COTTON PEICES AND AEEAS 49 



i (Fall due to the out- 



1915 . . 107 [ , , , , 



J break or war.) 



1916 . . 140 



1917 . . 251 



1918 . . 293 



Cotton has always been regarded as a hardy and 

 profitable crop, and, as might be expected, the culti- 

 vators have done their best to take advantage of the 

 steady rise in price indicated by the above table, and 

 have greatly increased the area of cotton cultivation 

 during the same period of eighteen years. They 

 would probably have done so far more if the pro- 

 portion of land under non-food crops in the Bombay 

 Presidency were not already unduly high, so much 

 so, indeed, that in a normal year the Presidency has 

 to import from other parts of India about 500,000 tons 

 of grain, and in a famine year something like 2,000,000 

 tons. At the beginning of the century the area under 

 cotton in the British districts of the Bombay Presi- 

 dency was only 3,000,000 acres. By 1907 it had 

 reached 4,000,000 acres, and under the stimulus of 

 very high prices it was in 1918 forced up to the 

 enormous figure of 4,750,000 acres. In that year 13 

 per cent, of the occupied area in the Presidency proper 

 was sown to cotton, while in the Districts of Broach 

 and East Khandesh the land sown to cotton amounted 

 to 48 and 46 per cent, respectively, of the total occupied 

 area, and was well over half the cultivated area. 

 Another very profitable export crop of which the 



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