Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
security were worries of possible uncontrollable population growth. In
the years after independence, Indian economists, planners, and policy
makers frequently and publicly debated how best to stimulate agricul-
tural production and achieve food security. These debates were also reg-
ularly linked with concerns about industrialization and the desire to be-
come a modern, powerful country. Rapid industrialization and economic
growth, however, required cheap, abundant food to feed a large, low-
wage
urban labor force.17
The solution to the problem of how to grow more grain to feed India's
population of workers came in the form of Public Law 480 (PL-
480) — an
American law, one sign of how globalized agriculture had become. En-
acted in 1954, PL-
480 was a program of global food aid by the United
States. To beneficiaries, it offered donations, credit to enable the direct
sales of low-cost food grains, and the barter of food grains for raw ma-
terials. 18 India was one of the early participants in this program. The
United States Agency for International Development (USAID) claims that
between 1954 and 2004 “the Food for Peace program [as PL-480 is now
known] . . . sent 106 million metric tons to the hungry of the world, feed-
ing billions of people and saving countless lives. The program depend[ed]
on the unparalleled productivity of American farmers and the American
agricultural system.”19
More cynically, however, critics argue that this American program
actually increased India's dependency on food imports and promoted
agricultural underdevelopment within the rural countryside.20 As cheap
American grains flooded the domestic markets, they rendered the culti-
vation of local food unprofitable. Indian farmers continued to lose their
self-suiciency and established ways of farming, as they had under the
British-led commercialization of agriculture. Farmers left agriculture or
converted to cash crop farming. At one point, India was importing over
six million tons of wheat per year from the United States.21
In the mid-1960s, the PL-480 regime and India's system of food imports
started to change. Increasingly, the United States was ataching political
and economic conditions to its offer of food aid, and the American govern-
ment even atempted to use PL-480 as leverage in India during the Cold
War. United States President Lyndon Johnson expressed displeasure with
