ad info




TIME Asia
TIME Asia Home
Current Issue
Magazine Archive
Asia Buzz
Travel Watch
Web Features
  Entertainment
  Photo Essays

Subscribe to TIME
Customer Services
About Us
Write to TIME Asia

TIME.com
TIME Canada
TIME Europe
TIME Pacific
TIME Digital
Asiaweek
Latest CNN News

Young China
Olympics 2000
On The Road

 ASIAWEEK.COM
 CNN.COM
  east asia
  southeast asia
  south asia
  central asia
  australasia
 BUSINESS
 SPORTS
 SHOWBIZ
 ASIA WEATHER
 ASIA TRAVEL


Other News
From TIME Asia

Culture on Demand: Black is Beautiful
The American Express black card is the ultimate status symbol

Asia Buzz: Should the Net Be Free?
Web heads want it all -- for nothing

JAPAN: Failed Revolution
Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori clings to power as dissidents in his party finally decide not to back a no-confidence motion

Cover: Endgame?
After Florida's controversial ballot recount, Bush holds a 537-vote lead in the state, which could give him the election

TIME Digest
FORTUNE.com
FORTUNE China
MONEY.com

TIME Asia Services
Subscribe
Subscribe to TIME! Get up to 3 MONTHS FREE!

Bookmark TIME
TIME Media Kit
Recent awards

TIME Asia Asiaweek Asia Now TIME Asia story

TIME 100: AUGUST 23-30, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 7/8

M.S. Swaminathan
Born Aug. 7, 1925 in Tamil Nadu
1952 Graduates from Cambridge with a Ph.D in genetics
1966 Uses Mexican seeds in Punjab, which results in vastly increased harvests
1967 His team develops high-yield, cross-bred wheat seed that starts Green Revolution across Southeast Asia
1974 Chairs U.N. World Food Congress in Rome
1987 Wins the World Food Prize in Washington
Illustration for TIME by Maria Korusiewicz
The father of the Green Revolution used his skills in genetic engineering and his powers of persuasion to make famine an unfamiliar word in Asia
By ANTHONY SPAETH

If you travel by land from any Asian metropolis, it doesn't take long to hit a timeless landscape carpeted with fields of rice, wheat, millet or maize. Whether you're at the terraced rice paddies of Banaue in northern Luzon or the wheat bowl of central China, farmers tend fields as their ancestors did, harvesting grain for their families and countrymen.

m o r e
Bhave Heart
Vinoba Bhave renounced the comfort of a middle-class home at age 20 to devote his life to the fight for social justice and equality

But beneath the soil of those seemingly unaltered tableaux is a high-tech invention that changed not only Asia but the world. The seeds planted today by farmers from Punjab to Pusan are nothing like those used by their ancestors. If they were, the entire continent would either be starving or enslaved to the outside world for food or financing.

That turn of history, one of the truly astonishing transformations of the century, is now known as the Green Revolution. It relied heavily on the work of a diminutive Indian geneticist named Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan. As godfather of the Green Revolution, Swaminathan, 74, is modest about his own achievements but forthright about his work's impact on his native land and the planet Earth. "Our history," he says, "changed from that time."

Swaminathan, together with colleagues in India and around the world, managed in a few short years to demolish the dire Malthusian worldview that was so prevalent, and pertinent, four decades ago. Asia's populations were growing uncontrollably. None of the largest countries was self-sufficient in food. China lost as many as 30 million people to famine from 1958 to '62 during and after the Great Leap Forward, and postwar India lived a "ship-to-mouth" existence, subsisting on foodgrains imported from the U.S. Too many mouths, ever more pregnancies, the same farmers growing the same crops--something had to give.

Instead of tragedy, though, a miracle was born in the mid-'60s at Swaminathan's laboratory in New Delhi--and, a few years later, at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines which he later headed. Swaminathan brought into India seeds developed in Mexico by U.S. agricultural guru Norman Borlaug and, after cross-breeding them with local species, created a wheat plant that yielded much more grain than traditional types. Scientists at IRRI accomplished the same miracle for rice. Imminent tragedy turned to a new era of hope for Asia, paving the way for the Asian economic miracle of the 1980s and '90s.

