Abstract
IN a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on October 31, Lord De La Warr discussed the prospects of British agriculture and how far it could help to meet the country's present problems of a shortage of dollars and the threat of an actual scarcity of food. The first essential, he said, is to decide the true nature of the trouble, whether it is a ‘crisis’ of temporary duration only or whether we are not rather being confronted with a fundamental change in our national economy. If the difficulties are merely short-term, it would seem that British agriculture has little contribution to make, since production has declined over the last two years both as regards acreage of tillage and livestock figures, and time will be needed to reverse this trend. Though increase of livestock may be the best way of farming to save dollars, the opportunity, which offered itself twelve months ago, of buying adequate feeding stuffs to do this had not been taken, so that the prospect of building up an animal population rapidly is not hopeful. During the last two years the whole world food situation has gone from bad to worse, and though this may be no one's fault, it must be admitted that interest in agricultural matters has been sadly lacking in the British nation as a whole. The word ‘crisis’ is, in fact, quite misleading, and its use has prevented us from realizing that the start we gained in the industrial revolution has run out and that cheap food and raw materials, with the consequent high standard of living to which we had become accustomed, can no longer be taken for granted. The idea that when the present ‘crisis’ ends we shall again be able to import all the food we require at a low price must be abandoned before we can hope to rebuild our shattered economy.
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Future of Agriculture in Britain. Nature 160, 914–915 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/160914a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/160914a0