Abstract
PEACE is the paramount need of the world to-day. Of the many factors, complex, obscure and profound, which tend to endanger peace and produce war, one at least can be definitely diagnosed as the increasing pressure of population, in some parts of the world, on land resources. Any practical means that can be applied to reduce that pressure should, if coupled with the requisite social and political adjustments, become a powerful agent of world peace. Such is the message of this book, a message of profound and vital importance, of particular interest to scientific agriculturists and students of population problems, but also of wide general appeal. Many nations are at present quite unable to obtain from their own soil all their requirements in food and raw material, which they must import accordingly and pay for by exports. But with the vast shrinkage in international trade and the increasing difficulties of keen and world-wide competition, this method of obtaining the desired supplies may appear, to some of the nations so situated, as much more difficult and less satisfactory than that of actual, and if need be aggressively, warlike attempts to find additional territory outside their own boundaries. Dr. Willcox, however, now offers to the peoples in these straitened and parlous circumstances a simpler, easier and much more effective method: that of greatly increasing the yields of their own soil, by using to their fullest extent the wonderful powers of crop productiveness that modern plant-breeding and soil science the new agriculture or agrobiology has placed within their reach.
Nations can live at Home
By Dr. O. W. Willcox. Pp. 279. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1935.) 10s. net.
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C., W. Nations can live at Home. Nature 138, 58 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138058a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138058a0