CAIRO TO KISUMU states, a year of high cotton prices is likely to lead to over¬ cropping and reduced profits, and vice versa. Another trouble in Egypt, and one which it would seem impossible to get around, is the fact that cotton is practically the only farm crop. This puts the fellaheen more or less at the mercy of fluctuating prices and changing business con¬ ditions; so that, like our cottom farmers of the South, they have their lean years and their fat years.

Egypt also has had a lot of trouble with the pink boll weevil. This pestiferous cotton worm, which is to be found all along the valley of the Nile, has also done great damage on the plantations of the Sudan, a thousand miles south of Alexandria. It is said that in one year it de¬ stroyed more than ten million dollars’ worth of cotton and that hundreds of the smaller farmers were ruined. The government has been doing all it can to wipe out the plague, but is working under great disadvantages. The Egyptian Mohammedans are fatalists, looking upon such things as the boll weevil as a judgment of God and believing they can do nothing to avert the evil. Con¬ sequently, the government had to inaugurate a system of forced labour. It made the boys and men of the cotton region turn out by the thousands to kill the worms under the superintendence of officials. The results were excel¬ lent, and as those who were forced into the work were well paid the farmers are beginning to appreciate what has been done for them.

The government helps the cotton planters in other ways. Its agricultural department sends out selected seed for planting a few thousand acres to cotton, contracting with each man who takes it that the government will buy his seed at a price above that of the market. The seed com-20