Abstract
ONE of the features of the post-War administration of the tropical possessions of the British Empire is the increasing attention which is being paid to the application of science to agriculture; This is no longer the sole concern of the Colonial Office, as a number of new organisations, official and commercial, such as the Empire Marketing Board and the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation, are devoting every year large sums of money to research. The new movement gained considerably, both in impetus and in direction, when, the Imperial Agricultural Research Conference met for the first time in London in 1927 (NATUEE, Oct. 29, 1927). One of the main recommendations of this Conference, as regards research, was a proposal for the establishment, as funds and staff permit, of a chain of central tropical and sub-tropical research stations which should, in the main, “confine themselves to long-range and wide-range investigations, or, in other words, should concentrate on (1) problems requiring more prolonged research than can normally be expected from the technical staff of any single administrative department, and (2) problems arising in more than one territory of the Empire towards the solution of which the comparative method may be expected to make an effective contribution”. On the relations between the proposed central stations and the local agricultural departments, the Conference laid down some general directions. The work of the central stations was expected to be developed as a reinforcement of the undertakings of the local agricultural departments and in no sense as a substitute for such activities. It was felt that such a policy would not only prevent friction but also would make overlapping impossible.
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Central Research Stations in Tropical Agriculture. Nature 126, 905–907 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/126905a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/126905a0