In a scheme of agriculture that was to take no heed of the permanent thrift of the land and the man who tilled it we have failed; as we deserved to fail, most miserably. We have built upon this most uncertain apex as a base, an inverted pyramid by which ocean and land carriers, merchants, brokers, speculators, and every branch of parasite commerce were to wax lustily. We may devise as we will rural credits, schools of agriculture, prophets of agrarian science, bellowing from the tail-end of peripatetic railway coaches, grants of seed, warrants, elevators, labour-saving machinery, and every other panacea to nurse the sick field labourer. Until we give him fixity of tenure he will continue to be a sick man. There has been no other solution to agricultural problems of the past. There can be no other solution. Our present rural population, concentrated on less than the present area they are engaged in cultivating, with continuity of usufruct or compensation for improvements secured to them, would produce a larger cereal harvest than they now do, and add to the wealth of our animal produce, and still more to the accumulation of our national thrift.
In Uruguay progress is still possible to the existing population; since the consequences of the civil disturbances which until recently paralysed the production of this country, by the constant commandeering of men, horses and supplies by one or other of the combatant parties, have not yet been overcome by the existing settlers who, therefore, still have work ready to their hands. Nevertheless, for Uruguay also it is a case of the more the merrier; more available labour, more rapidly increased agricultural output. Once means are found for an appreciable and constant increase of the population of these countries, immediate results of such increase may be expected not only from their production of Cereals, Live Stock and the “Secondary” products already enumerated, but also from coffee, chicory, tea, arrowroot, sugar-beet, sweet sorghum, hops, cinnamon, vanilla and very many others, for the cultivation of all of which favourable conditions are to be found in one or other of the various climates found between the many degrees of latitude traversed by the length of Argentina and the various altitudes between the Argentine Andine frontier line and the sea.
At the same time much could be done for their own comfort and prosperity by farmers, in the ample time which their chief occupations necessarily leave them, by the cultivation of some of these secondary products for their and their neighbours’ use. At present their almost unaccountable neglect to do so justifies an obiter dictum of the great Argentine statistician, Dr. Francisco Latzina, in a Monograph by him attached to the last Argentine agricultural Census.
“It seems to me,” Dr. Latzina says, “that the Ministry of Agriculture ought to take a decided initiative in encouraging horticulture which, as we see, does not supply the National demand. To add to the climax, even eggs are imported in this year of grace. If this goes on, the day will come, perhaps, when bread and milk shall be imported in order to be able to export all the wheat, flour and butter produced in the country.” (By “horticulture” Dr. Latzina means, in this connection, the produce of the Kitchen garden.)
It is a fact that, as he says elsewhere in the same Monograph, garlic and onions, peas and beans figure among the imports of a country possessing millions of acres of fertile land! While the farmer frequently buys his potatoes at the Store. This neglect on his part of everything which does not savour of export is one of the factors of dear living in Argentina. Uruguay is on a somewhat different footing in this regard, her rural population having, as has already been indicated, still about as much as it can do in making good the ravages of past Revolutions.
Still Uruguay sends vegetables to Buenos Aires, and Uruguayan housewives complain of the high prices of Kitchen stuff which, consequently, now rule in the Montevidean markets.
A very large proportion indeed of the whole of the Republic of Uruguay may be considered as cultivable. In Argentina the question of how much of the whole area of that country may be so considered is yet without exact solution.
In this regard therefore it may be well again to quote Dr. Latzina, who says:—[38]
It is difficult to determine even approximately the cultivable area of Argentina, because hitherto, and yet for some time to come, the extent covered by mountains, deserts, salt marshes, sand-hills, swamps, moors and lagoons, and the Patagonian table-lands, which are almost entirely uncultivable—not so much so on account of the poor soil, but on account of the want of water and the boisterous and continuous winds which blow incessantly day and night in those parts. A calculation such as I wish to make can only be roughly made, and I may say that I doubt if the cultivatable area of Argentina be greater than half its total area—in round numbers, 150,000,000 hectares.
Dr. Latzina then suggests the reservation of two-thirds of that area for stock-breeding, leaving only 50,000,000 hectares for pure agriculture.