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Article: A precocious appetite: industrial agriculture and the fertiliser revolution in Java's colonial cane fields, c. 1880-1914.
- Article from:
- Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
- Article date:
- February 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Cambridge University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A few years before the outbreak of the First World War, the newly established International Institute for Agriculture in Rome (the precursor of the present-day Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) began collecting data on the worldwide production and use of chemical fertilisers. Its findings still have the power to astonish. They reveal that the Indonesian island of Java, with an area of no more than 125,500 square kilometres, considerable tracts of which are volcanic slopes inhospitable to most forms of agriculture, was nonetheless the seventh largest international consumer of sulphate of ammonia. (1) The great bulk of this nitrogenous fertiliser was ...