How to combat world famine:
Sen, Sudhir
How to combat world famine Whatever happened to the Green Revolution- and what we should do about it now SUDHIR SEN LAST JANUARY THE much-esteemed Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the...
...Despite the pervasive gloom and the intimidating dimensions of the world food problem, there is no reason for despair, at least not yet...
...And second, were it not for these new varieties the world food situation today would be incomparably worse, and "famine 1975" might well have become a reality...
...The program has been caught in a crossfire of suspicions and sometimes, literally, of bullets, between the right and the left...
...This is the real meaning of the green revolution...
...This is particularly true of two crucial areas: land reform and road building...
...There followed large-scale repossessions of land and evictions of tenants...
...All-weather village-to-market roads, with a few modern facilities of a market town provided in these central places, will make, an immediate economic impact...
...and in general made the rich richer and the poor poorer in rural areas...
...They live in famine and near-famine conditions, spread over the third world, especially in Central Africa and South Asia...
...This is what we should have done long before the arrival of the high-yielding varieties...
...But for them India would have found it impossible to feed her soaring population even on the present low level of nutrition...
...In every developing counry there is a vast potential for productive job opportunities...
...And so Raymond B. Fosdick, then president of the Foundation, approached U.S...
...This should produce a groundswell for consolidating holdings, erasing the crazy-quilt pattern inherited from the past, and radically changing the landscape...
...The yieldpacked miracle seeds - along with the land, water, and the profuse sunshine of the tropics - should be adequate collat eral for even the most conservative bankers of the world...
...Speaking to a symposium on the conquest of hunger held in 1967, Dr...
...Roads must of course be built in a rational sequence-to keep down costs, to minimize the time lag, and to maximize the pay-off...
...the expectations it aroused ran too high...
...After surveying the precarious world food situation, FAO Director-General Edouard Saouma recently sounded the alarm...
...It is fascinating to reflect on the larger ramifications of these trends...
...soil conservation...
...It follows that the frequent reports we hear about its demise are highly exaggerated...
...The experts needed some rude shocks before they realized this simple truth...
...credit supply...
...and to carry out other agri-related activities...
...Fosdick, but warned that "they should not do much in the way of health work" because he thought "it would be a crime to make another Puerto Rico out of Mexico with population crowding on the means of subsistence...
...However, once the two basic prerequisites mentioned above are satisfied, the rest will be greatly facilitated...
...that can miraculously open up shorter and quicker routes to a future of abundance...
...In fifteen countries, production in 1979 was even lower than in 1970...
...Indeed, if small is ever beautiful, it should above all be a small, family-owned tropical farm, intensively cultivated for mixed crops and aimed at maximum production, income, and jobs per acre...
...Ashby, was fond of saying, "If I could do only one thing in a region to spur agricultural development, I would build roads...
...The advice he gave was both forthright and apropos...
...Almost all of them are quite off the mark...
...The objective should of course be to extend these feeder roads in stages, linking the small market towns to larger townships, to cities, and to the big metropolitan areas, creating a rural-urban continuum which is the backbone of a modern economy...
...First, there was a widespread misperception even among experts...
...The critical dwarfing genes came from Japan and Taiwan...
...No wonder that "development has not developed...
...Is it surprising that in such a situation the rich should get richer, and the poor poorer...
...This brings me to the second point, namely, finance, the ever-present issue and, in the eyes of many, the biggest stumbling block...
...Can we afford not to do so even now...
...To make the most of the new seeds, big farms, too, will need to be dwarfed...
...to reforest wastelands...
...Unlike tenants and sharecroppers, they should have no difficulty in obtaining the credit they need to raise crops, to purchase equipment and other supplies, to improve their land...
...But how will they be funded...
...As owners, farmers will take constant care to protect the land and to conserve the soil in order to build up the asset value of their property...
...These are the questions that should be at the top of the agenda of any discussions relating to the development of the poor nations...
...This is an ex-post-facto whitewash of some grievous defaults of the previous years...
