For Borlaug, the sudden request for 200 tons of Sonora 64 was startling. More startling still was a second order, from Pakistan, for 250 tons—Borlaug’s exhortations and the results of Swaminathan’s tests in India had changed minds. Mexico had never exported any wheat across an ocean before. On top of that, the requests, received in July, were late. The grain had to be planted in November, which meant that it had to arrive in mid-October if the seeds were to be transported to the planting areas by that time. Bulky and heavy, the grain would have to travel by ship to South Asia, which would take at least two months. To make the planting deadline, the ship had to leave Mexico by mid-August. Borlaug therefore had a little more than a month to get the wheat on a ship. Sonora’s seaport was the nearby city of Guaymas, about seventy miles from Borlaug’s experimental site. A quick visit sufficed to establish that no ships were available there on short notice that could go to India. Instead Borlaug was forced to book passage for his grain from Los Angeles on “the last freighter that would get it in time to Pakistan and India for planting in the middle of October.” It planned to depart on August 12, 1965.
Wellhausen, his supervisor, was on a long home leave. Borlaug was supposed to manage the Rockefeller office in Mexico City while his Sonora replacement, Ignacio Narváez, arranged to send the grain on the ship. To Borlaug’s consternation he spent all of his time wrangling with government officials about paperwork. The contracts for the grain were between the governments of Pakistan and India and Mexico’s state-owned Productore Nacional de Semilla (National Seed Producer), known as Pronase. The Pakistan agreement included provisions for unexpected accidents damaging the seed. The usual English legal term for these unexpected accidents was an “act of God.” According to Vietmeyer, Borlaug’s biographer, Pronase objected on religious grounds: “God didn’t do bad acts.” The company insisted that the text be changed to acta de naturaleza—act of nature. Pakistan insisted that “act of God” was demanded by legal precedent. Borlaug had the two parties sign two contracts, one in English with “act of God,” one in Spanish with acta de naturaleza. Late in July the Indian government weighed in, asking Borlaug to change its order to one hundred tons of Sonora 64 and one hundred tons of another variety, Lerma Rojo 64, which had better rust resistance. Borlaug refused—Narváez and the grain, in twenty thousand sacks, were already on trucks roaring toward the U.S. border.
And then everything went wrong. I thought I had the border fixed so that these 35 big trucks—and we didn’t have much money for this operation—[would go through. Instead they] were held up at the Mexican border for two days. And I had to pay them to hold the freighter. Then we were held up for another day on the American side. Pure bureaucracy. Finally, my Mexican colleague that was supervising this, he called and he said, “They’re on their way to the Los Angeles port.” But they didn’t get very far. It was the day of the Watts riot.
Ignited by accusations of police brutality, the riots in the African-American neighborhood of Watts turned a square mile of Los Angeles into a combat zone, complete with burning buildings, sniper fire, and thousands of armed police. The Mexican truckers wanted to turn back when they saw smoke rolling over the city and the National Guard with its rifles and tanks. The governor of California placed a curfew over an area of almost fifty square miles. Signs warned that troublemakers would be shot. Over the phone, Borlaug begged the owner of the shipping line to make the ship and its crew wait for his trucks. He told Narváez to order the truckers to drive through the fiery streets to the docks. Shouting and swearing, he called the L.A. police and demanded that his convoy be escorted through the blockades.
All the while he was fielding angry calls from Pronase. The check for the Indian grain had cleared. The Pakistani check, though, had bounced. “Check” is a misnomer. The payment was a money order for $95,000, roughly equivalent to $700,000 today. Alas, the money order had misspelled Pronase’s proper name, Productore Nacional de Semilla, and the bank in Mexico City wouldn’t accept it. Pronase was insisting that it wouldn’t allow the ship to be loaded until it received a new money order. Even as the trucks were rumbling toward the docks, Borlaug was frantically telephoning Rawalpindi, then Pakistan’s capital. By that point it was Saturday, August 15. Reaching government officials on the weekend was no easier then than it is now. A flurry of cablegrams finally produced a request from a Pakistani official for more time.
