520 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1960 



ductive in a few years, a cultural landscape created by modern tech- 

 nology and macliinery. The whole industry is directed largely by 

 one person, and the area under cultivation is still being expanded. 

 Eice is grown with an eye to the international market ; mdeed, 30,000 

 tons were shipped to Japan in 1955. 



Rice culture in the plains of the Seville sector is based on a lavish 

 use of low-cost, seasonal laborers from the hill villages, who have no 

 rapport with management and no stake in the land or industry itself. 

 Only the harvesting of the crop is mechanized. Regions of latif undia 

 everywhere seem to suffer from chronic unemployment or under- 

 employment, whether as manorial holdings during the Middle 

 Ages, worked by serfs, or as neoplantations today, manned largely by 

 hordes of paid migratory laborers. Andalusia is thus seen to be a 

 region of cleavages, between the hill villages and the plains, between 

 the haves and the have-nots — the few landed and the many landless, 

 most of whom are utterly without hope. 



In the huerta of Valencia, on the other hand, rice culture, started 

 by the industrious Moors, has been an instrument in the reclamation 

 of dry land and of marsh land. The present cultural landscape has 

 evolved slowly and painfully, step by step, over the centuries, down 

 to the present. In a few sectors rice is grown in large plots on a one- 

 crop basis, but elsewhere it is grown on small plots in a system of 

 interculture, which gives a greater spread of labor than is enjoyed 

 in an area of one-crop farming. 



The crop itself is largely for domestic consumption, usually in the 

 form of the internationally famous dish known as paella Valenciana, 

 a dish of rice with seafood, meat, or chicken. Rice growing is an 

 integral part of the whole regional economy, a significant factor in 

 the evolution of a closely knit regional unit, socially, linguistically, 

 and economically. Centrifugal political tendencies there may be, but 

 regional cohesion is strong because the cultural landscape has over 

 the centuries been cut to the measure of man. 



RICE IN THE TROPICS 



In several widely separated sectors of Cuba, soils that only a few 

 years ago were considered poor to worthless are being used for the 

 production of rice. These producing areas, in which the natural 

 landscape has remained unchanged for millennia, are undergoing a 

 rapid transformation. The rapidly evolving cultural landscape in 

 these sectors is due almost entirely to the favorable economic climate 

 induced by the high price of rice. 



Although the consumption of wheat has decreased in the tradi- 

 tional wheat-bread-eating countries, owing to the increased use of 

 "protective foods," the consumption of rice in the world increases 



