THE HOPE OF CONQUERING HUNGER

UNDER the shadow of great wealth," the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore lamented, "starvation moves across the land." So it always has in India. Ten million died in the Bengali famine of 1770, four million in 1877. Shrunken bodies littered the streets of Calcutta in 1943. As recently as 1965 and 1966, when the monsoon rains failed, thousands would have died but for the emergency shipment of 10.5 million tons of U.S. wheat, one-fifth of the American crop. India has always seemed to be dismaying proof of the Malthusian thesis that the world's population must inevitably increase at a faster rate than its ability to sustain itself. As recently as two months ago, that specter was evoked by British Novelist C. P. Snow: "We may be moving—perhaps in ten years—into large-scale famine. Many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets."

Dramatic Breakthrough. Perhaps not. For the first time, India no longer seems forever doomed to live on the edge of hunger—an accomplishment that may be as important for the human race as any other achievement in this century. The reason: a dramatic breakthrough in agriculture known from one end of the vast subcontinent to the other as "the green revolution." Within four years, despite its approximately 540 million population, which is increasing at the rate of 13 million a year, India expects to achieve self-sufficiency in food production. That prospect is the result of a combination of ambitious' innovations: extensively used new high-yield strains of rice and wheat, chemical fertilizers and advanced irrigation techniques. The revolution's effects can already be seen across the northern plains stretching from the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh to the Himalayas, limned in rich green carpets of young wheat, glittering paddies, and the silver glint of polyethylene lining the sandy irrigation ditches (an idea borrowed from the parched valleys of California).

The Hardy Dwarf. The keys to India's new progress are the wheat and rice strains developed by the Philippine International Rice Research Institute and by the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico during the past two decades. Using dwarf grain genes imported from Japan, Rockefeller researchers developed a group of short, sturdy, thick-stalked "Mexican" grains so impervious to seasonal light changes that they can produce two or three crops a year.* Following the disastrous 1965-67 drought, Indian farmers, with intensive field aid from the Ford Foundation, planted some 20 million acres of the new Mexican wheat. The results turned out to be astonishing: the 1968 wheat crop topped India's previous record harvest by 35 percent, or 4.3 million tons.