Food and Labour, 291 
attention, I cannot recall any article in the local press which has dealt 
more than casually and indirectly with what is certainly a prime factor in 
every labour problem. 
Tam not out to suggest remedies. In a tentative essay such as this 
it would be unreasonably venturesome to do so. It will be sufficient if 
such considerations as I have been able to put before my readers direct 
more attention on the part of those directly concerned in production to 
this aspect of their problem. 
So long as the abandoned sugar and cotton estates were being fairly 
well worked by the black people who took them over, and before the 
drainage of these places had fallen into decay, provisions were plentiful 
and cheap enough. Upto the end of the apprenticeship period areas of 
provisions existed on many estates and even as late as 1874 there were 
fifty-nine plantain estates of considerable size in the colony. With the 
rehabilitation under the Local Government Board Ordinances of the 
drainage of various peasant-owned estates, rice has attracted more 
attention than provisions and, instead of having a favourable effect on 
general prices has, for various reasons, tended rather in the opposite 
direction. The measures which, taken probably without full appreciation 
of the results, gave the first fillip to rice-growing in the colony, would 
probably have a considerable effect in removing the anomalous position 
of supply which compels the local markets of this good land and large to 
depend on provisions imported from the islands. The man with capital 
invested in the colony and his local agents have a very direct and vital 
interest in these matters and a full ventilation of the question is desirable 
if healthy and natural progress industrially is so clusely bound up with 
it as history proves it to be. As a matter of fact cost of living in an 
agricultural land like this is not at its proper level even when about on a 
par with a manufacturing country like the United Kingdom. The exi- 
gencies of a country producing raw material for the world’s markets 
demand a low labour rate and to secure this it is the business of captains 
of industry to see that labour can live at those rates. 
