The Place of Tropical Soils in 

 Feeding the World ' 



By Robert L. Pendleton 



Professor of Tropical Soils and Agriculture 



The Isaiah Bowman Department of Geography 



The Johns Hopkins University 



What are the possibilities and limitations of humid, tropical, low- 

 land soils? What can these soils contribute to the feeding of the 

 world? "V\niy can they not contribute so much as many persons think 

 they can ? 



Now that the airways offer more facilities and ease for travel, hun- 

 dreds of passengers are flymg over the enormous and magnificent 

 equatorial forests of the Congo and Amazon Basins. Literally from 

 an armchair, high above these forests, the layman who has enough in- 

 terest to look out of the plane window, down upon the lush vegetation, 

 easily gets the idea that the potentialities of the Tropics are unlimited.^ 



Before it was possible to travel so easily above these vast and mag- 

 nificent forests, the relatively few travelers who saw the humid, tropi- 

 cal river valleys such as the Amazon did so from the vantage point of 

 the small river steamer or dugout canoe. Usually gallery or fringing 

 forests stand along the river banks ; and not so far back from the river 

 are open, worse than useless grasslands. Before the age of air travel, 

 the occasional traveler on the rivers undoubtedly obtained an exag- 

 gerated idea of the extent of the tropical forests. But such travelers 

 did have, from time to time, opportunities to go ashore, and perhaps 

 to get something of a worm's-eye view of the forest. A United States 

 agricultural attache in Venezuela, planning a trip up the Orinoco 

 River, was being dissuaded by a river boatman with the remark, "Why 



* Substance of a lecture delivered before "Friends of the Land" in Chicago, 

 July 1, 1953. Reprinted by permission from Ceiba, vol. 4, No. 4, November 1954. 



"For a more extended discussion of man's relations to humid tropical regions, 

 see Pierre Gourou, The Tropical World, 153 pp., 1958, London. For the best 

 and most recent discussion of the nature, origin, and classification of tropical 

 soils, see E. C. Jul. Mohr and F. A. van Baren, Tropical Soils, 498 pp., 1954, 

 New York. 



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