At the docks, the truck drivers were surrounded by National Guardsmen. Narváez called Borlaug to ask if the grain should be loaded, given that it hadn’t actually been paid for. By now Borlaug had learned a new legal term: demurrage, a charge payable to the owner of a ship if it is not loaded by an agreed-upon time. Rockefeller would owe demurrage to the shipping line if the grain was not loaded. But if Borlaug gave the go-ahead and Pakistan didn’t replace the check, Rockefeller would be on the hook for $95,000. Leaving the sacks of wheat in the parking lot was not an option: grain used for seed, unlike grain used for flour, must be kept cool so that it will grow properly in the field. Frustrated and tired, Borlaug barked at Narváez in a way that would later make him feel ashamed. Get the grain on the ship! he snapped. Send it on its damn way!
When Narváez called to confirm that the ship was being loaded, Borlaug went to bed. Constantly on the telephone, he had stayed awake for seventy-two hours. When he awoke, he turned on the radio. War had broken out between Pakistan and India. His Pakistani contact lived in the city of Lahore, ten miles from the Indian border. Borlaug cabled him in shock and was astonished to receive a quick reply:
DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE MONEY STOP WE’VE DEPOSITED IT STOP AND IF YOU THINK YOU’VE GOT PROBLEMS YOU SHOULD SEE MINE STOP ARTILLERY SHELLS FALLING IN MY BACKYARD
The fighting was over Kashmir, a majority-Muslim region claimed by both India and Pakistan. A war in 1947–48 had ended up by partitioning Kashmir with a ceasefire line that neither side recognized as an official border. The new round of fighting had begun earlier in August, when about thirty thousand Pakistani troops dressed in civilian clothes infiltrated the Indian part of Kashmir. India discovered the ruse and launched its own incursion into Pakistani Kashmir. Prime Minister Shastri, mindful of the disastrous loss to China three years before, was determined not to back down. Indian forces escalated the conflict on September 6 by invading Pakistan itself, targeting the border city of Lahore. Pakistan launched a retaliatory assault aimed at the Indian city of Amritsar, a few miles from Lahore on the Indian side of the border. Large tank battles occurred on the ground; scores of planes shot at each other in the sky. More than six thousand soldiers died in the fighting.
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Borlaug liked to proclaim his lack of political sophistication. But even he could see that his plan to unload India’s portion of the grain in the Indian city of Mumbai and Pakistani’s portion of the grain in the Pakistani port of Karachi was going to run into trouble. India would confiscate the Pakistani grain as war materiel. Again he telephoned the head of the shipping line. The company would have to divert the ship to Singapore, he said. In this neutral ground, the grain could be unloaded onto two smaller ships, one bound for India, the other for Pakistan. Even as he negotiated with the shipping company, he was receiving irate messages from Rockefeller executives in Manhattan. They had just realized that Borlaug had potentially incurred a large debt on behalf of the Pakistani government. Further pleading telephone calls came from Pronase, the seed company. Where was the check? Unable to cope, Borlaug fled the office and went fishing for several days.
Fumigation
Despite the war, the seed arrived in late October, more or less on time. Amazingly, both Pakistan and India planted it rapidly. In the first nation, about half the grain went into acre-sized plots at 2,500 farms as a public demonstration; the rest went onto 30 large government farms to multiply the seed for the next round of texts. The second nation, India, sowed it on demonstration plots at government research centers and government-selected “progressive” farms that were said to be more open to innovat
ion. The planting was a month later than was optimal, but Borlaug was reasonably confident that the delay would not impede progress. In addition, Pakistan’s second, corrected money order had arrived.
Narváez flew to Pakistan days after the seed arrived and reported that the new varieties had been planted properly and were being given sufficient water and fertilizer. Despite the ongoing war, he had obtained the necessary government approvals to travel through the militarized zones and stay in Lahore to provide advice during the growing season. Two weeks after his initial survey he and a Pakistani colleague looked at plantings in the north. Instead of healthy young shoots they found scattered, thin sprouts dotting fields that were mostly barren. The farmers had done everything according to instructions, but something was wrong. Narváez immediately sent a cable to Borlaug, who flew to Pakistan.
