India: Fertilizer to Fight Hunger

Forever hungry, India needs fertilizer to inspire the food production necessary for its burgeoning population. The answer of course lies in chemical fertilizers. Since independence, the Indian government has built six chemical-fertilizer plants; to these is due much of the credit for the fact that per capita food production has actually gone up 15% in the last 15 years. This is not nearly enough, but under Pandit Nehru, India refused to allow foreign companies to "exploit" the country's potential market for fertilizer.

Nehru's successor, the late Lal Bahadur Shastri, moved toward changing that policy. India's food crisis, he decided, was just...