ABSTRACT
The general belief that ignorance is the chief cause of the use of extensive methods of cultivation made colonial as well as independent governments anxious to instruct primitive cultivators in the use of intensive methods of production. It is true that the colonial powers were interested in promoting the output of commercial crops more than in the progress of food production, but some of them nevertheless established a network of advisers to teach the cultivators to till their land more intensively and with less primitive methods. Such attempts at agricultural education were sometimes successful, in other cases their failure was conspicuous. In some cases cultivators under the system of long fallow refused to abandon fire and take to the plough; in other cases, cultivators living with the system of short fallow failed to use the water from new irrigation canals provided by the colonial governments and refused to change to more frequent cropping of irrigated land.