The two men decided to survey the whole country again, Borlaug looking at test plots in the south, Narváez in the north, meeting in the central city of Multan. (In those days Pakistan was not in the grip of sectarian violence; foreigners like Borlaug could travel in rural areas without taking elaborate precautions.) To Borlaug’s dismay, Narváez’s initial report proved accurate. The seeds had been planted about two weeks before, enough time for them to germinate and stick their heads above the surface. Half or more were effectively dead. Borlaug pelted the farmers with questions. As Narváez had reported, they had been following instructions to the letter. Something was wrong with the seed itself. The problems were sure to be replicated in India, too.
The two men met in Multan, in the middle of the country. Matching their despairing mood, the only hotel with available rooms was memorably unpleasant: cold, bleak, dirty, alive with vermin. They talked in their room until early in the morning, passing a bottle of whisky back and forth. Pakistan had invested a big fraction of its foreign-currency reserves in the seed, which now was failing. The huge effort to get the seed to South Asia had been a waste of time. Borlaug had let everyone down—officials in Pakistan and India who had taken a risk on him despite the opposition of their own scientists, farmers in Mexico who had believed in him enough to provide the grain at low cost, foundation executives in Manhattan who had backed his ideas despite his unwillingness to follow rules, villagers in India and Pakistan whose hopes he had raised. The two men couldn’t understand what had gone awry. They finished the bottle just before dawn.
The next morning Borlaug had to write a batch of painful telegrams explaining the germination problems. All anyone could do at the moment, he said, was to double the planting rates, fertilize the seeds like mad, and hope that something could be salvaged. Communication between India and Pakistan was shut down by the war, so he had to send an embarrassing cable to Wellhausen in Mexico and ask him to pass the word to Rockefeller’s India office, which would in turn send a note to Swaminathan. Later he would conclude that Pronase had wanted to ensure that its wheat wasn’t eaten by rats or attacked by mold on what was for the company a voyage of unprecedented length. In its inexperience, it had fumigated the seeds aggressively with methyl bromide—so aggressively that it had damaged them. But that understanding wouldn’t come for months. In the meantime, baffled and disheartened, Borlaug spent December 1965 anxiously shuttling between the two countries, the four-hundred-mile trip between Rawalpindi and Delhi extended by the now-necessary three-thousand-mile detour to Dubai—all direct flights had been canceled. The heavy fertilization seemed to be working, but that was no guarantee that the grain would come.
Meanwhile, President Johnson’s foreign-aid program, the biggest element of which was food aid to India, was attracting opposition in Congress. Rather than displaying proper gratitude, from Johnson’s point of view, India had spoken out against U.S. intervention in Vietnam—a personal affront. And it had got itself into a shooting war with Pakistan, another U.S. ally. Worst of all, in the president’s eyes, the Nehru policy of prioritizing industry over agriculture still seemed to hold sway. He issued an ultimatum: if the Shastri government did not throw all available resources into agriculture, he would cut off food aid. To keep Delhi on a tight leash, aid would be issued on a month-by-month basis. The Indian government was furious. Kowtowing to foreigners was what Nehru, Shastri, and the rest of the Congress party leadership had spent decades fighting. And using food aid for political leverage—playing with the lives of millions of people—struck the inheritors of the Gandhian tradition as deeply immoral.
India and Pakistan slowly halted the fighting and signed another ceasefire at a conference in Tashkent in January 1966. India ended up in possession of 720 square miles of Pakistani territory; Pakistan won 220 square miles of India. Both sides claimed victory. Shastri represented India at the ceasefire conference. The morning after signing the agreement he suddenly died, giving rise to a generation of conspiracy theorists (most claim that the CIA assassinated him). Into his office stepped a formidable presence: Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter. (No relation to Mahatma Gandhi, she had married a man with that politically potent surname.)
Gandhi was immediately caught up in the tense back-and-forth between India and the United States—the former fiercely determined to maintain the independence it had struggled for, the latter seeking to draw India into the Cold War and viewing its industry-first policies as a humanitarian disaster. Eventually she caved in to Johnson’s requirements, though with lasting bitterness. She agreed to spend more on agriculture. She kept Subramaniam as minister of agriculture. And she listened to his advice.
