36 TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN TROPICAL AGRICULTURE 



and then a desert, and bring ruin and famine not only to 

 Africa, but to India as well. 2 



To establish a college in West Africa is, for many 

 reasons, impossible; but, as already stated, since a good 

 many men who have been trained in the West Indies, and 

 especially in Trinidad, have done and are doing well in 

 West Africa, it seems possible that Government irrigation 

 and forestry officers and other experts that Africa will 

 need could be well grounded in the Agricultural College 

 and Institute of Tropical Research in the West Indies, 

 and so do better work in Equatorial Africa than would 

 be possible if they were trained in the East, where the 

 native labour, as well as the climate and other conditions, 

 are so different to the two Continental coast lines washed 

 by the Atlantic. 



You will notice that in this paper I have not gone into 



2 As regards this effect one portion of the globe may have 

 upon another even when the temperature and climate is 

 extremely different, I would call attention to what Sir Ernest 

 Shackleton told us at the dinner given in his honour by the 

 (London) Pilgrims Club, on April 24, when he pointed out that 

 the ice season in the Antarctic affected the rainfall in Chile, 

 Argentina, and, I would also suggest, along the entire 

 coast of the Pacific side of South America, if it can be said to 

 have any rainfall at all. " It has been found," he told those 

 present, " that a dense ice season in the Weddel Sea meant 

 heavy rains in Chile and the Argentine. It appeared that there 

 was an open season in the Weddel Sea this year, with the result 

 that the rains were not so heavy in the Argentine. If, therefore, 

 they could get observations over a series of years in the South 

 Polar regions, the farmers and stockbreeders of Argentina would 

 be more or less able to regulate the water supplies and various 

 other problems they had to contend with." Argentina and Chile, 

 as Sir Ernest pointed out, did not belong to this country, but 

 science (and, I would add, tropical agriculture) knows no country, 

 and I wonder, since the Antarctic affects the rainfall in this 

 manner in Argentina and Chile, whether it would not also affect 

 the Australian rainfall, and hence the sheep farmers out there as 

 well. I certainly attribute the more tempered heat and hence 

 the greater salubrity of one side of some of the West Indian 

 islands to their being open to the cooling winds coming up from 

 the Antarctic, and if these islands are so affected then Australia 

 as well as Argentina may be so. 



