THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS IN TROPICAL COUNTRIES Conditions that Control Tropical Agriculture.—In tropical countries the products of agriculture are overwhelmingly the main contribution to the world's business, although lumber, as we have seen, may soon be a large article of export. Other forest products still have some impor tance, but wild rubber, ivory, cabinet woods, medicinal barks, gums, etc., play a very small part compared with the sugar, coffee, tea, rubber, cacao, quinine, and fruit raised on plantations. Tropical agriculture, as we have seen, falls into three main types: (a) primitive hoe culture, which contributes almost nothing to the general business of the world; (b) rice culture, which resembles the one-crop agriculture of cooler regions but has far less effect on business, and (c) plantation culture, which is of great and growing importance. Before discussing the la4 two types, let us consider the general geographical factors which control agriculture and business within the tropics, and especially the relation of the white man to warm climates.
' (1) Rapid Growth of Vegetation.—One of the most notable features of tropical countries is the luxuriance of vegetation. For instance, in order to visit some of the wonderful Maya ruins a traveler wanted to traverse certain roads shown on the best maps of Yucatan. " But there arc no roads," said the guide. " They are on the map, but that was five or ten years ago when the chicle gatherers were bringing out gum. No one can find them now. They have all grown up to forest." In such regions ordinary bushes grow six feet a year, while types like the banana shoot up fifteen or twenty feet. In the clearings the weeds seem almost to spring full grown from the ground. Certain grasses make a dense mat that chokes out everything else and can be rooted out only at an almost prohibitive expense. Many tropical farmers have to clear new lands each year because of the grass and weeds. For example, in the Philippines about 48,000 square miles, or 40 per cent of the whole area, are covered with tough dogon grass 5 or 6 feet in height and with the tahalib grass of the moister parts which reaches a height of 9 or 10 feet. Such rapid growth has certain advantages as well as disadvan tages. Sugar canes 6 feet long are fit for cutting in a year after plant ing; huge bunches of bananas are ripe, not much more than a year after the buds sprout from the root; rice yields ten to a hundred bushels per acre compared with ten to thirty for wheat in the temperate zone; and two or three crops of millet can be grown each year.
(2) Low Food Value of Tropical rapid growth of tropical products tends to give them a low food value. Rice, which is far the best of the common tropical foods, is less nutritious than any of the other important cereals except rye and millet, but millet is also largley a tropical product rivaling rice in importance. Although rice supplies nearly as many calories of energy per pound as wheat, it con tains about 2.5 times as much starch as there ought to be in an ideal food in order to balance the proteid or muscle-building material, while in corn the proportion is only 2.1, in wheat 1.4, and in oats 1.1, or almost exactly right. The banana fills people's stomachs but does not supply strength. It would take about 10 pounds of bananas per day to yield the energy or heat needed by a man at hard labor, and 50 pounds to yield the necessary proteid. The vegetables are coarse, stringy, and watery. The sweet potato, for example, contains proportionally only I half as much protein as the common white potato, and the yam and cas- • sava are still more starchy. Likewise, although some cultivated forage plants such as Para, and Guinea grass and Sudan gram make good fodder, most of the plants eaten by animals though often large and succulent are relatively lacking in nutrition.
(3) Exhaustion of the have already seen that the abundant rain and high temperature of tropical regions allow the soil to be rapidly weathered and rapidly leached. This intensifies the effect of the climate in causing tropical food products to be poor not only in nitrogenous proteids, but in potash and phosphates. A minor result of the rapid leaching of the soil is that in the moister regions it probably intensifies the effect of weeds and grasses in preventing the primitive tropical people from raising more than one or two crops from a field with out allowing it to rest several years. Thus in Yucatan among the Maya Indians and in northern Burma and Siam among the Shans, it is com mon to cultivate a field one or two years, then make a new clear ing, burn the brush, and start a new field. Such practices prevent the accumulation of capital in the form of improvements on the land and '1 permanent houses.