Ecological Balance in Tropical Agriculture

WITH increasing global concern for the management of man's production and consumption systems has come a heightened need to reexamine concepts and objectives and to scrutinize established priorities. This need is no less important in the developed nations than in the developing ones. The latter, with more than 60 percent of their burgeoning millions directly engaged in agriculture, are struggling to industrialize and are faced with a mounting population-resource crisis. Sometimes out of desperation but often because of insufficient vision, development plans are drawn up and targets are outlined that are less than consistent with present or predictable geographical realities. How can a poor country, chronically short of staple foodstuffs, let most of its agricultural land lie idle or be seriously underutilized while pouring borrowed capital into the erection of a $10 million national monument (as Congo-Kinshasa is doing)? Why did preBiafra Nigeria spend an average of $20 to $25 million annually to import carbohydrate foods when it could easily have grown them locally?' Or how would one explain the fact that before the outbreak of the civil war maize could flow from east to west across Nigeria and yams (Dioscorea spp.) and gari (a cassava meal, Manihot sp.) could traverse the 700-mile stretch from south to north, while all too frequently thousands of tons of groundnuts destined for overseas would lie wasting at several shipment points in the north? And this in spite of the fact that groundnuts, a prime source of highgrade protein and of the vitamin-B complex, have always had a large local demand in the south where animal proteins are in short supply. Statistical data from Nigeria evoke comment on research decisions, developmental policy making, and agricultural land use which has broad applicability in the underprivileged realm. In 1963 yams, alone worth approximately $840 million, accounted for some 30 percent by both value and tonnage of all food crops raised for domestic consumption.2 This is double the total value of all agricultural and forestry products exported during that year. Nonetheless, though rather high-powered research institutions have been established for export crops such as palm oil, cocoa, and rubber,