In 1964 and 1965, India received five million tons of emergency wheat grain aid each year from the United States under the US government’s Food for Peace program. Canada and Australia also sent grain. It was the largest food rescue operation in history. In spite of this, the famine worsened.

Malthusian thought—unchecked population growth always exceeds the growth of means of subsistence—was reawakening. Many biologists and economists were siding with Malthus.

Concern about the ability of the Earth to feed its people reached a crescendo with inadequate wheat crops, especially in India, in 1965, 1966 and 1967. Soon after taking office, President Richard Nixon instructed his Science Advisory Committee to study the world food problem. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations pushed its campaign against hunger.

The Paddock brothers, William and Paul, published a widely read book in 1967, Famine 1975!: America’s Decision; Who Will Survive?, contending that famine on a vast scale was inevitable, and counseling that efforts to avert it be restricted to certain areas that promised some hope of success. India was written off as beyond hope.

The following year, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Writing as a biologist and environmentalist, his book was primarily about the world’s rapidly growing populations and the need for “population control.” But he also made predictions about food production, which he said could not possibly keep up with increases in human population.

In 1967, even close associates of Norman Borlaug were not optimistic that food production would catch up in India. George Harrar, then president of The Rockefeller Foundation, and the person who had headed the expert team of Rockefeller scientists in Mexico from 1943 to 1952, said in an address in March of 1967: “It is a fundamental fact that, next to world conflict, the greatest single threat to mankind is that of explosive population increase. To date, neither the disadvantaged countries nor those who would help them have been able to limit the vast increase in numbers.”

India and Pakistan were contributing more than their share to the population explosion, and had barely been meeting their food needs by importing increasing amounts of American wheat under the Food for Peace program. Nonetheless, the two countries wanted to improve their own food production rather than become permanent wards of the United States.

This was the climate of opinion in which Borlaug’s new highyielding Mexican wheats began to appear in the Asian subcontinent. The timing could not have been more propitious. As in the past, Borlaug’s work seemed the product of benevolent destiny. Borlaug arranged through the Rockefeller Foundation for Dr. Glenn Anderson, wheat expert and “gung ho leader” from the Canadian Department of Agriculture, to join the Rockefeller Foundation staff and help with the project in India. Dr. Ignacio Narvaez, native Mexican and one of Borlaug’s earliest and most talented wheat apostles, was sent to Pakistan under a Ford Foundation grant.

In 1964, with help from the participants Norm had trained in Mexico, Borlaug’s wheats were planted as experiments in various locations in both India and Pakistan. In 1965, in collaboration with local scientists and administrative officials, Borlaug arranged for 250 tons of seed of the Mexican dwarf wheat varieties to be imported into Pakistan and 200 tons to be imported into India for wide-scale testing on farms. Especially in those settings in which Norm’s recommended cultural practices were followed, the on-farm trials yielded exceptionally well.

India’s Minister of Food and Agriculture, Shri C. Subramaniam, said, “This wheat is better than anything we’ve ever seen. We’d better go with it.”

Based on these promising results, supplemented with equally good results from the International Spring Wheat Yield Nursery that had been grown at many locations in the Near East, Borlaug concluded that it was time for strong production campaigns in both countries. But, to be successful, based on his experience in Mexico, he knew that the campaigns would have to be aggressive. The conventional wisdom at the time was that agricultural progress in developing countries would inevitably be slow. In 1967, the US President’s Science Advisory Committee reported, “Since yield take-offs in the past have required educated, alert farmers, capital, and a commercial system of agriculture, they will be extremely difficult to achieve in the developing nations.”

But Norman Borlaug knew from his observations of the euphoric reactions to field trials of farmers in Pakistan and India that even small-scale peasant farmers would go with the exciting new technology if given a chance. A system was needed to provide participating farmers with a complete package of the new technology: the high-yielding seeds with instructions on when and how to plant, how to fertilize it, and how to manage weed and insect-pest control. As Norm saw it, that would be relatively easy compared with getting changes in government policies to make the campaigns a success.

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