* * * * Nutrition and Agriculture The final Report
of Lord Astor's League of Nations Committee on Nutrition, published this week (Allen and Unwin, 7s. 6d.), should serve for many years as an invaluable text-book to all Governments that aim at giving nutrition its proper influence on the shaping of agriculture and economic policy. At the least the Committee's researches will remove some of those illusions to which our own Government so obstinately clings, as, for instance, that the proper way to increase the consumption of milk is to keep its price high, and if possible increase it. The Com- mittee not merely emphasise the fact that consumption depends on price but that, especially with the protective foods, it is very sensitive to small price changes. Perhaps the most instructive and important section of the report is that which discusses the adaptation of agriculture in the light of new knowledge of nutritional problems ; that knowledge emphasises above all the value of the protective foods, and the necessity, if demand is effective, of increased production of fruit, agriculture and dairy produce. For our own agriculture such adaptation would be obviously wise and desirable ; and it does not involve reduced pro- duction of cereals, for which, as fodder, the demand may be actually increased. This conclusion is illustrated very clearly in the case of Denmark, which, adapting its agriculture to animal husbandry and dairy production for export, found that the national production of cereals was actually doubled.
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