CHAIRMAN’S ADDRESS. 685 
these developments were of course reduced in their effect on the total by the 
slower growth of the South-Western nations and the nearly stationary con- 
dition of France. 
No larger areas, but rather smaller ones, of the chief food grains are 
apparent in Great Britain or Scandinavia or North-Western Europe. The 
German areas of wheat and rye show practically little change, and although, 
if the Hungarian areas are larger in the centre of Europe, the general 
movement is not upward in respect of food-producing area. Even in live- 
stock the numbers scarcely keep pace with population, for although the herds 
and the swine of Western and Central Europe have risen by nearly a fourth 
in the one case and three-fifths in the other, the sheep, except in Great 
Britain, are much fewer now. 
On the average of the first quinquennium of the present century the 
home production of wheat represented only about 20 per cent. of the 
consumption in the United Kingdom or in Holland, 23 per cent. (appa- 
rently) in Belgium, 64 per cent. in Germany, and perhaps 80 per cent. in 
Italy ; and the imported grain to fill the deficits was considerably over 
400,000,000 bushels. Nearly~half of this came, of course, from Eastern 
Europe, and particularly Russia. Such a mass of produce would require 
20,000,000 acres elsewhere, even if the exporters could raise it, as most 
have certainly not done, at twenty bushels per acre, and nearly double that 
area if the yield was only that of some of our largest exporters to-day. 
The actual reductions of area in Western Europe are not in the aggre- 
gate extensive, although Belgium has seen her grain area shrink from 
30 to 25 per cent. of her total surface, France from 28 to 25°5 per cent., 
and the United Kingdom from 12 to 10 per cent. The grain-growing 
capacity of European States varies greatly, and it would be interesting, 
were the data everywhere available, to see how far we have distinct evidence 
of an appreciable if not any great advance in the yields extracted from the 
non-expanding areas under the more recent conditions of scientific knowledge. 
Nowhere is so large a share of the total surface under grain as in Roumania, 
an Eastern European State and not inconsiderable wheat exporter, and there, 
at all events, the total grain acreage developed between 1886 and 1906 by 
nearly 25 per cent., and the surface under wheat by 72 per cent. The yield 
there, according to some official reports, was something over fifteen bushels 
per acre in the five years before 1890, and in those ending 1906 it was over 
nineteen bushels—the latest year nearly touching twenty-three bushels ; the 
barley yields of the same State rising from an average in the former quin- 
quennium of thirteen bushels to over nineteen bushels in the latter. 
In Hungary, another European grain exporter, the wheat acreage has 
been materially developed, rising from over 7,000,000 acres to 9,500,000 in 
twenty years to 1906, and but slightly receding since, while the yields are 
also materially greater. 
France, with a drop in wheat acreage of 1,000,000 out of 17,000,000 acres, 
has between 1884 and 1908 raised the average of her production on a five years’ 
mean from 17°8 bushels to 20°2 bushels, and thus turned out somewhat more 
produce from a lessened surface. 
Germany, on a constant but much smaller wheat area of 4,700,000 acres, 
with a quinquennial average yield of 20°3 bushels, would seem to have 
raised this to 27°9 in 1899-1903, touching a still higher level in more 
recent seasons, when 30 bushels were apparently approached, although some 
changes in her statistical methods of inquiry may slightly reduce this com- 
parison. 
Some effort to feed new mouths from old acres has thus indeed been made. 
Nevertheless, without disregarding altogether the qualifications which a 
careful statistician would deem it his duty to admit, one may broadly say 
Western Europe looks mainly for the growing needs of her consumers to the 
