Gov Pedro Tenon (left), Commonwealth ot the Northern Mariana 

 Islands, lOins colleagues at the agricultural session 



about 400,000 tons to about 3.7 million tons in 1976, 

 and will reacti 4 million this year. 



My interest is in plant breeding. I am interested in 

 the people who eat bread, what it takes to produce 

 that wheat, then flour, and that bread to teed the 

 common people. I had to be concerned about break- 

 ing down all of these nice little boxes of disciplines 

 that we find in academia here in which many of our 

 foreign students are trained, and when we come 

 back, we have to break apart and try to integrate. 

 We did that 20, or 30, or 40 years ago, but now we 

 have gotten very sophisticated. You have got to learn 

 how to handle all of these things, all the disciplines, 

 how to restore soil fertility, the agronomic practices 

 that are most efficient for those soils in that climate, 

 to breed the right plants, to control the diseases and 

 insects and weeds and then to marry this all to the 

 economic policy of government leaders who will permit 

 its adoption by the farmer. 



When I started in India, I was told, "Well, you were 

 pretty lucky in Mexico, you don't know our farmers, 

 you'll never pull this off." Nonsense. It went twice as 

 fast in India. We transplanted the technology from 

 Mexico. We modified it after 3-4 years of on-farm 

 testing. We moved whole shiploads of seed and the 

 production of wheat in India went from an average of 

 1 1 million tons — about 400 billion bushels — which 

 is the average from 1959-66. Last year it was 37 

 million tons, and this year, 38 million. 



Now what does this mean? More than a three-fold 

 increase — a 300 percent increase. The additional 

 income from last year's crop was about $5.4 billion If 

 you add that up when change started to take place. 



1967-68, it accumulates to somewhere in the order of 

 about $30 billion. 



They still have got many hungry people in India. 

 The changes started taking place later in rice. Of 

 course when you start messing around with these 

 kinds of things back home here, you'll get skinned 

 and jabbed for making the rich richer and the poor 

 poorer That's the jargon that goes on in the scien- 

 tific literature. I think it is pretty largely motivated by 

 political ideology. Maybe they would like to see a 

 revolution coming, and go left rather than to see as 

 we can't get this ball rolling fast enough, so that it can 

 evolve democratically If you are going to be involved 

 in this, as a scientist, a foreigner working abroad, you 

 need to develop a skin slightly thicker than that of a 

 rhinocerous or an elephant. That way you don't feel 

 all the darts or you ignore them. And if you can 

 develop bad hearing, it's also pretty useful. 



When you showed the results of tests on farms, to 

 prove the validity of your case, I never saw more 

 enthusiastic farmers, though the vast majority were illit- 

 erate, but that doesn't mean you can't figure if you're 

 illiterate. You see that it's going to yield twice or three 

 times as much as before, sometimes more. And if the 

 government makes fertilizer available at a fair price, 

 they take off. India became in 1979 self-sufficient for 

 the first time since independence. In addition, they 

 had 22 million metric tons of grain in their ware- 

 houses. Then came the worst drought in 90 years. 

 Rice production plummetted and the next wheat crop, 

 because of the shortage of irrigation water, went 

 down by 4 million tons But we never heard anything 

 about hunger They lived off those 22 million tons in 

 storage We would never have been able to move 22 

 million tons through the ports, assuming they had the 

 wealth to buy it, or over the railroads, and back up to 

 the villages. And we didn't even hear about it in this 

 part of the world. 



So, in closing, let me say that, we can stave off the 

 population monster while we double this food produc- 

 tion and some more. We shouldn't only increase it in 

 the next whatever it turns out to be, 40, 60, or 80 

 years, from 3.3 to 6.6, but we have got to do bet- 

 ter — perhaps 7.3 billion metric tons, because there 

 are still too many hungry people. We have got to do 

 a better job of distributing it. It is a very complex 

 problem I say it can be done. We shouldn't get led 

 off the path by special interest groups who are sure 

 we are poisoning ourselves out of existence, who are 

 more interested in recreation. I told you at the outset 

 that I lived the back country of Idaho and I learned to 



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