bookpower Chapter 695
Chapter 695
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: 0.036s Scan: 0.019sLike the Mao Bears, the doubts in the hearts of reporters and military attachés from other countries completely disappeared after they set foot on the British mainland!
When they left Edinburgh and headed north, not only did they no longer have any doubts in their hearts, they even began to firmly believe that the German army would definitely win this war!
Reason?
About 200,000 British troops in the entire Scottish region were captured by the German army. At this time, they were building roads and bridges and reclaiming land in the Scottish region. When these reporters went all the way north from Edinburgh, they witnessed the whole process with their own eyes!
They had never seen so many prisoners in their lives, and these prisoners seemed to be scared. Although the number of German soldiers guarding them was small, they did not dare to escape, resist, or have any complaints. They all honestly followed the instructions of the German army and honestly reclaimed land on large tracts of wasteland.
“These are the farms we set up in Scotland. The land of the British people is actually very fertile and the area is not small, but they are unwilling to work. After occupying most of the colonies in the world, the food they need can be obtained from foreign colonies, which makes their food production decline year by year, the self-sufficiency rate is less than 40%, and the planting area of grain has also dropped by more than 50%.
As the country with the largest colonial area and the richest occupied area in the world, the British people are naturally unwilling to endure hardships. Farming is a low-income and labor-intensive business, and the spoiled British people are unwilling to do it.
If it were other countries, they might starve to death if they didn’t farm, but this would not happen to the British people, because they could get food from abroad. The British Empire transported food and other supplies back from its colonies, especially places like the Maple Leaf Country and India. Take India for example, the population here is as high as 250 million. It is no problem for them to take out some of the food to feed the 40 million people in the British mainland.
As for whether the people in India will starve to death after these foods are taken out, that is not something the British Empire should care about. It doesn’t matter if they starve to death anyway. The Indians have a high fertility rate and a low average age of the population. No matter how many people starve to death, they will soon make up the number. Therefore, the British Empire does not care about the life and death of the Indian people.
With overseas colonies, it is easy to suck blood, resulting in the continuous decline of agriculture in the British Empire after 180.
They are used to a comfortable life, and they have to live with their faces facing the loess and their backs facing the earth.
Naturally, they would not be happy with the days when the sun rises.
So the British Empire gave up a large amount of arable land and turned it into grassland.
It only retained a small part of the land in the southeastern part of the British Empire.
The area of this land is only about 20,000 square kilometers.
These places are all plains, which can be cultivated by mechanization, reducing the labor intensity, so some farms like Yingjiang are formed!
These farms are the few remaining agricultural production areas in the British Empire! The local food production is insufficient and needs to rely on imports from overseas colonies. This kind of thing is actually not a problem in peacetime, but it is fatal in wartime.
During the First World War, the British Empire’s food self-sufficiency rate was about 7%, but after Hans’ submarines launched an unlimited sabotage war against them, he The amount of materials they sent to their homeland by sea dropped drastically, resulting in a serious food crisis in their homeland.
This crisis should have stimulated them to pay more attention to their homeland’s agriculture and food security.
As a result, after the victory of World War I, the British thought they had solved the biggest crisis in Europe, so they not only did not reflect on and improve their homeland’s agricultural policies, but further abandoned their homeland’s agriculture.
After the outbreak of the economic crisis in 1926, in order to solve the local security problem, the British sent more than 7 million workers to Europe, causing the local agriculture to further decline, and the food self-sufficiency rate dropped to below 40%!
This is probably the country with the lowest local food self-sufficiency rate in Europe so far. Even the tiny country of Luxembourg has a higher food self-sufficiency rate than the British!
With such a low food self-sufficiency rate, they naturally couldn’t stand the tighter maritime blockade of Hans!
Therefore, in the first half of 1928, the food crisis in the British mainland had spread to all walks of life. The price of food had soared. The monthly salary of ordinary people could buy thousands of kilograms of rice, but at this time it had dropped to less than fifty kilograms of rice, and the price was still rising rapidly. As the war situation in the mainland continued to deteriorate!
The British government was forced to close all grain stores across the country, collect the grain from all merchants and farmers by force, and then implement a food rationing system to distribute it to every citizen at a fixed time and quantity!
This measure slightly alleviated the crisis of the British mainland, but in the long run, their serious food shortage problem was not really solved. The crisis was only temporarily delayed, not solved, so even if the German army stopped the offensive and stopped attacking the British army, the British army could be starved to death by themselves!
Reporters from various countries were full of interest when they heard the explanation of the German army guide. They stared with wide eyes and took the camera in their hands to take pictures of these British prisoners of war and their farms.
It is also very ironic that the British did not want to farm, but they lost the war and had to come back to farm after being captured.
They were very unwilling before and would rather starve to death than farm. Now under the threat of the German army’s black guns, they dared not even fart, and were honest like a docile sheep, which made reporters from various countries want to laugh. The
British are really weird!
Almost no one who witnessed this scene sympathized with them. Even the most comfortable and enjoyable Eagles felt that the British were to blame.
After all, the Eagles themselves also attach great importance to agriculture. During the economic crisis, a big problem they faced was not a shortage of food, but a surplus of agricultural products. A large number of vegetables, fruits, even pigs and milk, could only be discarded, buried and dumped because they could not be sold.
During the economic crisis, it was not uncommon for the Eagles to be in the newspapers because farmers dumped milk into the river.
As for the Russians who are working extremely hard and are cutting back on food and clothing to build a brand new country, they naturally have no sympathy for the lazy people of the British Empire.
Since the Tsarist Russia era, the Russians have always been the granary of Europe.
Their own industry is backward, and the only thing they can offer is their own cheap food.
So in order to maintain their lives, the Russians attach great importance to agriculture.
Every year, they try their best to plant food on all the land, and then sell the food after the harvest by cutting back on food and clothing.
After earning a little pitiful foreign exchange, they immediately purchase various machinery and equipment from industrial countries such as Hans to support their own industrial construction!