Challenging Malthus

Under a searing sun, India's peasant plods endlessly behind his scrawny bullocks, scratching at the badly irrigated soil with tools of a thousand years ago. Most of his cow's dung cannot be used as fertilizer, for it is needed as fuel; his patch of land is tiny, and his life is mortgaged to the local moneylender or landlord. He has a deep distrust of foreigners' slick schemes for greater yields; yet the fate of all of India's 415 million depends on the stubborn peasant's ability to expand production. Six years from now, crowded India will have 80 million more mouths to feed; unless output is raised drastically, there will be scarcely two-thirds the amount of food needed to stave off hunger.

Sharing India's rising alarm, the Ford Foundation last week put up $10.5 million toward a $100 million Indian government pilot scheme for the reshaping of the nation's agriculture. The plan will establish model farming projects in seven scattered regions embracing 10,000 villages and 1,000,000 farmers, with the aim of raising their food production by a breathtaking 50% in five years as an example to the rest of the nation. If the scheme works and its lessons are gradually applied to other areas, India's total food grain output should rise to at least no million tons by 1966 instead of the 80 million tons expectable at present rates of production.

The Ford Foundation's contribution will finance a team of Indian and foreign farm experts to take charge of the program, build teaching centers to train hundreds of additional agricultural specialists, and construct a network of seed-treatment and soil-testing stations. The government will expand local storage facilities, distribute fertilizer, insecticide and seed for sale to peasants, and create a farm-credit system to help farmers finance their own improvements. The scheme will operate along lines of U.S. soil-conservation projects; farmers who agree to improvement plans will get a package deal of soil testing, fertilization and planting that expert advisers will supervise. "The soil of India has the capacity for vastly increased production," says Forrest F. Hill, head of Ford Foundation's overseas development program, "but the farmers need the incentives -- and the means -- to do the job." Until the new project starts paying off, India remains perilously vulnerable to the threat of famine if a single crop season goes bad; last week Minister of Food and Agriculture S. K. Patil was in Washington negotiating a $1.5 billion surplus-food purchase to bolster his stockpiles in the event of just such an emergency.

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