...But even more than the industrial revolution, which arrived after the liquidation of much of the feudal system and long after the emancipation of the serfs, the green revolution exploded overnight right in the heart of a feudal milieu - and was accompanied by a biomedi-cal revolution and a population explosion...
...When this happens, freedom from hunger will cease to be a dream or a mere yearning of the soul...
...some isolated pockets...
...By contrast, medical experts have all along regarded it as an axiom that an effective system of tropical medicine for controlling tropical diseases can be developed only on the basis of intensive research and investigations on the spot...
...The agency made this remark in its "Indicative World Plan for Agricultural Development" unveiled in 1970...
...No trained hands have fashioned it to match the Bulletin's handiwork and to adjust its movements...
...Even if the seeds somehow manage to reach them, who will cultivate them...
...Finally, though much progress has been made on the research front, a great deal more remains to be done...
...Even the United Nations family toed the passive line and soft-pedaled the land reform issue...
...and inevitably they have become the centers of development and the sources of a large infusion of Western culture...
...It will be well on its way to becoming a reality...
...When yields are changed from 500 to 5,000 kilos per hectare, "a cataclysmic reaction occurs across the whole spectrum of human activity...
...Its progress, too, has slowed down, and in many areas it has already hit a plateau...
...And this led, a few months later, to the establishment of a grain genetics program under Dr...
...A MODERN SCIENCE-INTENSIVE agriculture will of course need a good many other things to ensure rapid progress: seeds, fertilizers, plant protection...
...Has its promise faded - for good...
...American prices have rocketed beyond the reach of poor nations...
...Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace for his advice...
...more recently, quite a few of them have expanded into sprawling megalopolises...
...Its centerpiece is a new plant-type - a dwarf with stiff straw, erect leaves, a strong root system, able to absorb a lot of sunshine and large doses of fertilizers...
...And most of us felt confident that with this rapidly unfolding revolution we would be able to beat back the looming famine...
...the situation is particularly serious in Africa, where people have ten percent less food than they had ten years ago and where starvation is imminent...
...Pond fish culture offers, to quote FAO, "the most spectacular possibilities of rapid expansion" by increasing both the area under pond culture and yields from existing ponds...
...And productivity remains abysmally low...
...Their agriculture, it follows, must be liberated from this dual bondage if the'green revolution is to spread far and wide, instead of being confined to...
...The clock of global famine is still ticking remorselessly...
...Obviously, the right places to begin are the densely populated rural areas...
...Some scientists prefer to speak of a "seed-fertilizer revolution," rather than of a "green revolution," a term they find colorful but vague...
...For the third year in succession world grain stocks are expected to decline - by the end of the 1980-81 season they will probably total just fourteen percent of world consumption, which is well below the minimum deemed necessary for world food security...
...Thus the feudal chains have been reinforced by spatial chains...
...To further boost farm incomes, this intensive farming may be mixed with cattle-breeding, poultry-raising, pond fishery, and cultivation of a wide range of vegetables and fruits...
...We are really in a state of general alert," he declared...
...Our best hope today lies in capitalizing on the potential of the high-yielding varieties that have emerged, or are emerging, from the series of international centers established in the last twenty years for crop research in tropical agriculture...
...that they call for specific research in a given environment for their improvement, propagation, and protection...
...Though not commonly recognized as such, land reform became the first casualty of the Cold War...
...Inevitably it created enormous convulsions...
...it has shrunken in size, its function has changed, and its price has soared too high for most developing nations...
...consolidation of holdings...
...Yet it has apparently gained solid support from an army of newly-created owner-farmers...
...The green revolution, in its economic impact and wealth-creating potential, resembles the industrial revolution that started in Britain just over two hundred years ago and gradually swept over Western Europe...
...a vast pool of manpower which, though a burden, can be turned into an asset...
...It may be presumed that before long they will muster enough sense to make an about-turn, to get on to the good road, and to move confidently towards the long-cherished goal with all deliberate speed...
...These increases were possible mainly because of the high-yielding varieties...
...Model-building development economists must learn to program this elementary truth into their computers if they are to be worthy of their professional salt...
