PRODUCTION IN RELATION TO CONSUMPTION 253 



If it is supposed, further, that a section of the human population 

 developed at this stage a taste for limited quantities of meat, they 

 might get such supplies as they wanted at a price covering merely 

 the costs of marketing, just as obtains at the present time in the 

 case of the supplies of drinking water in well- watered countries. 

 This would be the case so long as the total consumption of meat by 

 such people was less than the total quantities incidentally produced 

 from the herds of wild animals. 



Even if it is supposed that the total consumption of meat by 

 meat-eaters tended to exceed the supplies obtained as a by-product 

 from the animals found in these waste pasture-lands, the price of 

 the meat might not rise much above the total costs of marketing. 

 Owing to the conditions of farming in temperate latitudes, where 

 some rotation of crops is necessary, and where there is necessarily 

 some waste fodder and herbage unfit for human consumption, even 

 when the requirements of working horses have been provided for, 

 a limited number of meat-producing animals might be kept at a 

 purely nominal cost, merely to consume what would otherwise be 

 waste fodder. In other words, a limited number of meat-producing 

 animals are incidental to the production of food crops and 

 the meat obtained from them represents, as it were, a by-product 

 of such farming. So long as the total consumption of, and the total 

 demand for, meat did not exceed the supplies available incidentally 

 from the wild herds and from the animals living, so to speak, as 

 farm scavengers, taken together, the price of meat might not 

 appreciably exceed the costs of preparation and marketing. It 

 would scarcely exceed these at all, if meat-consumers were in- 

 different and the demand very elastic, so that the smallest rise in 

 the supply price caused a marked contraction in the consumption. 

 The latter would still be within the limits of supplies from incidental 

 production. 1 



If it is now supposed that the number of meat-consumers becomes 

 greater and their demand for meat keener and less elastic, so that 

 the supplies derived from any wild animals existing on the unused 

 pasture land, together with those kept incidentally in crop farming, 

 are no longer sufficient, then new conditions appear, representing 

 in a simple form those obtaining in countries populated by white 

 people at the present. Prices will rise above the costs of collection 

 and marketing, and will contain something in the way of costs of 

 production. The native pasture lands will acquire economic value, 

 and some human control will be exerted on the raising of animals 

 upon them, with the object of increasing the supplies of meat, the 

 enhanced price of which will repay a certain amount of labour and 

 trouble expended in this direction. Similarly also, more attention 

 will be given to the rearing of meat-producing animals upon crop 

 farms, and if the demand continues to grow, some part of the land 

 resources that would otherwise be devoted to crops may come to 

 be utilised for the feeding of such animals. 



1 See Chap, ii., Appendix, p. 225. 



