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India's Green Revolutionary Is Back In Spotlight
Reuters via New York Times
Forty years after he helped rescue the world from growing famine and a deepening gloom over the future of food supplies, Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan is once again agitating for revolution -- this time a perpetual one.

The 82-year-old scientist, dubbed here the father of the Green Revolution for helping development a hybrid wheat seed that allowed Indian farmers to dramatically increase yields, says the current food crisis offers the world a chance to put farmers on the right road to unending growth.

In the twenty-first century's "Evergreen Revolution," as he calls it, conservation farming and green technology will bring about sustainable change that could allow India to become an even bigger supplier of food to the world.

... But Swaminathan says that some seeds of the current crisis were sown in his own revolutionary heyday.

"The Green Revolution created a sense of euphoria that we have solved our production problem. Now we have a plateau in production and productivity. We have a problem of under investment in rural infrastructure," he says.

With genetically advanced seeds, farmers overlooked the potential ecological damage of heavy fertilizer use, the drop in water tables due to heavier irrigation and the impact of repeated crop cycles on soil quality.

He believes we've learned from those lessons, and the next wave of improvements will have environmental considerations at their core, without the need to return to the genetics lab.

... With a host of measures suggested to kickstart the struggling sector, Swaminathan believes farmers should be allowed to play a pivotal role in leading the change, though he regrets it took a crisis to finally shift the world's attention back to the land.

"Only when disasters come, farmers become important."
(11 May 2008)
Contributor Carl Etnier writes:
Swaminathan advocates making agriculture more environmentally sustainable, food self-sufficiency for his country, and growing easier to grow, coarser grains. What's not to like?

I only wish another Green Revolutionary, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, would support Swaminathan's agendas; that could give them a real boost worldwide.

While stocks last
Joanna Blythman, The Observer
In just a year, the cost of eggs is up by 40 per cent, butter is up by 60 per cent and wheat has more than doubled. As prices soar and British production plummets, Joanna Blythman investigates the crisis in store: we are running out of food
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... All of a sudden, we have the first inkling that the world is panicking about having enough to eat. Shortages of staple foods such as wheat and rice - caused by climate change, the biofuel gold rush, and the growing taste for a more western diet in developing countries - have generated a wave of troubling headlines. But viewed from the crowded supermarket shelves of lush, green, prosperous Britain, there is a feeling of 'Panic? What panic?'

Cost-conscious shoppers will have noticed that their food bill has gone up by 11 per cent in just a year, but global fears of growing food insecurity still seem reassuringly distant, something to do with famine-prone people in faraway countries, something as yet intangible and not likely to affect us.

But while Britain likes to think of itself as a fertile, productive country, a land of plenty with lots of food left over to export profitably, the truth is less comforting. Those surpluses of the Sixties, the milk lakes and butter mountains, have melted away as the Common Agricultural Policy has been reformed. Our potential self-sufficiency in food, meanwhile, has plummeted.
(11 May 2008)

World's giants to alter food equation
Evan Osnos and Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune
As China and India rise, diets change and demands soar
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... The roots of today's food crisis span the globe, from sky-high oil prices in the Middle East to the diversion of crops from food to biofuel in the U.S., to drought-stricken harvests in Australia. But the crisis also has focused attention on a longer-term trend: the growing, evolving appetites of developing giants such as China and India.

"Population is increasing, and the income of the poor is increasing, but production is not increasing," said Usha Tuteja, head of the Agricultural Economics Research Center at the University of Delhi.

Rising consumption in China and India is not the prime cause of today's food-price shocks; both countries are largely self-sufficient in rice and wheat, staples that have fallen short in other developing countries and triggered riots.

But experts see milestones on the horizon: Sometime in the next year, for instance, China's growing consumption and shrinking farmland are likely to turn the country into a net importer of corn, a major source of animal feed and an ingredient for many of the processed foods cropping up on the nation's supermarket shelves.

Likewise, India is on track to become a grain importer thanks to a fast-growing middle- and upper-class minority that demands a diet diversified beyond the traditional staples of grains, legumes and vegetables.
(11 May 2008)

How the world's oceans are running out of fish
Alex Renton, The Observer
The future of our seas has never been more precarious. Ninety years of industrial-scale overfishing has brought us to the brink of an ecological catastrophe and deprived millions of their livelihoods. As scientific guidelines are ignored and catches become ever bigger, Alex Renton tells why the international community has failed to act.
(11 May 2008)