The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  The frustrated Swaminathan showed his experimental plots at IARI in 1958 to a visiting Japanese wheat geneticist, Hitoshi Kihara. An Olympic skier and a pioneer in genetics, Kihara was the first to describe the structure of wheat’s genome, along the way establishing the modern definition of the term “genome.” He was an august figure who used retirement as an excuse to stop teaching, research nonstop, and add to his encyclopedic knowledge of plants. When Swaminathan described his difficulties, Kihara promptly informed him of the existence of some unusually short Japanese wheat varieties. Because Japan was still struggling to recover from the war, Kihara told Swaminathan that it would be easier for him to obtain samples of the dwarfs from a U.S. breeder, Orville Vogel.

  Swaminathan wrote to Vogel, who replied that he was happy to send samples, but that he was working with winter wheat, which wouldn’t grow well in hot India. Vogel also told him about a man in Mexico to whom he had sent samples. This man, working in the back end of nowhere, was engaged in a crazily massive effort to crossbreed the Japanese short wheat with local varieties to get the kind of spring wheat Swaminathan would want. The man was named Norman Borlaug. Swaminathan dispatched a letter to Mexico City.

  “Each Digging His Little Gopher Hole”

  It would not be accurate to say that the Cuban missile crisis was responsible for ending famine in India, but it would also be incorrect to say that the two events were unrelated to each other. On October 16, 1962, U.S. president John F. Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union had installed ballistic missiles in Cuba, setting off a confrontation that brought Washington and Moscow near nuclear war. Four days later, China invaded India. The two nations had quarreled for years over their Himalayan border. After Nehru placed Indian troops in the disputed territory, China unexpectedly attacked. Indian forces were heavily outnumbered.

  Nehru implored Kennedy for immediate military assistance: hundreds of fighters, bombers, and radar planes and the thousands of airmen and logistical personnel needed to operate them. At stake, he told the president, was “the survival of India”—no, “the survival of free and independent governments in the whole of this subcontinent.” His language was so nakedly desperate that the foreign ministry initially refused to send the letter to the White House.

  Incredibly, Kennedy didn’t respond. The president was “totally occupied with Cuba,” complained John Kenneth Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to India. “For a week, I have had a considerable war on my hands without a single telegram, letter, telephone call or other communication of guidance” from Washington. The requested planes and troops did not appear; the U.S. government, paralyzed by the missile crisis, did not even threaten to intervene. Nehru watched helplessly as China methodically tore apart India’s border outposts. Once Beijing established secure control of the frontier, it declared a ceasefire on its terms a month after fighting began. It withdrew from some of the seized territory, but a large chunk of it remains in Chinese hands.

  To Nehru, the debacle was shattering. Advisers saw his hunched posture and lurching gait and feared that he had suffered a stroke. Not only did the war represent a calamitous loss of face, it also ended Nehru’s long-held hope of allying with China to counteract the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union, the two Cold War superpowers. So politically toxic was the loss that the official report on the war was kept secret for decades; at Delhi’s request, Nehru’s imploring letters to Kennedy were not made public until 2010. Nehru lost political support from others and confidence in himself; his health never recovered. (He died eighteen months after the war.)

  Among the few beneficiaries of the defeat in India was M. S. Swaminathan. Swaminathan’s initial letter to Borlaug in 1958 had gone astray, presumably because the Mexican Agricultural Program was in the process of shutting down. Believing that with the development of short-straw wheat the project had achieved its goals, the Rockefeller Foundation was slowly passing responsibility for it to the Mexican government, which later would help create CIMMYT. Borlaug had been let go. He had found a job with the United Fruit Company, which wanted to develop disease-resistant bananas in Honduras. Before he could move his family south, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization asked him to join a research group surveying wheat and barley research in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The team left in February 1960.

  The results were dismaying. Everywhere Borlaug found senior scientists sunk in lassitude, using their education to create comfortable sinecures for themselves. At the same time he met energetic young people who wanted to help their countries, but who lacked what Borlaug regarded as proper training. One of the worst cases was India, where status-obsessed researchers were locking themselves in the laboratory to study minor crops—“each digging his little gopher hole of security in his own discipline.” Borlaug reserved special disdain for Indian wheat breeders, who were focusing on “beauty of grain…rather than total yield.” And he was appalled at the government’s refusal to prioritize agriculture. One of the researchers he met was Swaminathan—they spoke for about an hour. Neither man seems to have been particularly impressed with the other. One can imagine Swaminathan paying little attention to the blunt, poorly educated foreigner who was trying to tell Indians what to do; Borlaug, for his part, may have seen the other man as the sort of smooth careerist he had spent years battling in Mexico.

  When he returned to North America, Borlaug wrote a report detailing his findings and recommending that Rockefeller establish a training program in Mexico to inculcate what would later be called Green Revolution methods. The recent, resounding success of dwarf wheat ensured that his ideas were rapidly followed. Researchers from Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Turkey flew to Sonora. Arriving in early 1961, they received training in plant genetics, soil science, plant pathology, and other subjects from Mexican scientists who had been trained by Borlaug’s team. Borlaug was hired to supervise; he never went to Central America to work on bananas.

