TROPICAL AGRICULTURE. Modern industry receives from tropical regions two-thirds of the sugar entering interna tional trade. From the tropics come the world's bananas, pine apples, dates, vegetable oils ; the indispensable beverage materials, coffee, cacao, and tea; sisal and henequen, and related fibres, abaca, jute, kapok; quinine, camphor, and other medicinal mate rials; dyes, and tannins. Numerous other products extensivel: used in the tropics may yet become better known in norther] countries, such as the cassava (manioc, yuca, tapioca), plantains yams, taro, dasheens, and other root crops; palm sugar, the bev erages mate and kola; and the valuable fruits, avocado, mango papaya, durian, mangosteen, etc.
Table Showing Production of Some Important Tropical Crops World Production, 1928 Sugar* . . 25,326,935 long tons (I long ton=2,240 lb.) Coffee . . 36,095,00o bags of Go kilos (I kilo=2,2o4 lb.) Teat . . . 3,955,00o metric quintals ( I met. quin.=22o.4 lb.) Cacao . . 505,281 metric tons (I met. ton=2,2o4 lb.) Crude rubber . 653,833 long tons (I long ton=2,24o lb.) Rice . . . 854,486,000 metric quintals I met. quin,=22o.4 lb.) Sisal . . . 239,00o tons (1 ton=2,000 lb.) *Season of 1927-28. t1927 Many important crops which originated in the tropics are now extensively cultivated in temperate and sub-tropical zones. Among these are oranges and other citrus fruits, cotton, maize, melons, beans, sweet potatoes, and tobacco. There are still hundreds of little known species awaiting development.
Forest products are among the oldest known tropical exports. The tropics have long been the source of the world's precious cabinet woods, such as mahogany, Spanish cedar, rosewood, satin wood, and many others. They have provided many useful forest by-products, chief among which are rubber, balata, and gutta percha essential for cable insulation, chicle, and other gums. So wide has been the demand for tropical forest products that the world no longer depends wholly for its supply on the wild forests, but now produces rubber, mahogany, and other forest materials from plantations, often grown in association with food crops.
When compared with farming methods in North America and Europe, tropical agriculture is characterized by the employment of much hand labour, using crude, simple tools, and by a very limited use of labour-saving implements. The production per capita is small and the standards of living low. As a result, in most tropical countries native methods of tilling the soil are ex tremely primitive. The land is often in communal or tribal owner ship and agriculture becomes a shifting, nomadic procedure, in which patches of forest are cut and burned and a mixture of crops planted. At the end of a few years the land is abandoned and another patch cleared and cultivated.
Within the last century plantation or estate systems have been introduced by Europeans and Americans for the production of export crops of sugar, rubber, coffee, fruits, and fibres, under modern scientific methods, with native labour and white manage ment. Conspicuous in this field are the sugar plantations of Java,
Hawaii, Cuba, and Porto Rico; the rubber estates of Java and Sumatra, Malaya, and Ceylon; the banana industry of the Carib bean region, where one company alone cultivates 450,000 acres of land in six or eight countries, operates 1,600 m. of railroads and a large fleet of ships, has two sugar mills and a refinery, and main tains a chain of excellent hospitals and a research division with scientific laboratories and experimental fields.
Under the leadership of scientific methods, a revolution in trop ical agriculture is in progress. Great changes are being wrought. Enormous improvements have been achieved by breeding varieties of plants and live stock and by the culture of crops and the curing, processing, preservation and shipment of tropical products. Ex periment stations are maintained in almost every country. Notable instances of the latter are found in Java, Sumatra, and Hawaii.
Tropical industries attain success in the proportion that they em ploy and liberally support scientific research. Thus, the Dutch in Java have originated disease-resistant sugar canes with higher sugar content ; they have improved cinchona and transplanted quinine production from the Andean countries, and are now pro ducing a better palm oil than Africa. Rubber, in like manner, has been taken from the Amazon to the Orient.
It has been predicted that northern countries will eventually be unable to produce sufficient food for their increasing popula tion and that the tropics will supply this deficiency. The impor tance of the role the tropics are destined to play in this production of foodstuffs for the northern races is a complex and still unset tled problem. Among the factors are the vast areas of unde veloped land in tropical America, Africa, and portions of the middle East (Borneo, New Guinea, Sumatra) ; the tendency of the native people to multiply as health conditions improve ; the in creasing importation of northern foodstuffs into tropical coun tries ; and the disinclination of northern races to change their food habits and to consume tropical vegetables, fruits, and cereals.
On the other hand, the tropics can be depended upon to supply the world with all its prospective needs of rubber, sugar, vege table oils, beverages, hard fibres, spices, and similar tropical commodities. In fact, these can be grown on a relatively limited area, and their culture can not be greatly extended without glut ting markets and depressing prices below the cost of production.
Consult the articles on RUBBER, SUGAR, COFFEE, RICE, TEA, etc., and on INDIA, BRAZIL, EAST INDIES, WEST INDIES, CEYLON, etc.