RICE — CRIST 519 



and other countries of the Far East. This axiom has been under- 

 mined in many parts of the world — in Cuba, in France, in Venezuela, 

 and in the United States. The last two are countries of relatively 

 high labor costs. Probably the two most important factors in effect- 

 ing this revolution are the phenomenal rise in the price of rice, and the 

 dominant role of the machine in the production of that grain. The 

 internal combustion engine has been adapted in certain countries to 

 do most of the work formerly done by a poorly paid, often wretched, 

 labor force. In the United States workers enter the fields on the 

 ground only twice — to prepare them for planting the seed and later 

 to harvest the crop. The operations of planting, fertilizing, and 

 weeding by the application of chemical weedkillers all are done by 

 plane from the air. Yet the greater part of this mechanically pro- 

 duced rice is for export, much of it to the Orient ! 



To be sure, the problems confronting rice growers vary markedly 

 from country to countiy. In Valencia, Spain, the rice farmer has an 

 abundance of cheap labor, but little machinery, with its attendant 

 high costs. In the United States generally the rice grower has 

 extremely expensive labor but relatively cheap and efficient machinery 

 for the cultivation of vast tracts. In north Italy both labor and 

 machinery are relatively cheap. 



Activated in large part by the food shortages consequent upon the 

 German Occupation (1940-1944) , French rice culture in the Camargue 

 has evolved as the result of the coaction of a series of favorable fac- 

 tors, in spite of extremely high labor costs as well as of liigh prices 

 for machinery. 



Eice in the Camargue is perhaps not a "political crop" to the ex- 

 tent that the sugar beet was under Napoleon, but political factors 

 would seem to share honors with technological developments in the 

 responsibility for tracing out the historico-geographic trajectory fol- 

 lowed by the Isle de la Camargue. To continue the figure of speech : 

 rice in France was a spent missile, a dud, by 1942, but it ricocheted 

 after that and became airborne, as a result of the coaction of the 

 several factors enumerated above.^ 



SPAIN • 



In the flood plain of the lower Guadalquivir Eiver vast tracts of 

 land have been reclaimed by the installation of large-scale irrigation 

 works. Some 25,000 acres of once semiarid land have been made pro- 



8 Crist, Raymond B., Rice culture In the Camargue, Ann. Assoc. Amer. Geogr., vol. 50, 

 No. 3, p. 312. September 1960. 



' Under tlie auspices of the Social Science Research Council and the John Simon 

 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the author also carried out field Investigations of rice 

 culture In Cuba (Some notes on recent trends in rice production in Cuba, Econ. Qeogr., 

 vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 66-74, April 1956) and in Spain (Rice culture in Spain, Sci. Monthly, 

 vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 66-74, February 1957). 



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