R. O. Whyte

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This book is designed to present those principles and techniques for land appraisal which are applicable to all developing countries. Examples of specific situations in which these techniques have been or might be adopted are taken primarily from monsoonal and equatorial Asia. It is in this region that the land/food/population problem is most acute. It is also the writer's region of specialization; over the past ten years out of a total of some twenty-five years working in or closely concerned with Asia, an attempt has been made to examine the major problems ofland potential in relation to rural economy and nutrition in the whole region, and in particular to show to what extent its different parts resemble or differ from each other. The geographical scope comprises mainland southern, southeast and east Asia, from Pakistan to the People's Republic of China and Korea, with the insular monsoonal and equatorial lands of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, East Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan and Japan (part). International and bilateral agencies and specialists outside Asia repeatedly insist that Asia must learn to feed itself from the produce of its own land, or from imported foods paid for by the exports of primary and secondary commodities and of manufactured products to the developed world.

1.1 Objective and scope These chapters are not intended as a treatise on range management of tropical grazing lands, nor on the agronomy of sown pastures and cultivated fodder crops, aspects of applied science that are only one stage above scientific farming and use of land. An attempt is made to present the vegetation sciences, or botany and ecology in their widest aspects, as the essential background for their application in economic land use and plant and animal husbandry. The basic thesis is that science is global, but that its practical application is restricted to specific biological and socio­ economic habitats. The region covered is termed the intertropical zone. This comprises the equatorial latitudes, the tropics and subtropics. It is not only that part of the globe lying between latitudes 30° north and south of the Equator, as proposed by some writers (DAVIES, W., 1960; repeated by DAVIES & SKIDMORE, 1966). Rather is it those regions of the world in which, at the lower elevations, certain families and members of the Gramineae and Leguminosae grow wild or can be cultivated. It may be a matter for discussion whether these plants in their wild communities or sown or planted crop mixtures are better indicators of a biological environment than the instruments and criteria of the meteorologists.