...that they can no longer commandeer them but can obtain them only through fair deals on a give-and-take basis...
...Or, one might say without much violence to facts, the rural areas have become the colonies of native rulers...
...to reclaim marshy or waterlogged areas...
...of saving the masses of people from mass killers only to deliver them to mass starvation...
...incentive price...
...So began an effort that, by the 1960s, culminated in the green revolution, though for some fortuitous reasons, the pride of place went to wheat rather than corn...
...The U.S...
...Then came the over night quadrupling of the oil price at the end of 1973...
...of boosting longevity without paying heed to the adequacy of life-sustaining nutrition...
...He also told Mr...
...genuine cooperatives will mushroom...
...Besides, caught in a zero-sum growth in world trade, they are bickering bitterly among themselves for limited markets...
...Each of these categories has large untapped potential to multiply food production and farm incomes...
...The petrodollar hordes piled up by the OPEC nations have flooded the "North" for several years almost to the point of saturation...
...ALL THESE TRENDS should more or less build upon themselves...
...Yet, formidable as the problem of finance looks, it is largely our own creation...
...We stand on the threshold of an all-encompassing revolution in tropical agriculture...
...Wheat prices, for example, have gone up thirty percent since the beginning of the current season...
...mixed farming to boost incomes...
...Though the hour is late, the problem can still be tackled effectively...
...That was the only way they could ever expect to work their way out of hunger and poverty and to raise their own living standards to a tolerable level...
...This is the kind of approach they must apply also in dealing with the four great problems of the third world: poverty, hunger, population, and illiteracy...
...The ports grew into towns, then into cities...
...The colonial masters, for obvious reasons, dropped ports at convenient spots which in due course dotted the coastlines of the three continents they came to dominate...
...Let me use an exaggerated analogy to highlight the point...
...Would it be possible to set up a series of fertilizer factories at suitable locations within the developing countries as a logical complement to the work of the international crop research centers...
...to conserve soil and water through gulley-plugging, contour-bunding, and other measures...
...farmer cooperatives...
...They will soon see the advantages of having all their bits and pieces of land in one compact block wherever physically feasible, rather than leave them scattered over a wide area as is now the case...
...What could be more irrational - and inhuman than to saddle them in addition with a huge burden of jobless adults...
...sound, agri-oriented government policies...
...It would be a "a fine thing" if the Foundation went to Mexico, he told Mr...
...and so a reaction was bound to follow...
...Above everything there, a job should be done on increasing the yield of corn...
...and the two together spell subsistence farming...
...What they overlooked was a simple fact, namely that agriculture deals with plants and animals which are living things and therefore not easily transferable across climatic barriers...
...The traditional plant has been restructured and turned ingeniously into a dwarf to multiply its grain-yielding capability...
...Their absolute number is still rising as population leaps ahead...
...Nor should we forget the eight hundred million people, or one-fifth of humanity, whom Robert McNamara calls the "absolute poor...
...With them even primitive fanning can be catapulted into the scientific age surprisingly fast...
...It was a grim reminder of the fateful times we live in...
...The first voice of reason to challenge this policy came from Theodore Schultz who was awarded the Nobel Prize two years ago...
...Improved varieties of crops and breeds of animals constitute the heart of agricultural development...
...And if to these I could add a third, I would build still more roads...
...In their own interest, fanners will readily join hands to procure their supplies and to sell their produce on more advantageous terms...
...THE GREEN REVOLUTION, as we all know, is in essence a gene revolution...
...Thus, we have done precisely what Henry Wallace had warned the aid-givers not to do...
...a warm climate with profuse sunshine ideal for multiple cropping and even year-round cropping where enough water is available...
...The results are clear: declining stocks, rising prices, greater dependence of the food-deficit countries on external sources...
...What good will it do if large segments of mankind are painstakingly rescued from deadly diseases and then delivered to protein-calorie malnutrition, if not to stark hunger...
...And they will also create strong underpinnings - the sinews of a modern agriculture...
...A great deal could, and should, have been done even in the days of old, or "traditional," agriculture...
