ' the High Commissioiner 101 Egypt, to decree that cultivators rooting up cereals to plant cotton shall be fined £100 an acre. A most grave food crisis is now developing m Egypt, and unless it can be stemmed m some manner a great danger exists of tho, famished people .'being driven to rioting arid disorder. Bad m towns, the situation is Worse m the country, and worst m Upper Egypt, where there is less cultivation than m the Delta and tho difficulties of import are greater. The sufferers are the peasants, the fellaheen, who either rent small plots of land or, as is the case with millions, act as' hired agricultural laborers In tho main th© cause of the deep distress prevailing is cottoni * Cotton has commanded such soaring prices that landowners and the landowning fellaheen themselves have rushed to increase the area of cotton growing. I am told by an official who has made a special study of the- matter that the planted area of cotton is actually approaching a 2S per cent, increase^ on the pre-war area. Wheat and other grain crops have actually been ploughed up when -on the fair way ,to maturity m order that land might bq sowed with cotton. Gambling m cotton has been disastrously widespread among alk classes ot the community, and m cottonseed aud cotton planting. . Normally Egypt m the matter of food suffices for herself practically, and by stringent food regulations, combined with a reversion to normal crops on the excess of land sown with cotton, might do so m future.