Since the end of the First World War, the international grain market had remained sluggish and fallen into a prolonged depression. Taking wheat alone as an example, in the nearly ten years since the war ended, wheat prices on the international market had fallen by more than 60 percent. In other words, the agricultural depression had begun far earlier than the current economic crisis.
During the 1920s, mechanization levels rose sharply across the world, pesticide and fertilizer output surged, and agricultural techniques advanced and improved. These were important reasons for the global surplus in food production.
Then there were the colonies and semi-colonial countries, as well as the land development undertaken by the great powers, which further intensified competition in the international agricultural market. As everyone knew, imperialism had set off a frenzy to carve up the world at the end of the 19th century. Two or three decades later, the regions annexed and invaded by various countries had undergone tremendous changes.
This process had indeed been a disaster for the local people of colonies and semi-colonies, but at the same time, it dismantled the originally backward natural economies of those regions and brought more efficient management models and advanced agricultural technologies.
Take East Africa as an example. Its more than ten million square kilometers of territory, if left in the hands of the natives, might still have maintained a primitive economic model of gathering and hunting. Yet after East Africa's transformation, it had become the region with the most cultivated land in the world, and its food output had multiplied by an unknown number of times.
Not only could it supply East Africa's own population of nearly 200 million, it could also export large quantities abroad. And this was only the East African mainland; East African overseas colonies were