Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the Indian government's criticisms of the American presence in Vietnam
and pressured India to devalue its currency to reduce the country's trade
deficit. Johnson's “humiliating” tactics, including the withholding of food
aid until India met American demands, along with yet another drought in
the mid-
1960s, prompted Indian lawmakers to pursue a completely differ-
ent and more internal food strategy.22
An influential report published by the Ford Foundation in 1967, en
-
titled
India's Food Crisis and the Steps to Meet It
,
affirmed this move. The
report blamed India's food aid dependency on its growing population
and advised the country to quickly and dramatically increase its domes-
tic production of food. To augment yields, the report recommended that
the Indian government and society move away from decentralized ag-
riculture and instead promote an agricultural system based on the use
of chemicals (like synthetic fertilizer inputs, pesticides, and herbicides),
hybrid seeds, large-scale monocropping, credit, mechanization, and the
centralization of decision making. India's Green Revolution was born.23
Politicians and scientists hailed the Green Revolution as a miracle
for Indian agriculture. First initiated in Mexico with funding and over-
sight from the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Department
of Agriculture (USDA), the Green Revolution involved converting farm-
ers to using high-yielding varieties (HYV) of hybrid plant seeds and ag-
ricultural technologies that were developed in laboratories with private
industry input.24 With the assistance of organizations such as the Ford
Foundation, Indian policy makers and scientists welcomed the Green
Revolution to India.25
In India the revolution initially revolved around wheat breeding.
Scientists experimented with crossing and breeding wheat varieties to
discover a type that yielded more per acre. The new plant they created,
however, also required more water and pesticides than traditional vari-
eties to grow well. In addition, these new varieties of wheat came from
hybrid seeds—seeds that produced a first generation of vigorous, high-
yielding plants but whose progeny were unlikely to be healthy or capable
of the same productivity as the previous generation. This development,