  India initially refused to participate in the training program—foreign “experts” had nothing to contribute. But food shortfalls were growing more common. As the country grew more dependent on U.S. aid, Indian planners reluctantly agreed in 1961 to test Green Revolution–style pesticides, fertilizer, irrigation, and technical advice in seven agricultural districts. Swaminathan had now seen a few examples of Borlaug’s dwarf varieties; at his insistence, they were included in the trials. When the initial results were successful, Swaminathan began the lengthy process of officially inviting Borlaug to India.

  The two men met again in March 1963. Recognizing that grain developed in Mexico might not be suited to Indian conditions, Borlaug wanted to visit the Indian wheat belt to see how people farmed there. Swaminathan took Borlaug and several of his Mexican students on a five-week harvest-time tour through northern India, visiting farms, talking to farmers, and looking at ag-research facilities. It was a version of the trip through Mexico taken by Rockefeller scientists before the Mexican Agricultural Program. This time the two men hit it off. Borlaug discovered that the man whom he had taken for a time-server “had one of the most brilliantly swift agricultural minds I had ever experienced.” Swaminathan learned that what he had taken for brusque condescension was a directness and simplicity that he thought almost “child-like.”

  As he had been in the Bajío, Borlaug was heart-struck by the lives of poor smallholders: men reaping grain with sickles, threshing it by hand, and storing it in gunny sacks that let in disease and insects; women cooking chapati over fires fueled by cow dung outside mud-walled huts. Children with the dull gaze and discolored hair of chronic malnutrition. No schools, no electricity, no fertilizer, no running water, no access to credit. Impoverished soils: farmers often harvested less than half a ton of grain per acre, barely enough to survive even in good years. (Sonora was at the same latitude as North India and had a similar climate, but its farmers were taking in three tons per acre.)

  Indian farmers could never overcome these obstacles on their ow
n, Borlaug thought. Yet local politicians and scientists seemed uninterested in farmers’ woes. As Borlaug later recalled, he was repeatedly told that poverty was the smallholders’ lot; they were “traditional” and didn’t want change. Knowing how much he had hated harvesting corn by hand, he found it impossible to believe that Indian smallholders wouldn’t welcome improvements in their lives.

  To Borlaug, the resistance seemed to be due, at least in part, to a bureaucratic fear of confronting high officials. The “first step” in the Green Revolution, he stated, was “the vigorous introduction” of “heavy rates of chemical fertilizers.” (Nitrogen! Get that rubisco going!) Yet India was dragging its feet. The nation had few fertilizer plants, which meant that most fertilizer had to be imported, which meant in turn that it had to be paid for with foreign exchange. According to the Indiana University historian Nick Cullather, Nehru’s development plan reserved four-fifths of India’s foreign-exchange reserves for heavy equipment for industry. The remainder was for importing “essential raw materials.” Fertilizer, an agricultural raw material, was given a lower priority than industrial raw materials like jute, the plant fiber in burlap or gunny cloth, because burlap and gunny cloth could be manufactured in India and sold abroad, recouping the foreign exchange used to buy jute. Meanwhile, fertilizer was a foreign-exchange loss—the food it produced was not exported, but used to feed Indians. As a result, so little fertilizer was imported that aid officials liked to say that India was not overpopulated—it was underfertilized.

  In the West, businesspeople would see the fertilizer shortfall as an opportunity, and build their own fertilizer plants. But this didn’t happen in India, partly because the nation had little investment capital, partly because fertilizer plants required large amounts of scarce electricity to operate, and partly because such plants were officially discouraged. In Nehru’s government, planners assigned every industrial facility a numerical ranking. “Fertilizer factories ranked in the double digits,” Cullather wrote, “well behind the high-priority steel mills and dam projects.” Nobody wanted to tell Nehru and his ministers that lifting up Indian farmers necessarily would involve taking money away from heavy industry.

  The inevitable confrontation occurred at the end of the trip, when Borlaug and Swaminathan came to IARI. Before a skeptical group of researchers and administrators, Borlaug talked about the need for scientists and the government to support farmers—above all, to help them get nitrogen into the fields. Then Swaminathan asked Borlaug the key question: Do you think your wheat could do for India what it has done in Mexico? The implication was: Are you certain enough of the value of this technology for us to fight the battle that would be required to import it? Borlaug hesitated. He had not tested his new varieties in India and still knew little about Indian conditions. I don’t know, he admitted, chagrined.

  Borlaug and Swaminathan in an Indian field in the mid-1960s Credit 86

  The next day he flew to Pakistan. Two recent graduates from his training program now worked in a research institute outside Faisalabad, the nation’s third-biggest city. Borlaug had previously sent them samples of his wheat varieties for testing. He hoped to quietly look at the results with his former students, which might give him some answers for Swaminathan’s question. Instead he discovered that Pakistan’s ministry of agriculture had arranged a special day to honor him. A crowd of dignitaries, civil servants, and newspaper reporters met Borlaug and the minister at the gates of the institute.

