Abstract

In the great tropical and subtropical plantation industries, such as tea, rubber, onee, cocoa, citrus fruits, etc., large areas of permanent crops are cultivated on capitalistic lines with uniform and usually white control. On an estate of hundreds or even thousands of acres, often under highly intelligent supervision and where the produce may be worth a great deal of money, it is comparatively easy to get adopted improvements which are the results of scientific research, whether in the control of disease or in any other direction. It is quite a different matter, however, when one comes to deal with the crops grown by the indigenous people of the tropics for their own use. Their agricultural practices are rigidly traditional, their standard of intelligence may be low, money is scarce or even absent, and their crops are raised in small holdings, often subdivided to an almost incredible degree. I once had occasion to acquire 17 acres for expansion of an agricultural research station in India and found 30 families and 91 individual plots represented in this piece of arable land. In such conditions and they are those under which a great part of the population of the world lives "the culti vator's ways and the sheep's ways tend to be much the same", as an Indian proverb says, and however wall the traditional agricultural methods are followed, the cultivator is apt to be helpless in an emergency as, for example, an outbreak of epidemic plant disease.

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