PART VII — WATER RESOURCES, FORESTRY, AND AGRICULTURE 



cole crops and other green and yellow 

 vegetables, from fruits and nuts, 

 cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, pigs; 

 chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese. 



Research is heavily concentrated on 

 crops of commercial importance. Re- 

 search on such crops and their com- 

 mercial production does not help the 

 subsistence farmer who must trade 

 his small surplus for the necessities 

 of life — salt, needles, cloth — that 

 he is unable to produce. We need 

 social science to guide us to the as- 

 similation of the subsistence farmer 

 into commercial agriculture or to 

 urban industry. Until recently, ap- 

 plied research in most developing 

 countries was poorly financed and 

 completely lacking in relevance to the 

 problems of local farmers. Even 

 where research was directed at pro- 

 ducing practical results, it was gen- 

 erally concentrated on cash crops for 

 export rather than on basic food 

 staples. 



It is not enough to produce high 

 yields of nutritious grain. In India, 

 prices for fine-grain rice from old, 



low-yielding native varieties are vir- 

 tually unrestricted while prices of the 

 coarser high-yielding varieties are 

 controlled. Total production is re- 

 duced by diversion of acres from 

 high-yielding to low-yielding varie- 

 ties. The affluent pay for what they 

 want; the poorer consumers become 

 dependent on rationed supplies of 

 low-quality grain. 



The Institutions — Industrialized 

 nations of the world have — in in- 

 stitutions widely varying in structure 

 — produced, taught, and applied the 

 scientific information that is the basis 

 of agricultural technology. In the 

 United States, federal-state coopera- 

 tion among the U.S. Department of 

 Agriculture (USDA) and state agri- 

 cultural experiment stations in each 

 of the states provides a useful means 

 of coordinating research, teaching, 

 and service. Agricultural research has 

 had the objective of producing results 

 useful in improving the productive 

 capacity of the land, the efficiency of 

 crop, livestock, and forest production, 

 the use of agricultural products, and 

 the welfare of rural people. 



This system, while close-knit, is 

 not closed. Inputs from all the sci- 

 ence of the world and important con- 

 tributions to it are commonplace. 

 Shall at Princeton, East at Harvard, 

 and Jones at the Connecticut Agri- 

 cultural Experiment Station at New 

 Haven all contributed to the scientific 

 basis on which hybrid corn was de- 

 veloped. But so, too, did a hundred 

 others in USDA and the state agri- 

 cultural experiment stations who 

 painstakingly identified and modified 

 the genetic stocks and the ways in 

 which they could be used effectively 

 in producing commercial seed for 

 every latitude in which corn is grown. 



Developing nations must have their 

 own institutions for agricultural 

 teaching, research, and service. They 

 emulate the model on which our Land 

 Grant College system was conceived. 

 They may find other organizations 

 better suited to their needs. In any 

 case, they must have institutions of 

 their own to produce, teach, and ap- 

 ply the science and resultant technol- 

 ogy basic to efficient agriculture in a 

 coordinated manner. 



The Hazard of Drought 



In most of the world, where men 

 till the soil or graze animals, drought 

 is a recurrent phenomenon. Given 

 the preponderance of agriculture as a 

 source of livelihood in the world, 

 drought emerges as the major natural 

 hazard of geophysical origin for man 

 in terms of areal extent and numbers 

 of population affected, if not in the 

 intensity of harmful effects. Because 

 it is a recurrent phenomenon, human 

 adaptation or adjustment becomes 

 possible. Indeed, most agricultural 

 systems involve some adaptation. 



This statement takes as its starting 

 point a human ecological context for 

 the discussion of drought adaptation, 

 illustrates the process of adjustment 

 with two examples from widely dif- 

 fering societies, and concludes with 



suggestions for the development of 

 certain lines of scientific endeavor 

 that promise to broaden the range of 

 drought adjustment available to agri- 

 culturists. 



What is Drought? 



In this ecological context, drought 

 is defined as a shortage of water 

 harmful to man's agricultural activi- 

 ties. It occurs as an interaction be- 

 tween an agricultural system and 

 natural events which reduce the water 

 available for plants and animals. The 

 burden of drought is twofold, com- 

 prising the actual losses of plant and 

 animal production and the efforts 

 expended to anticipate drought, and 



to prevent, reduce, or mitigate its 

 effects. 



Several important concepts follow 

 from this definition of drought. First, 

 for the purpose of this statement, only 

 agricultural drought is being exam- 

 ined; plant-water relationships that 

 affect, for example, watershed yield 

 are not considered. Second, drought 

 is a joint product of man and nature 

 and is not to be equated with natural 

 variation in moisture availability. 

 Natural variation is intrinsic to natu- 

 ral process and only has meaning for 

 man in the context of human inter- 

 action. Third, the measurement of 

 successful adaptation is in the long- 

 term reduction of the social burden 

 of drought, not simply in the increase 

 in agricultural yield. The scientific 



218 



