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 too terrible to let socialist doctrine stand in the way of solution. At his recommendation, an agricultural program was adopted last December that, among other things, allows foreign firms to build and operate their own fertilizer plants--and set their own prices. After Shastri died, the new Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, was ultimately convinced of the program's necessity. Despite some indigenous political sniping, she has strongly sponsored it since. Recognizing the world's biggest potential fertilizer market when they see it, American firms are hurrying to get in on the ground floor. Items:

> American International Oil Co., a subsidiary of Amoco, has signed an agreement to build and manage jointly with the Indian government a $65 million plant in Madras with a capacity of 200,000 tons of nitrogenous fertilizer annually.

> International Minerals & Chemical Corp. is building a $68 million, 418,000-ton-a-year plant in the southeastern state of Andhra.

> Armour & Co. has signed a preliminary agreement with the Birla Gwalior industrial group to build a $50 million, 220,000-ton fertilizer firm in Goa.

> Allied Chemical Corp., which has been toying with the idea for four years, is now seriously negotiating with a private Indian firm, Andhra Sugars, to finance a $35 million plant in Andhra.

> Phillips Petroleum Co. is surveying the possibility of a plant near Calcutta.

If, as the Indians hope, all this comes to pass, Indian nitrogenous-fertilizer production will rise from 243,884 tons in 1965 to 2,500,000 tons in five years. With that, grain production should go up from 76 million tons to 120 million tons. And that, says Mrs. Gandhi, would give India "a reasonable margin of safety."

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