  From Borlaug’s point of view, it was an ambush. The head of the research institute, like some of his Indian counterparts, detested the thought of following orders from foreign experts. With the journalists in tow, he led Borlaug, the agriculture minister, and a group of researchers and officials on a tour of the facility. Rows of Pakistani native wheats and the Mexican varieties had been planted side by side. The Pakistani wheat grew straight and tall; the Mexican wheat was short and spindly. “The weeds were nearly as high as the wheat,” Borlaug later remembered. “The whole nursery was miserable.” The director said, in Borlaug’s recollection, “You see, the Mexican wheats don’t fit here. Look how good the tall Pakistan wheats are.” And he proceeded to tell Borlaug that his work would be useless in Pakistan—a dramatic presentation for the camera-wielding reporters and his superiors. Borlaug, “more and more irritated,” said that the seed beds had not been properly prepared, the plants had been inadequately fertilized, and the plots had not been weeded. “This is how we grow wheat in Pakistan,” the director said.

  The argument continued into the evening, with Borlaug insisting that the trial had not been fair. With this kind of wheat, he said, Mexico had tripled its output in a few years. The director pointed to the evidence in the fields: the new varieties didn’t work in Pakistan. Borlaug’s former students watched but said nothing. As he later recalled,

  We were to leave the next morning on the plane at 10:00. As we walked toward the guest house, these two ex-students of mine, they came up and said, “We have something we want to show you tomorrow before your flight.” I said, “OK, what time?” They said, “At daylight.” [Early the next morning, there was a] tap on the window. I went out. It was just getting daylight. We walked to the most remote corner of the experiment station. And there were four beautiful plots, about the width of this room and maybe twice as long, of the best four new dwarf Mexican varieties that were commercial in Mexico. They said, “There they are. You see how they fit!” And I said, “Why didn’t you plant the nursery like that?” They said, “They wouldn’t let us.”

  Fuming, Borlaug left for Mexico. On the plane he wrote a memo to higher-ups at Rockefeller—an angry, barely literate screed, he said later. But his thrust was clear: the Mexican seeds could grow in South Asia. They just needed to be given a chance. The naysaying was directly harming poor farmers—literally snatching bread from their mouths. He attributed the foot-dragging to academic politics, bureaucratic laziness, and class-ridden careerism. And doubtless he was correct in some instances. It never seems to have occurred to him that any of the resistance might be attributable to something worth considering.

  Rush Order

  In November 1963, Swaminathan received the next shipment of Borlaug’s wheat: 220 pounds each of four commercially released varieties and samples of another 600 breeding lines that were promising but not yet commercially available. IARI researchers divided the wheat among five-acre plots in four different experimental stations. The results were remarkable. Indian farmers typically reaped less than half a ton per acre. The four Mexican varieties yielded a per-acre average of about a ton and a half, and some plots came in at almost two tons.

  Researchers, excited, tipped off the press. In March 1964 the extraordinary yields were trumpeted in India’s largest newspapers, The Times of India, The Statesman, and The Sunday Standard. Capitalizing on the attention, Swaminathan asked the government to buy twenty tons each of the two best Mexican varieties—Sonora 63 and Sonora 64—to test in a thousand acres of demonstration plots around the country. In the usual course of events, the request would have been rejected by Nehru’s industry-favoring ministers as a waste of foreign exchange. But things had changed. Nehru died in May 1964, his credibility as damaged by the war as his health. His successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, quickly put the nation’s steel minister, Chidambaram Subramaniam, in charge of the ministry of food and agriculture. Both Shastri and Subramaniam were independence activists who had been imprisoned by the British; both men had argued against Nehru’s industry-first policies. And both men had seen the Mexican wheat at IARI. Now they had a chance to do something about it. They approved Swaminathan’s request.

  As the grain came in, Subramaniam proposed quintupling expenditures on agriculture, setting off a furious, months-long debate within the new government. While the government wrestled over policy, Swaminathan released the results of the newest tests of Borlaug’s grain. Again they were positive. Now Swaminathan asked for two hundred tons of Sonora 64, five times more than before. Finance officia
ls balked, but Swaminathan was able to circumvent them. His father-in-law, S. Bhoothalingam, was a high-ranking official in the ministry of finance. Bhoothalingam promised that the money wouldn’t be lost in the bureaucracy or whittled down as a compromise. A request was sent to Rockefeller on July 2, 1965.

  Swaminathan was lucky to get it through. The Shastri administration was ensnarled in a host of conflicts, inside and outside India. Nehru had been prime minister for seventeen years and had built the entire government in his image. Shastri and his ministers had different ideas, but trying to implement them set off a struggle with Nehru’s bureaucrats. On another front, Lyndon Johnson was pressuring India to let U.S. companies build fertilizer factories in India, threatening to withhold food aid if Shastri did not go along. Relations with Pakistan were worsening; the two countries were skirmishing across their border. A drought had begun to settle into the northeastern state of Bihar, raising the prospect of hunger and food shortages.