it produces about 70% of the total annual crop. Crucially, the (debated) shortfall in rice production in 1942 occurred during the all-important aman harvest. Rice yield per acre had been stagnant since the beginning of the twentieth century; coupled with a rising population, this created pressures that were a leading factor in the famine. Bengal had a population of about 60 million in an area of 77,442 square miles, according to a 1941 census. Declining mortality rates, induced in part by the pre-1943 success of the British Raj in famine reduction caused its population to increase by 43% between 1901 and 1941 – from 42.1 million to 60.3 million. Over the same period India's population as a whole increased by 37%. The economy was almost solely agrarian, but agricultural productivity was among the lowest in the world. Agricultural technology was undeveloped, access to credit was limited and expensive, and any potential for government aid was hampered by political and financial constraints. Land quality and fertility had been deteriorating in Bengal and other regions of India, but the loss was especially severe here. Agricultural expansion required deforestation and land reclamation. These activities damaged the natural drainage courses, silting up rivers and the channels that fed them, leaving them and their fertile deltas moribund. The combination of these factors caused stubbornly low agricultural productivity. Prior to about 1920, the food demands of Bengal's growing population could be met in part by cultivating unused scrub lands. No later than the first quarter of the twentieth century, Bengal began to experience an acute shortage of such land, leading to a chronic and growing shortage of rice. Its inability to keep pace with rapid population growth changed it from a net exporter of foodgrains to a net importer. Imports were a small portion of the total available food crops, however, and did little to alleviate problems of food supply. Bengali doctor and chemist Chunilal Bose, a professor in Calcutta's medical college, estimated in 1930 that both the ingredients and the small total amount of food in the Bengali diet made it among the least nutritious in India and the world, and greatly harmful to the physical health of the populace. Economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda writes, "Bengal's rice output in normal years was barely enough for bare-bones subsistence ... the province's margin over subsistence on the eve of the famine was slender." These conditions left