34 



This, therefore, furnishes my first recommendation : 



1. The maintenance of the purity of Sakel. 



This I consider to be the point of greatest practical importance at 

 the present moment. It has been argued that the decreasing yield 

 of Sakel makes this practically impossible, for it is not possible to 

 dictate to the fellah that he must grow a certain form when it is a 

 foregone conclusion that he will lose by so doing. The argument 

 overlooks one point. Sakel, as I have stated, is used for other 

 purposes than this specialized trade, and it is so used merely because 

 it is produced in such quantity that the price is determined not by its 

 primary but by its secondary or substituted use. Were the production 

 to decrease, and only that quantity to be produced which would 

 satisfy the primary use, the price would rise until it reached a figure 

 which would make its substituted use impossible. The limits to the 

 price that would be reached from this cause cannot be estimated with 

 any exactitude, but it is probable that the increase would be sufficient 

 to counterbalance any deficiency in yield. There is another factor to 

 be considered here. It was pointed out to me in Lancashire that the 

 industrial changes of the past few years have so altered the economic 

 position in the cotton industry that the price of the raw material has 

 now become a matter of secondary importance, and that there is 

 thus a much greater readiness to pay high prices for the raw material 

 than formerly. I am inclined to think, therefore, if this be a true 

 statement, that the market for Sakel will remain even at any price that 

 may be necessary to counterbalance the diminished yield. 



The danger to Sakel lies in this. There is no harm, in fact it is 

 probably desirable, that that section of the Sakel crop which at present 

 goes to provide a substituted use should be replaced by a lower grade, 

 but higher yielding, cotton. Such a replacement cannot take place, 

 however, without danger to the entire Sake! crop. Unguided, that 

 replacement might easily end in the disappearance of Sakel as a distinct 

 class. At the present moment Pelion forms a rival which may, at 

 no distant date, replace Sakel as completely as Sakel itself a few years 

 ago replaced 'Afifi. The latter replacement was not fundamentally 

 unsound, for it was a replacement of an intrinsically inferior by an 

 intrinsically superior class of cotton. The replacement of Sakel by 

 Pelion is of the reverse order, and in this fact lies the importance of 

 taking special steps to preserve Sakel. 



The preservation of Sakel as one of the standard classes of Egyptian 

 cotton will no doubt form one of the items of work of the Botanical 

 Section in that, from it, a series of pure line cultures will be made. 

 But such work is slow, and it will take some years to work up an 

 appreciable bulk of seed. The method is likely to be slower than the 



