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.

The evidence of the revolution is everywhere. A once brown and arid district of Haryana state is now dotted with oases of green where farmers have bought a diesel or electric pump and are no longer at the mercy of uncertain monsoon rains. Beside many a newly built brick pump shed sits the remains of the charsia. It is an ancient device, similar to a Persian waterwheel, by which teams of yoked bullocks are used to raise and lower the well's leather bucket. Indian farmers are gradually discovering that the charsia is a luxury they cannot afford. It costs a farmer $19.40 to run a charsia and takes him four days to irrigate a single acre with one. A diesel pump can irrigate two acres a day for $3.64, and an electric pump can do the same job in twelve hours for $2.37. The boom in pumps has produced a shortage in power; in some districts in the countryside, farmers must irrigate at night because there is not enough electricity to go around in the daytime. "I never get any sleep any more," one farmer grumbled. "At night I am busy irrigating." All across India, farmers who until three or four years ago had scarcely seen an electric light are chattering about horsepower and voltage ratings. "So far India has known only the problems of an underdeveloped economy," a Western diplomat remarked in New Delhi last week. "Very soon she may be experiencing the problems of affluence."

Black Market. Fatter granaries have indeed brought farmers a new affluence, and have led many village shopkeepers to stock toothbrushes, cigarettes and even bicycles and sewing machines for the first time. A black market in certain seeds is thriving. A land boom is under way, and in some areas land prices have risen 600 percent within five years. In many villages, the once-powerful moneylender, beset by competition from both cooperatives and government agencies, is turning to land speculation himself. Significantly, the green revolution seems to be reversing the migration of peasants to cities and towns. Already a few clerks and a great many unskilled workers have quit their jobs and returned to the land. If he does well, a farmer can earn over $1,300 a year, twice a clerk's wage.

Despite the obvious progress, government officials are guarded in their enthusiasm, lest it slow the momentum of the new agricultural programs as well as the government's massive educational and medical efforts to reduce the birth rate. "I would like to caution against too much talk of an agricultural revolution," the President of India, Dr. Zakir Husain, told his countrymen last weekend. "We are not yet free from the vagaries of monsoons. There are too many imponderables."

Increased Harvests. Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that such a revolution is changing not only India but much of the world. In Pakistan (pop. approximately 135 million), where an ambitious birth control program--using such slogans as "Grow More Food, Breed Fewer Children"--has reduced the birth rate from 3.3% to 2.5%, self-sufficiency in food will be achieved this year. Vastly increased grain harvests have been gathered in the Philippines, Ceylon, Turkey and Mexico. In South Vietnam, the IR8 rice strain (TIME, June 14) has been so successful that the Viet Cong have sought to discredit it by telling peasants that it causes cancer and leprosy. Indeed, most developing countries--but not including China, because of its self-imposed, xenophobic political isolationism--are benefiting, or about to benefit, from the new crops and new techniques. By themselves, the new farming methods are, of course, not the final answer. But they do provide an urgently needed respite. "We've been able to buy some time," says U.S. Food Expert Lester Brown, "so we can study further how to control the world's population."

* With heavy fertilization, the dwarf wheat, which stands 18 inches high, half as tall as ordinary wheat, can bear more grain without toppling over.

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