...That pattern has remained largely intact even after decolonization...
...An eminent British agricultural economist, Professor A.W...
...All this is certainly true, and yet the underlying reasons are too often distorted or misunderstood...
...And developing nations are already staggering under an external debt burden of over $360 billion...
...It stems not from cold-blooded exploitation of people, but from a lopsided application of science...
...policy, he argued, was unsound for its own economy and, what is more, damaging to weak economies of the poor nations...
...All three will stand to gain tremendously from such joint ventures, and through such action they can help conquer hunger and famine once and for all...
...The nomenclature had a distinct Madison Avenue ring...
...And it grows well even when the days are short or the sky is cloudy, and so it matures quickly - in three to four months...
...And the transnational corporations have spread the biomedical revolution far and wide with a dazzling array of wonder drugs and medical technologies...
...What we really need is to expand production credit boldly to finance a whole array of high-yielding, quick-maturing projects, and to mobilize the vast manpower to work on them...
...Finally, there is a heartening signal - from, of all places, turbulent El Salvador...
...Our foremost concern at this stage must be to spread it systematically and as rapidly as we can...
...Today we know better...
...Moreover, health and food are complementary...
...Suppose it had remained confined to the Eastern seaboard states which just over two hundred years ago joined hands to establish the Federation...
...A spectacular breakthrough, which seems tantalizingly close, would be nitrogen fixation for non-leguminous plants...
...A crying need of the hour is to make an all-out effort to vastly step up fertilizer production-to feed the high-yielding varieties flowing out of the international crop research centers so that they may, in turn, feed the surging population of the third world...
...It has, without doubt, created turmoil in the countryside...
...They can no longer fool themselves with the thought that America can, or will, feed their teeming millions...
...The landlord, as a rule, flourishes by exploiting not land, but people...
...These fragile economies are groaning under the burden of a huge population of dependent children and teenagers...
...not from the folly of individual nations, but from the collective folly of mankind...
...These nations must develop their own agriculture and produce their own food to the maximum possible extent, he insisted...
...Suppose the United States had had no "Drang nach Westen," no drive to new frontiers under the banner of Manifest Destiny or "winning the West...
...Here are some of the facts he cited: The rate of agricultural production has not kept pace with population growth in many countries of the third world...
...America's food surplus is much less of a problem than it was in the fifties and sixties...
...up-to-date technologies, machinery, and managerial know-how supplied by the Western countries which will of course include Japan...
...SUCH, THEN, ARE the dismal prospects that face us today...
...In Washington, the budget axe is falling mercilessly even on essential social programs amidst cries of agony...
...The fault lies not with the green revolution per se, but with the failure to accommodate it properly and to cash in on its unique potential for the benefit of the masses of people...
...And what would have happened to its farmlands and its crop production which has become a pillar of its economy and of the world food system...
...WHEN THE food problem began to attract more attention in the early fifties, we immediately ran into formidable snags...
...This is hastening a chastening process among third-world nations...
...an effective administrative apparatus...
...This will boost housing and building-related industries, create millions of new jobs, and, by satisfying a prime necessity at relatively low cost, raise living standards...
...Together, they have dealt a heavy blow to the nascent green revolution just when it had started to gain momentum...
...El Salvador, however, is only a curtain-raiser...
...Ironically, we are coming full circle to realize once again, after three decades of groping in the wilderness, that land-to-the-tiller programs have a most vital role to play, that this is the only road that can lead to rapid economic growth along with social justice, and therefore also to peace and stability...
...The world food crisis, at bottom, is a man-made phenomenon...
...The ideal approach would be to establish these fertilizer plants on a tripartite basis - with crude oil and capital furnished by the OPEC members...
...besides the obvious botanical reference, "green" in this context also meant "not red," and the slogan's transparent purpose was to unlock a more liberal supply of aid dollars from a tightfisted Congress...
...and will concentrate their efforts, above all, on the half-dozen crucial items that have been outlined above...
...J. George Harrar, later president of the Foundation...
...At this point, my optimism is warranted by some excellent reasons: America's food surplus has ceased to be a problem...
