PART II. CONSUMPTION 



INTRODUCTORY 



IT has been shown in the first paj t of this enquiry that, the pro- 

 duction of animal foodstuffs throughout the world has increased 

 only at a moderate rate in recent years, and that indications 

 have not been wanting to show that consumption was overtaking 

 production. Although with the exception of Siberia the rapid 

 opening up of new and productive areas of agricultural land came 

 to an end about the year 1900, the full enccts of this curtailment 

 were not felt, till nearly a decade later ; they are evident at the 

 present time and will continue to be so in the immediate future. 

 The position has been ameliorated in some measure by the fuller 

 utilisation of already occupied lands consequent upon the extension 

 of railways, and by a continuation of the processes of exhaustive 

 cropping and overstocking on large areas of fertile land that had 

 been under production prior to the year 1900, whose stores of fer- 

 fertility have not in the interval reached the point of threatened 

 exhaustion. 1 



Owing to the fact that the production of animal foodstuffs tends 

 to be residual, the shortage of agricultural resources relative to 

 population has been most marked in the matter of animal foodstuffs. 

 The increased demand in the industrial areas of the Northern Hemi- 

 sphere has tended to withdraw the whole surplus of animal food- 

 stuffs from the newly-developed regions, with the final result that 

 meat may become almost as limited for local consumption and 

 nearly as costly in Buenos Ayres or Christchurch as in London, 

 where a considerable advance in the price in 1913 failed to draw 

 forth a corresponding increase in supplies. 2 



Although the outlook for increased supplies in the more distant 

 future appears on the whole, as we have seen, to be quite hopeful, 

 the prospects for the immediate future do not disclose the existence 

 of any factors that are likely to add considerably to the world's 

 output of animal foodstuffs. From this point ol view a world-wide 

 food problem tends to appear, and the study of the conditions that 

 determine the rates of consumption of animal foodstuffs, and of the 

 economic relations between the consumption and the production 

 of these foodstuffs, requires special notice. 



1 In new countries it is necessary to distinguish between merely occupied 

 and fully productive land. Much land in those countries has passed to piivate 

 ownership and ranks as farm land, but either produces nothing, or only a 

 fraction of what it might produce, even in the existing conditions of general 

 development. 



a See Agric. Statistics, Part IV., 1913 (Cd. 7551), p. 290. 



