Foreign News: Facing Starvation

In a surprisingly outspoken report, a Ford Foundation team last week warned India that it is on a grim arithmetical collision course. Unless a drastic turn is taken, by 1966 the birth rate will have so outstripped food production that literally millions may starve to death in a crisis that “no conceivable program of imports or rationing can meet.”

The report, prepared by 13 American agricultural experts at the request of the Indian government, makes these points:

¶ By 1966 India’s exploding birth rate will have added 80 million mouths to feed. At present growth rates, food-grains production will be 28 million tons short annually of what is needed.

¶ A disaster of this magnitude would nullify all India’s progress toward human welfare, might well result in “civil disturbance.”

¶ To avert famine in 1966, India must triple its present rate of increase in food production, reach a goal of at least 110 million tons of food grains annually.

¶ India now has one of the world’s lowest crop yields per acre (the average yield of rice per acre is one-third of Japan’s). India uses only a fraction of its potential water supply, one of the world’s largest. Shockingly, India gets only a 20% to 25% increase in irrigated lands over nonirrigated.

¶ Only a crash program on a “war footing” can do the trick—a program that slices through Indian love of paper-shuffling solutions and provides a “far-reaching, centralized authority with a clear line of command and execution.”

¶ One of India’s biggest problems in creating more food is the population of 203 million cattle, most of which are regarded with religious reverence by Hindus. The sacred cows wander freely through Indian fields eating as they please, proliferating without restraint, dying at a ripe old age (in many Indian states it is illegal to kill a cow). Since they may not be eaten as food, they contribute little to the Indian food supply, of which they consume a great deal. If they cannot be killed, they might be sterilized, the Ford experts suggest.

The Ford report got respectful attention in New Delhi, but not the hoped-for galvanizing of resolve. Under an acetylene sun, millions of peasants all over India continued to work in loincloths behind’ scrawny bullocks, scratching at parched land with tools identical with those of a thousand years ago, struggling against disease and malnutrition, in debt to the moneylender, and blindly unaware of the modern techniques that could change their lives.