...Together, they form an integral part of restructuring the environment mentioned earlier...
...WHAT, THEN, IS THE prognosis...
...The aid dollars - that is, dollars available for non-military aid - are dwindling fast...
...What, in short, has actually gone wrong...
...Such consolidation will in itself amount to a major revolution...
...The sea lanes were the umbilical cords that tied these ports to the metropolitan powers...
...The rich nations know more than ever before that to run their industrial machine they need secure supplies of raw materials, especially a number of key minerals, from the poor nations...
...Hence the emphasis now being laid on crop and animal research in the tropics to fill a critical void inherited from the past...
...Prices are already exorbitant, and are still trending upwards...
...led to waves of evictions of tenants and sharecroppers...
...The step was prompted by the fact that improved missile accuracy and mobility have unleashed a new arms race, threatening the acceptance of counterforce first-strike policies by both sides...
...Another clock with awesome implications has been ticking for quite some time - that of global famine...
...For it is a kind of "Open Sesame...
...But the green revolution had just burst on the horizon...
...And will the apocalyptic vision of the Paddock brothers and the triagists come true, after all, with a slight delay - this year, or in the Orwellian year of 1984, or a bit later...
...there is stony reluctance to spare enough tonnage of food to bring relief even to the famine-stricken millions of Northeast and Central Africa...
...They lack the incentive to work intensively since they cannot retain enough of what they earn with the sweat of their brow...
...How to combat world famine Whatever happened to the Green Revolution- and what we should do about it now SUDHIR SEN LAST JANUARY THE much-esteemed Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its "doomsday clock" from seven to four minutes before the midnight of extinction...
...What emerged next was a de facto alliance between the feudal interests of the developing countries and the so-called aid programs...
...Whatever the motive, it must be admitted in retrospect that the phrase was unfortunate and has been the source of much confusion...
...The initial publicity it received was overdone...
...the multiplier effects of fast-rising farm productivity will spill over in all directions, creating countless opportunities for new jobs, both on the farm and off" the farm...
...And so developing countries are now compelled - mercifully - to fend for themselves...
...Where will they get this huge tonnage from...
...The vast hinterlands have remained isolated...
...It is the direct outcome of topsy-turvy priorities...
...These "on-the-shelf" and "near-shelf" technologies are capable of raising the average acre-yield several-fold...
...To a large extent this is the kind of anomaly most developing countries are suffering from today...
...Fosdick: "The all-important thing is to expand the means of subsistence...
...WHO has set up a spectacular record of achievements, virtually stamping out malaria (even though it threatens to reemerge in some pockets) and other arch-killers...
...research, extension, education...
...Here is a revealing episode that occurred in New York just over forty years ago, in February 1941, although it is buried deep in the archives beyond the reach even of the most penetrating minds...
...In fact, all activities relating to the green revolution should fully qualify for credit finance...
...Our next task, as I emphasized in A Richer Harvest (Orbis, 1974), was to restructure the traditional environment so that the dwarf could readily yield up its bounties...
...Quite often goods cannot move even short distances of twenty or thirty miles within a country, even though they can travel thousands of miles across the seas...
...Consequently, where water supply is assured, we can grow three to four crops a year with these varieties...
...If to this I could add a second, I would build more roads...
...First, all developing countries sorely need comprehensive rural works programs - to build roads, market-towns, warehouses...
...They cannot much longer chase the will-o'-the-wisp of massive transfer of resources from the affluent countries...
...Thus, driven by circumstances, developing countries have begun to move in the right direction, still slowly and clumsily, often in reverse gear out of dead ends...
...How different would have been its history...
...This is the approach that needs to be energetically explored at the international level today...
...My third item relates to something that came like a bolt from the blue - the fertilizer crisis, which is an offspring of the energy problem...
...The Rockefeller Foundation was about to de: velop a program of assistance for Mexico...
...The point at issue is this: Since the Second World War the developing countries have received, in one form or another, a great deal of assistance in health and tropical medicine, while tropical agriculture has suffered from chronic and cruel neglect...
