THE AMERICAS: The Food Finders

On a 1,200-acre plot dotted with ten brick buildings a few miles outside Bogota is a privately operated project that one American diplomat calls “the most outstanding example of technical assistance in South America.” There last week five grain specialists, with their assistants, painstakingly harvested and examined 30,000 different wheat strains from Canada, Russia, the U.S., Germany, Brazil, Britain, Chile, Mexico, India, while other workers planted experimental fields containing thousands more for harvest and research next year. Some day soon the scientists of Tibaitata Experiment Station hope to find the strains that best combine yield, taste, nutritional quality, disease and insect resistance. When they do, one of a dozen programs to help Colombian agriculture will have paid off.

Land & Experts. The work began in 1950 in answer to a request from the Colombian government to the well-endowed ($500 million) Rockefeller Foundation, headquartered in Manhattan: would it help find “ways to provide the people of Colombia with more and better food as economically as possible?” The foundation sent in experts, the Colombian government handed over top-grade land and the search started. At first Tibaitata concentrated on wheat and corn, has since branched into potatoes, beans, forage crops, barley, farm administration, pathology, entomology, animal husbandry.

The hunger fighters have already discovered seed strains that offer a vast improvement over what Colombian farmers have planted for years: barley that yields 37 bu. per acre instead of the usual 24, wheat that yields 56 bu. instead of 29 and matures three to four weeks earlier, thus allowing two crops yearly. Tibaitata’s scientists are experimenting with a barley that brings 102 bu. per acre, a hybrid corn that yields as much as 127 bu.

Study & Llanos. The joint Colombia-Rockefeller project, directed by 16 Ph.D.s, has also produced a bumper crop of trained scientific personnel. The U.S. specialists instruct about 100 Colombians at Tibaitata, plus five other Latin Americans nominated by their governments. Another eight project scientists are usually sent to the U.S. on fellowships to take advanced degrees. The program’s cost to date: about $12 million, of which $9,500,000 has been supplied by Colombia, the rest by the Foundation.

The two partners will spend millions more before they are through. Tibaitata’s biggest search is to discover ways to utilize the sun-seared, flash-flooded llanos, barren plains that comprise 60% of Colombia’s land, house only 2% of its population. It is a search that not only Colombia but all South America watches with mounting interest. With its population growing at the world’s fastest rate, by the year 2000 Latin America will be second only to Asia in numbers, and in desperate need of productive land.