Our Provision Supply. 



By W. T. Binnie. 



^=^JHE supply of food, affe6ling as it does every 

 branch of industry in all colonies and coun- 

 tries, forms an imposing subjeft, and perhaps 

 this paper would have been more effe6tive every way if 

 it had proceeded from the pen of a modern agriculturist. 

 As however the markets in Georgetown, where are sold 

 the overplus provisions and fruit produced in the Colony 

 after the estates employes and farmers' wants are supplied, 

 may be considered a constant gauge, by quantity and 

 price, of the extent of provision cultivation in the Colony, 

 the Clerk of the Markets has the honour of preparing 

 and reading before this Society, a paper on " Our 

 provision supply." There is no necessity to rehearse 

 first principles as bearing on a cheap and plentiful 

 supply of food and a profitable employment of capital in 

 the produdlion of staple exports, yet I must emphasize 

 the term overplus provisions, supplied to our city mar- 

 kets, because with the exception of the bank of the 

 river Pomeroon, the rivers of the North West District, 

 the Camoonie Creek, and the Demerara River, farming is 

 simply a mode of procuring subsistence and not a trade, 

 and until provision cultivators as a whole make a trade 

 or business of farming, native-grown food-supplies must 

 not only flu6luate between extremes, but in general 

 be both scarce and high priced. Provision cultivation 

 on the empoldercd land may be described as four years' 



* Read at the Oftober Meeting of the Society. 



LL 