...For a correct diagnosis of today's problems, we have to ask ourselves a straight question: How did we manage to arrive at today's dreadful mess, with population constantly threatening to outrun food production and setting the stage for hunger and starvation on a mind-boggling scale...
...As the world stumbled anew into a food crisis in 1973 and continued to coast along the brink of fresh ones, many began to question the very existence of such a revolution...
...As a result, population has relentlessly crowded on the means of subsistence, threatening to deliver two billion people or more to perpetual hunger and starvation...
...The middle-of-the-road moderates, in a frantic eleventh-hour move to avert the worst, pushed through a radical land-.to-the-tiller program...
...In fact, what we are experiencing is something far more momentous: the age of science has suddenly burst on the static scene of tropical agriculture...
...During the same period production of wheat more than trebled - from 11 million to 34 million tons...
...And so the question arises: What happened to the green revolution on which we had built our hopes not so very long ago...
...They were the so-called "know-how, show-how enthusiasts" who believed hybrid corn could be transplanted overnight, saj, from Kansas State to the Ganges Valley, just as a steel mill or a textile plant could be hauled across the oceans and established in a developing country...
...Here are some of the other things we may confidently expect, once agriculture comes to be dominated by owner-farmers...
...there has even been an atrocious suggestion to use food "as a weapon...
...The list is long and, at first glance, daunting...
...What should have been the number-one item on any rational agenda for third-world development was quietly erased from it...
...This is overwhelmingly the case in most developing countries-even today...
...And how will they pay for it...
...the production of rice, too, rose from 35 million to 54 million tons...
...Besides, one must remember that some forty-five to fifty percent of the population in developing countries is below fifteen years of age...
...It is high time to treat the billions of wasting man-hours as equivalent to billions of dollars and to cash them in aggressively...
...Once farmers own their land, one of the very first things they will do is to build themselves homes, however modest, largely using local materials and their own family labor...
...Saouma, may reach ninety-four million tons of grain...
...and quite a few would still hark back to the past and flog a dead horse called colonialism...
...More to the point are Bob Dylan's words which, written in a different context, echo through all this pessimism: "It looks like it's a-dyin' an' its hardly been born...
...it has far outshone FAO in performance...
...For the first time we have seen the ugly face of triage in the Horn of Africa where too many people are too close to death and there is not enough food to go round...
...The Reagan regime, too, after its precipitate plunge, is having second and third thoughts, and it may yet veer round to the realistic conclusion that its best bet to avoid another Vietnam in El Salvador, and to bring peace and stability to this troubled land, is to lend full support to the land reform and make it an unalloyed success...
...They used their considerable talent not to find out how hungry nations could be saved from the jaws of famine, but to determine the precise order in which they should be sacrificed...
...and local labor and other facilities provided by the host countries...
...This means we continue to be vulnerable to the vagaries of climate...
...Land-to-the-tiller, roads with neighborhood market-towns - these are the two prime movers of agriculture, also the most powerful levers of progress, which developing countries most urgently need today...
...Here again, things have changed quite radically...
...First, in a biological sense, there has indeed been a revolution...
...Here are some of the time-tested consequences that will ensue...
...It mocked the cynicism of the doomsayers...
...India, for example, had for decades declared a land-to-the-tiller program as a foremost national goal, but after independence it was virtually bypassed in almost all areas...
...Even primitive farmers are not foolish enough to produce surpluses they know they will not be able to move to a market...
...But they are at last in sight of the highway...
...Around the same time we saw the emergence of a group of scientists preaching the gospel of triage...
...the surplus is being systematically used to maximize export earnings to narrow the balance of trade deficits...
...But clearly it can succeed only if it moves in lockstep with another program, namely, Food for All, also to be accomplished in the last stretch of the twentieth century...
...The other snag was the huge food surplus in the United States...
...If and when this comes true, it will liberate agriculture from one more bondage - its dependence on factory-produced nitrogeneous fertilizers...
...I know positively that a very great improvement could be made...
...Advanced technologies, and especially high-yielding plant varieties, are now available to bring about a rapid increase in per-acre productivity...
