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Show WHAT THE WORLD CAN PRODUCE. One authority has said the world is facing a bread famine; another has predicted tho near approach to the time when the stock ranges will fail to yield enough meat to meet tho absolute ab-solute needs of humanity. An interesting inter-esting analysis of the food supplies of the world, in which a contrary view is presented, is given by William J. Showalter. "Many men are inclined to sound a posslmlstio note," says Showalter, "as to the adequacy of the world's food supply for future generations, and, like Malthus a hundred years ago, are Inclined to predict that the day has at last come when tho human hu-man race must cease to expand Its numbers, or else face inevitable hunger. hun-ger. "And when we consider how many mouths there are in this world to feed, and how much food It takes to satisfy them, little room is there to wonder at this pessimism. "The earth's population today reaches a grand total of about 1,700,-000,000 1,700,-000,000 souls. If they were all set down at a banquet it would require sixteen tables reaching around the globe to seat them. For even' ounce of food they ate, the dinner-giver would have to provide 53,000 tons of pro-visions, and if the dinner were no more than a Democratic dollar-a-plate affair, it would cost, in the aggregate, as much as it costs to run the United States government a year and a half. "Expressed in terms of annual consumption, con-sumption, the world's market basket Is one that defies portrayal in weight and size. One is forced to cast around for new units of measurement to give a proper Idea of its proportions. propor-tions. Assuming that the average inhabitant in-habitant of the earth uses two pounds of provisions a day, the total for the year would amount to a billion and a quarter tons. It would require a string of cars, carrying thirty tons to the car, and reaching eight times around the earth, to haul thiB material. ma-terial. "The fact, however, is that the average av-erage inhabitant of the earth probably ' uses more than two poundB of provisions provi-sions a day. The steerage passengers ; on English ships are allowed 2Vi : pounds each day. Even the prisoner i in the average jail gets more than 2 pounds; the Russian conscript 4 i pounds; and the Austrian common '. soldier 2 1-2 pounds a day. i "Still another way to get an Idea of the size of the world's food prob- ' lem is to assume that the average ' individual consumes ten cents' worth of food daily. On this basis it would require the entire national wealth of the United States, the richest nation of all history, to pay the world's food bill for twenty-six months. For every ev-ery cent per day per capita that the cost of living increases, more than $6,000,000,000 Is added to the world's annual market-basket expense. "But when ono considers the possibilities pos-sibilities of future food production, It Is difficult to have much faith In the prophecies of pessimism 'of these twentieth-century successors of Malthus. Mal-thus. For instance, in the United States we have 035,000,000 acres of arable land, only 400,000,000 of which are under cultivation. Yet, with less than half of our available land utilized, util-ized, the United States produces one-sixth one-sixth of the world's wheat, Heven-ninths Heven-ninths of Its corn, one-fourth of Its oats, one-eighth of Its cattle, one-third of Its hogs, and one-twelfth of its sheep. "Even with the land now under cultivation, If we produced as much wheat per acre as England and Germany, Ger-many, we could supply the world with two-thirds of its flour. If we produced produc-ed as much corn to the acre as they do, we could double the world's supply sup-ply of that product. "Today tho United States has a total cereal crop of 5,000,000,000 bushels. bush-els. Were all of our arable land under un-der cultivation and producing only according ac-cording to our present standard, which Is less than half as high as that of western Europe, we could add enough cereals to take care of an additional ad-ditional population the size of that of Europe. " "When one has lived on land, as the writer has done, which, at the end at the Civil war, did not produce more than eight bushels of wheat and twenty bushels of corn to the acre, and has seen this land produce as high as forty-five bushels of wheat and a hundred bushels corn, It is difficult dif-ficult to take any other than an optimistic op-timistic view of the possibilities of American agriculture. "Not only are there Infinite possibilities possi-bilities yet untouched in our own country, but also In most of the other oth-er countries of the earth as well. For Instance, Russia, that laud for which nature' has done so much, endowing it with food-producing possibilities 6uch as few other countries possess, has a wheat yield of only ten bushels to the acre. "When the day comes, as come it certainly will, that Russian produces as much per acre as Germany and England, and when the untold millions mil-lions of acres of undeveloped land are opened up and settled, as they are destined to be, alone she can supply the world's present needs in cereals except rice and corn. "Nor is that all. Any ono who has traveled through the tropics, studying the production of foodstuffs there at first hand, cannot fall to understand chat vast potential food sources still lie untouched. The wonderful discoveries discov-eries of Ross and Reed and their coadjutors, co-adjutors, of the methods of preventing prevent-ing malaria and yellow fever, followed follow-ed by the mastery of the secrets of the bubonic plague and beriberi, and the application of these lessons in Cuba, Cu-ba, at Panama, and elsewhere in the tropical world, have made it possible for civilized man to open up gardens of plenty of which he never before dreamed. "Untold millions of acres of densest jungles are, so far as man is concerned, con-cerned, nothing more than lands of Infinite richness wasting their sweet ness upon the desert air of unutilized opportunities. "Not long ago I visited the ruins I of Quitigua In Guatemala. Tho Unit- j od Fruit company had set npart sever- I al hundred acres as a reservation for I the protection of the ruins. Tho jun- I gle forest of the reservation, border- 1 lng the banana clearingB, towered like a green wall a hundred feet I high, and the undergrowth was so dense that no man could penetrate it J save by cutting his way through with J a machete. There I saw the contrast J between the past and tho future of I the tropical world. The banana plan- tations, stretching for miles and miles J up and down the Motaga Rivor val-loy, val-loy, were producing millions of bunch- 1 es of bananaB, where but a few years I before had existed the same sort of jungle as that at Quirigua." oo |