Rainfall conditions have had much to do with the overemphasis on the land problem and indeed with the failure of succeeding governments to solve that problem. As in all arid countries, water rights were originally more important to the natives than were land rights. In hundreds of the Indian communes which still persist, the communal rights of the Indians are distributed, not on the basis of land assigned, but of the water allowed; each Indian receives a proportion of the water brought by the communal irrigation ditches, and may take three or four times the amount of land which his water will irrigate--for crop rotation, forage, etc. This inevitable emphasis on water has perhaps had its part in directing the attention of the Indians in their demands for land distribution, toward the cultivated haciendas where water is available. But it also gives promise for a future which will make possible the rehabilitation of the country through great irrigation projects creating thousands of rich small tracts available for distribution to industrious natives--and foreign small farmers as well. In the government franchises given under Diaz to private irrigation projects, provision was made that about one-third of the land brought into cultivation should be turned over to the government for distribution to small native farmers. Aside from the indirect effect of these rainfall conditions, they have determined, with imperative insistence, the type of agriculture which is followed in Mexico, and so have affected her trade in foods and raw materials. They have made corn (maize) the staple food of the country, as wheat is the staple of the lands where there is winter snow and regular rainfall throughout the year. They have allowed the development of only the tropical products like coffee, sugar and rubber in the rich districts of Vera Cruz and Oaxaca which were partially opened by foreign stock companies under Diaz. They have, more than all, enthroned, as the only important agricultural export of Mexico, the sisal hemp of Yucatan. This desert product, which requires slow growth for the maturing of the long stout fibers which make rope and binder twine, is the greatest export of Mexico which is the product of Nature’s bounty and human enterprise. Coffee and some rubber and tobacco and a little sugar were raised for export in happier days, but only sisal hemp, the product of the desert _henequen_ plant, has become a wealth-producer in any great quantity. Mexico has long been an importer of foodstuffs, for, as I have noted, before the days of modern commerce, famine came with terrible regularity. Under Diaz, food was imported in increasing quantities, and since his fall, Mexico has been utterly dependent on the outside world for a large portion of the nutriment of her people.