...However, thirteen years ago William and Paul Paddock did make an attempt, albeit a clumsy one, in their hair-raising Famine 1975: America's Decision, Who Will Survive...
...We have talked of "operation bootstrap," but have trapped them with false hopes...
...Wide crosses like those made between wheat and rye may open up new possibilities to produce more food of higher nutritive value at a low unit cost...
...Once the great majority of the tillers in the developing nations are turned into landowning farm families (India alone has sixty-five million or more such families), they will be fully employed on their farms...
...They will provide jobs for the dizzily rising idle workforce in rural areas...
...The seeds of the green revolution cannot flourish in rural communities languishing in such total isolation...
...Can they do so, how, and how rapidly...
...How different would have been post-war history if the land reform movement, after setting shining examples of success in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, had not been abruptly shelved in the late forties...
...When properly cultured, it gives, say, five to six times more yield...
...This, in essence, is the mirror image of underdevelop-ment...
...We have long preached the gospel of self-reliance in the developing countries only to make them ever more dependent, at least mentally, on external aid...
...So began a phase of humanitarian dumping of highly subsidized food in the developing countries...
...Indeed, many of the things will tend to fall into place more or less automatically as a result of the internal dynamics of a revitalized rural economy...
...THE RESTRUCTURING OF THE environment has yet another major dimension which, though axiomatic, is only too often overlooked by experts as well as laymen...
...It looked like an ideal solution, good for the pocket and good for the soul...
...Norman Borlaug argued: National production programs should be organized not for a "slow, steady increase of yields," but for a "revolution in production...
...For the right model one can best turn, once again, to the same twin sources...
...Genetically improved varieties of wheat, rice, corn, sorghum, pulses, potato, cassava, and other major crops grown in the tropics., including some vegetables, are already there...
...Economists, sociologists, scientists, politicians, and others are of course ready with their own answers...
...However, progress will be greatly accelerated if concerted action is taken on four other fronts, national and international...
...We are still paying a staggering penalty for this egregious default...
...The reality of famine is already there even though we fight shy of the word as a matter of semantics or as a comfort to our consciences...
...But what about the size of holdings...
...A way must be found out of the present predica ment...
...But it suffers from the fact that its focus is much too narrow, and therefore it misses the exciting vistas that the high-yielding varieties have opened up for the developing countries...
...In their sweeping negativism they overlook two incontestable facts...
...Those hopes have remained largely unfulfilled...
...What could be more reasonable for Americans, as they looked at their mounting stockpile of food at home and pervasive hunger abroad, than to urge a marriage of the two...
...Research on the food front must continue with the same relentless vigor as research on the health front...
...Yet, in fairness, we must admit that the critics of the green revolution have some valid points...
...India's national leader Mahatma Gandhi used to say, "A man is born not simply with a mouth, but also with two hands...
...The landlords saw unique opportunities - both in mechanized farming with the new seeds and in soaring land prices - to multiply their wealth rapidly...
...This confidence is warranted because of two principal reasons: The developing countries possess rich and still unused or underused physical resources - large expanses of arable lands...
...The country was decolonized, but it was not defeudalized...
...Soon afterward the Foundation sent three leading American scientists to Mexico to carry out a quick reconnaissance and feasibility study...
...They are now slowly turning "Southward" in one form or another...
...to construct small-to-medium irrigation projects...
...To cite just one example, food-grain production in India rose from 82 million (metric) tons in 1969-71 to 132 million tons in 1978-79...
...We predicate development on massive external finance running into billions of dollars, and then throw up our hands in despair because aid on such a scale is not forthcoming...
...Meanwhile, world grain production, according to FAO's estimate, may drop by six million tons in 1980-81...
...irrigation and water management...
...Since there has been a good deal of misconception - and much groaning and grumbling - about the green revolution, let me try to set it in perspective...
...The land-to-the-tiller plan was turned upside down...
...More specifically I argued: "The tall varieties of wheat and rice had to be dwarfed to produce the seeds of the green revolution...
