4 CEREALS 



Madagascar. Small quantities of wheat have been 

 produced on the higher lands in the interior of 

 Madagascar, and flour of good quality has been produced 

 from it, but difficulties in transport and the lack of a 

 market for the by-products of milling prevent the profit- 

 able production of wheat, and the flour required is 

 imported from France. 



India. The man in the street probably regards India 

 as a tropical country, but only a moderate proportion cf 

 her wheat crop is grown actually in the tropics. The 

 wheat-growing districts of Bengal are situated in the 

 north of that province, and are, therefore, not in the 

 tropics. Excluding Bengal, Central India and Sind, 

 and the great wheat fields north of those provinces, I 

 find that about 6,000,000 of India's 30,000,000 acres, or. 

 say, 20 per cent, of the whole area under wheat, is within 

 the tropics. The total crop of India is about 45,000,000 

 quarters per annum, and of that quantity about 6,000,000 

 quarters are produced actually within the tropics. The 

 yield per acre for the whole of India is about 12 bushels, 

 and for tropical India about 6J bushels per acre. The 

 smaller crop in the latter may be largely due to the fact 

 that the great and beneficent work of irrigation is per- 

 formed principally north of Cancer, but to some extent 

 it is due to the fact that in tropical India the wheat has 

 specially little time to tiller. Burma has about 40,000 

 acres under wheat. The advent of British troops seems 

 to have been the immediate reason for the introduction 

 of the white man's cereal into that country. 



Australia. I shall be referring later on to investigations 

 which have recently been made into the possibilities of 

 tropical Australia (Northern Queensland, Northern Terri- 

 tory, and Northern West Australia) as producers of 

 wheat, but at this juncture I may dismiss them with the 

 remark that substantially no wheat is produced there. 

 The Commonwealth Year-book says there were 2 acres 

 under wheat in the Northern Territory in 1911-12. 



For the purposes of the foregoing summary I have 

 searched a good deal of literature, but beyond mention 

 of the facts that some wheat is grown in Nigeria and 

 German South- West Africa, I have seen nothing calling 