Despite the fumigation, some of the Mexican seed grew. What remained, though damaged, still outperformed traditional varieties grown with traditional methods. In Pakistan, Narváez had planted adjacent crops of Mexican wheat and local wheat on the grounds of the presidential palace. When the president took his afternoon walk, he could see the difference himself. For her part, Gandhi toured the experimental farms with Swaminathan. To Swaminathan, it was obvious that she knew little about agriculture. It was also obvious, he told me, that she was a quick study who was not afraid to make up her own mind. Journalists were writing that the foreign seed was an attack on Indian culture. A leading member of the powerful Planning Commission demanded that India terminate its relationship with Mexico.
Instead Gandhi decided to gamble. Three Indian officials went to Mexico in the summer of 1966 to buy eighteen thousand tons of Lerma Rojo 64—more than forty times the previous purchase. They refused to contract with Pronase, instead making a deal with a farmers’ cooperative. Because Pronase was the only entity allowed to export grain, Borlaug arranged a special permit with the Mexican government, setting off a bureaucratic turf battle. The grain went out from the Sonora port of Guaymas in October, filling the holds of two big ships. Much of India’s precious foreign-exchange reserves was consumed by the purchase. But Gandhi was feeling pressure to accelerate the wheat program, and not only from the agitated president in Washington. The monsoon rains had failed that summer in the northeast. Worst affected was the poor, populous state of Bihar, west of Kolkata, burned into Indian memories as the site of the horrific famine of 1943.
A small-scale academic contretemps has arisen over whether what happened in Bihar in 1966 was an actual famine or a temporary shortfall exaggerated for political reasons. Between July and October of that year almost no rain fell in the state—except for a week in August, when heavy downpours caused catastrophic floods. Paradoxically, the rainfall didn’t help Bihar’s farmers. Instead it washed out their fields, carrying away the plants.
Loading and packing eighteen thousand tons of grain in 1966 was an enormous effort for Mexican distributors, who had never done anything like it before. Credit 88
Local and parliamentary elections were scheduled across India for the following February. Fearing that voters would believe that it had let the situation get out of control, the Bihar government initially refused to admit the gravity of the situation. Some of Borlaug’s travels took him to the edge of Bihar. Years later he would recall the trucks that plied the streets, pickin
g up the nightly dead. Homeless children thronged the entrance of his hotels, begging for bread, thin hands plucking at his clothes. Physicians reported frightening increases in malnutrition and the diseases of dietary deficiency. Its hand forced by disaster, the Bihar government finally asked Delhi for help in the fall of 1966. But the Gandhi administration, too, dismissed the alarms, partly because the resurgence of widespread hunger was an embarrassment to the nation, partly because Bihar was (accurately) viewed as horrifically corrupt—its politicians might exaggerate a famine just to pocket the relief money. Adding to suspicions, Bihar’s leaders had not supported Indira Gandhi in the party caucuses after Lal Shastri’s death.
As evidence of suffering mounted, Gandhi, too, was forced to reverse course. In November she gave a widely publicized speech calling on Indians to mobilize against the tragedy. “Countless millions of our people,” she said, have “had the bread taken out of their mouths by an abnormal failure of the rains….There is hunger and distress in millions of homes.” Still, Gandhi didn’t use the loaded word “famine,” fearing the reaction it would trigger. Johnson demanded that she say it, because Congress would be more likely to dole out foreign-aid money for an official famine. People are starving in India, he proclaimed. He was furious when the Indian ambassador, mindful of the political situation in Delhi, refused to back his claim. Despite its unwillingness to utter the F-word, the government set up the biggest relief effort in modern Indian history, borrowing huge sums from the International Monetary Fund to import 20 million tons of grain, most of it from the United States. The operation was successful in that it prevented widespread death. It was unsuccessful in preventing sickness and misery. Notwithstanding Gandhi’s efforts, unhappy voters punished her Congress party at the polls. The opposition won in Bihar. After much hemming and hawing, it declared in April 1967 that two-thirds of Bihar was afflicted by famine or scarcity. More than 34 million souls were affected.