...The struggle that has begun there to "win the hearts and minds of the people," to use a Vietnam-era phrase, with equitable land distribution among the actual tillers as the central issue in this relentless tug of war, is destined to spread to other countries...
...The results are not in, of course...
...The world food crisis is essentially a post-colonial and post-World War II phenomenon...
...and since then there has been a further trebling or quadrupling spread over the last few years...
...In such areas there are, almost always, primitive - or notional - market places where farmers bring their meager surpluses after laboriously - and waste-fully - negotiating dirt roads and no-roads...
...The result has been a rapid extension of life expectancies, leading to an explosive growth of population in the developing world at a time when its food production remained stagnant or lagged way behind...
...WHO has drawn up a bold and imaginative program called Health for All by the Year 2000...
...It is also a sine qua non for a rational system of irrigation, and therefore for intensive farming based on multiple cropping...
...Right now, famine is raging in all its fury in Northeast Africa, where tribal warfare and superpower rivalry superimposed on a drought-stricken primitive agriculture have created a ghastly tragedy...
...The principal source of food among the Mexican masses is corn...
...Adam Smith will then come alive stimulating exchange of goods and services on an increasing scale...
...Let us hope this will happen soon...
...Over the years I have come to consider myself, like Rene a "despairing optimist...
...Echoing the same sentiment, others have argued that there was not much a country like India could do by way of boosting production until the arrival of the high-yielding varieties...
...WHEN THE DWARF wheat, Norman Borlaug's handiwork, burst upon the scene and with its spectacular yields began to cut a wide swath across three continents, some ingenious mind promptly labelled it "green revolution...
...For in the last two decades her population grew from 439 million to 683 million, or by fifty-six per cent...
...abundant supplies of water despite arid tracts...
...There is a great deal that international aid-givers and national planners can learn from the World Health Organization and its systematic, goal-conscious, fact-oriented approach in dealing with a major problem like malaria or tuberculosis, bilharziasis or trypanosomaisis...
...All we have done so far is to buy some extra time - a decade or two...
...It is also indicative of the inertia that characterizes aid programs that in the intervening years so little has been done to activate this potential...
...They believed that a very rapid improvement in food production could be brought about in the poor nations, and that all they needed to do so were men, money, and machinery...
...The corn of Mexico is yielding only ten bushels to the acre...
...of the health-before-food, or health-without-food, approach...
...When donors and planners and national leaders get sufficiently serious about tackling the problem of world hunger, they will end their scatter-shot programing, their hit-or-miss methods without priorities...
...And unless the 1981 harvests are good, the world may experience another crisis similar to that of 1973, or worse...
...There isn't much time left to waste...
...The import requirements of developing countries this year, according to Dr...
...twenty-nine developing countries are now suffering from acute food shortage...
...As a result, they are waking up to the realization that the pie of world trade can be greatly enlarged by speeding economic growth and spreading prosperity in the South...
...transportation, warehousing...
...This will, at last, break the back of the massive problem of rural unemployment, put to productive work the billions of idle man-hours that now run to waste, and multiply the rate of GNP growth...
...Having mindlessly unleashed the demographic genie we are now frantically looking for some magic means to bring it under control...
...Absentee landlordism is still rampant, and the farmlands are crowded with tenants-at-will and sharecroppers-at-will...
...in fact, it was derailed right at the start...
...They will spur farm production and spawn a host of local industries and services...
...Bilateral programs, too, have made large contributions to that end...
...The biological engineers who had ushered in the dwarfs remained surprisingly reticent about it...
...Those who worry that they might be too small will do well to look at the productivity of farms in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea: also the productivity of the private plots in Soviet Russia and mainland China...
...The specter of famine has been far from banished...
...And they cannot obtain credit - to raise crops or to improve their land - since they have no asset they could mortgage as collateral...
...The miracle seeds had been - and are being evolved on the assumption that fertilizers will be available in abundance and at an affordable price...
...This has some merit inasmuch as it focuses attention on the two primary ingredients that constitute the heart of the green revolution...
Vol. 108 • September 1981 • No. 16
