XVI INTRODUCTION 



away. Without good means of transport, it is idle to expect 

 any serious agricultural industries to be carried on, for sale or 

 export of the produce. 



Capital, to some extent at least, must be forthcoming. 

 Even those undertakings which soonest give a return, such as 

 cotton, whose crop can be picked in six months, need a certain 

 amount of capital to tide over the period of waiting ; without 

 this only the very smallest enterprises can be carried on, and 

 even these will often be in an unhealthy condition, their crops 

 being mortgaged to money-lenders. 



Labour must also be available, if any but very small 

 enterprises are to go on. A man and his family cannot 

 obviously till more than a few acres at most, and for anything 

 more extensive and efficiency in agriculture largely goes with 

 the larger enterprises we must have hired labour. This 

 difficulty is one of the greatest that confront anyone proposing 

 to start agricultural enterprises in the tropics. In India, 

 Ceylon, the Malay States, Java, and some of the West Indian 

 islands, labour is comparatively plentiful, but elsewhere it is 

 usually difficult to obtain. 



In the first part of this book, we propose to discuss, in 

 brief, these necessary preliminaries to agriculture. In the 

 second we shall consider the principal cultivated crops of the 

 tropics in a general way, with a view partly to making sugges- 

 tions for their improvement. In the third part we shall go on 

 to consider village and capitalist agriculture respectively, with 

 the directions in which improvement seems most possible, and 

 in the concluding part of the work shall discuss agricultural 

 policy, and the organisation of a department of agriculture, 

 a thing which has now become a necessity in most tropical 

 countries. 



