190 



THE COCO-NUT 



CHAP. 



should be discounted. A study of the coir possibilities 

 in Indo-China led to the conclusion that the husks are 

 most valuable there as fuel. They serve this use well 

 throughout the tropics. 



COPRA 



Copra is the most important, in a plantation sense, 

 of the products of the coco-nut. It is not itself an 

 article of ultimate consumption, but has its place on the 

 world's markets because of the oil it contains. In most 

 coco-nut countries, or, at any rate, on most plantations, 

 it is not practicable to make and ship oil, but it is 

 everywhere economically possible to prepare and market 

 copra. Where conditions are all favourable, it is good 

 business to manufacture oil on the plantation. This 

 demands apparatus of some kind for the extraction of 

 the oil, and containers for shipment. But it has the 

 advantages that transportation on everything except 

 the oil is saved for the planter, and that the oil-cake is 

 available for local use. However useful the oil-cake 

 may be on the plantation, whether to feed, to stock, or 

 for direct use as a fertilizer, its money value is, as a 

 rule, so much greater in Europe than it is in coco-nut- 

 growing countries as to pay for the cost of its transporta- 

 tion. In fact, oil mills iu the Philippines have been 

 driven out of business because the copra buyers were 

 able, at least for a time, to bid for the local copra the 

 whole of its oil value, paying the cost of transportation 

 and the profit on the business from the oil-cake which 

 could be put on the French market. 



The importance of proper methods in harvesting 

 nuts to be used for the manufacture of copra or oil 

 has already been emphasized. Walker's table on the 

 copra and oil content of nuts of different degrees of 

 maturity shows the great importance of never using 

 any except perfectly ripe nuts for this purpose. If 

 immature nuts are used in copra making, the chief loss 

 is not so much because less copra or poor copra is obtained 



