CHAIRMAN’S ADDRESS. 691 
She was spoken of, I remember, as having reduced her consumption of 
bread by 14 per cent., and only by this means continuing her exports in 
defiance of her true needs, and contributing to the rest of the world there- 
fore a merely provisional and precarious excess. I am not aware how the 
calculation here alluded to had been arrived at, nor have statisticians 
perhaps a very robust faith in the estimated numbers of the Russian popula- 
tion before the great census of 1897, but the subsequent history of her 
apparent wheat surplus is interesting. __ 
The exports of wheat from Russia, which we were warned could not con- 
tinue, and which had doubtless been unusually large between 1893 and 1898, 
shrank for three years after that date as if they would realise the prophecy 
which would relegate Russia from the ranks of exporters to the task of 
feeding her own population. But that mysterious empire has since then 
resumed her large supplies, and from 1902 to 1906 the exports ranged higher 
than before. Although forming only 24 per cent. of her estimated wheat 
crop, Russia’s exports averaged 141,000,000 bushels over the first five years 
of this century, against 104,000,000 bushels over the whole preceding 
fifteen years. Quite lately we seem to see some restriction, but the history 
of the trade forbids a confident opinion that she has reached the end of 
her contributions to other lands. 
So far as the areas under wheat are recorded, the Russian agriculturist 
keeps on extending his industry, and, low as the yields may frequently be, 
they are tending upward under, it may be presumed, some reform of the 
very primitive conditions of production. Within the fifty governments of 
European Russia alone, and omitting the Polish or Caucasian figures, 
which do not go so far back, the average area of 29,000,000 acres only in the 
"eighties became 40,000,000 at the close of the century, rising to a maximum 
of 49,000,000 acres in 1906, a point from which a decline was shown in 
1907 to 45,600,000 acres. This, however, even taking the latest and lower 
figure, is an advance of 10,000,000 acres in the last decade, or nearly 30 per 
cent.—surely considerably in advance of even the Russian growth of popula- 
tion, great as that is. 
It has, I think, not been sufficiently realised that in the two decades 
stretching from 1887 to 1906, European Russia has added 1,000,000 acres of 
wheat per annum. This is not only a 70 per cent. advance in twenty years, 
but it is double the absolute area of 10,000,000 acres which the United States 
added in this interval. From such official estimates as are furnished, the 
total produce of these fifty governments, where alone the figures are con- 
tinuous, increased in a still higher ratio. The average production, which 
did not exceed 180,000,000 bushels in the five years before 1879, or 226,000,000 
bushels in the quinquennium ending 1889, reached what appears to have 
been a maximum in 1904, and was averaged at 415,000,000 bushels for the 
whole five years’ period then ending. If the later years are again at a lower 
level, they represent very nearly double the produce before 1879. The yield 
per acre, which stood below eight bushels to the acre between 1883 and 1892, 
averaged nine bushels over the next ten years, and has been 10°9, 10°4, and 
11°4 bushels respectively in the three seasons ending 1904. In the south- 
western region, where the yield was just over eleven bushels in the decade 
ending 1892, it seems to have averaged fifteen in the ten years ending 1902, 
while over eighteen and nineteen bushels were reported in 1903-1904. 
These figures omit the Polish, Caucasian, and Asiatic districts, for 
which a much smaller retrospect is possible. The acreage in Poland is 
small—little over a million—and nearly constant in extent. But the wheat 
of Northern Caucasia, first accounted for in 1894, has risen from 5,600,000 
acres to 8,300,000 in 1906, and the Siberian totals, after increasing, appa- 
rently but slightly, from 3,400,000 acres in 1895 to 4,800,000 acres at the 
close of the century, do not seem much to exceed 5,000,000 acres now. 
Russian wheat production does not therefore seem a wholly arrested process. 
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