Grow more Food Campaign Causes of Limited Success
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Author:K. C. RAMAKRISHNAN
p-ISSN:0024-9602, e-ISSN:2582-5321, Vol:35, Issue:sep-sep
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.A04537
Abstract
For over a quarter of century now, Madras has been a deficit
province in respect of her requirements of rice. The demand has
increased faster than production, due to the natural increase of population
and the substitution of rice in place of millets in the diet of the lower
middle class and even the working classes in urban and industrial areas.
The shortage was not felt as long as Burma was ready to send us rice at a
price cheaper than our own cost of production. The flow of imports was
suddenly stopped by the conditions of war; the havoe wrought was so
great not only in Burma, but in Siam and Indo-China, next largest
exporters of rice, that the surplus available is still too short to meet the
demand of all Asiatic countries-India, China, Japan, Ceylon, etc. Here
was a challenge to our Agricultural Department to raise production to
the level of our requirements, which formed only 20 per cent above our
production, while the Department claimed to produce on its farms more
than double the average yield of the province and nearly as much as
the high yield of China and Japan. In the United Kingdom, food
production was accelerated in the course of a few years of war by
30 or 40 per cent above the normal. Why could five years of strenuous
and expensive propaganda and State-aid not raise the total yield by
more than a few lakhs of tons?
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