ABSTRACT
The history of international agricultural research since the 1950s suggests that this half-true argument for ‘more food from MVs’ as the cure for inadequate food consumption is deeply entrenched. If we feel the need to modify it, we must understand that history; for the population argument was, from the start, at the centre of the IARCs’ efforts (Chapter 7, c).5 The celebrated Ford Foundation report [Ford Foundation, 1959] saw ‘India’s foodgrain crisis’ as one of continued population expansion confronting the limits of land expansion, and creating a crisis of food consumption; ‘steps to meet it’ were to be concentrated on raising food production, largely through accelerated technical progress by ‘progressive farmers’—not the poorest, as a rule-in lead districts [Brown, 1971].