As with all great revolutions, though, the seed was but the starting point. Swaminathan combined all the great components of a revolutionary: vision, dedication, energy and follow-through. He was born in what is now the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. His physician father was an ardent follower of Mohandas Gandhi, and the young Swaminathan was brought to a rally in which British cloth was burned. (Gandhi exhorted Indians to end their dependence on imported goods.) It was a lesson the boy would never forget. In college, he eschewed more lucrative professions and studied agriculture. "I believed I had to serve the nation," he says from his Madras-based M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, which is involved in a range of activities, including ways to hook farmers up to the Internet. He almost became a police officer, but a 1949 fellowship to study genetics in the Netherlands changed his career path. In 1952 he earned his Ph.D from Cambridge University, then crossed the Atlantic on the liner Queen Elizabeth to do further studies in Wisconsin. There he turned down a professorship. "I asked myself, why did I study genetics? It was to produce enough food in India. So I came back."

Swaminathan's poor, overpopulated homeland was importing vast amounts of grain. "Importing food was like importing unemployment," he recalls. "Seventy percent of our people were employed in agriculture. We were supporting farmers in other countries." By 1966, Swaminathan was director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi, spending his time in fields with farmers trying to help improve their productivity. Fertilizers were a dead end: when the wheat plant's pod grew more seeds, its stalk collapsed under the weight. With help from the Rockefeller Foundation, Swaminathan found a cross-bred wheat seed, part-Japanese and part-Mexican, that was both fruitful and staunch. (He would later marry this plant to an Indian variety to produce the golden-colored grain favored by Indians.)

That was the breakthrough in the Green Revolution, but there was a lot more work to be done. Indian farmers, immersed in traditional ways, had to be convinced to grow the new wheat. In 1966, Swaminathan set up 2,000 model farms in villages outside New Delhi to show farmers what his seed could do. Then came the hardest part. He needed the government to help--specifically, to import 18,000 tons of the Mexican seed at a time of fiscal hardship. Swaminathan lobbied then-Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. "He probably thought nothing could be worse," Swaminathan recalls. "Famine was imminent. There was a willingness to take risks." The first harvest with the new seeds was three times greater than the previous year's.

But the revolution was still incomplete. Only Punjab state had the right irrigation for the new technologies, the state-run food collection and distribution networks were notoriously inefficient, and new fertilizers and pesticides were needed, along with credit lines for small farmers. Political leadership was vital to solve that tangle of problems, and Swaminathan found it in Shastri's successor. "Indira Gandhi was a strong nationalist," he recalls. "She wanted an independent foreign policy, and food was a political weapon." Gandhi bluntly asked him how India could be free of imports and gave Swaminathan a free hand to organize a new agricultural program. Today, India grows some 70 million tons of wheat a year, compared to 12 million tons in the early '60s.

Swaminathan now believes farmers must adopt more eco-friendly methods, and he's using his influence to spread the message. And although populations continue to mushroom, he maintains that still greater harvests are possible. All that's needed, he says, is "inspiration, perspiration and luck." The greatest stroke of luck for hundreds of millions of Asians has been Swaminathan's revolution.

Reported by Meenakshi Ganguly/Madras





The Most Influential Asians of the Century

Asians of the Century
A cavalcade of towering individuals and a newly awakened populace

Why Adam Smith Would Love Asia
Asia has been the proving ground for global capitalism

Ending Silence
Asian women are celebrating hard-won triumphs

Viewpoint
Embrace the wisdom of democracy and capitalism

t h e  l i s t

Hirohito
Ho Chi Minh
Pol Pot
Issey Miyake
Daisuke Inoue
Rabindranath Tagore
Sun Yat-sen
Mohandas Gandhi
Sukarno
Mao Zedong
Lee Kuan Yew
Deng Xiaoping
Corazon Aquino
Park Chung Hee
Eiji Toyoda
King Rama
Swaminathan
Akira Kurosawa
Dalai Lama
Akio Morita



This edition's table of contents

AsiaNow


   LATEST HEADLINES:

WASHINGTON
U.S. secretary of state says China should be 'tolerant'

MANILA
Philippine government denies Estrada's claim to presidency

ALLAHABAD
Faith, madness, magic mix at sacred Hindu festival

COLOMBO
Land mine explosion kills 11 Sri Lankan soldiers

TOKYO
Japan claims StarLink found in U.S. corn sample

BANGKOK
Thai party announces first coalition partner



TIME:

COVER: President Joseph Estrada gives in to the chanting crowds on the streets of Manila and agrees to make room for his Vice President

THAILAND: Twin teenage warriors turn themselves in to Bangkok officials

CHINA: Despite official vilification, hip Chinese dig Lamaist culture

PHOTO ESSAY: Estrada Calls Snap Election

WEB-ONLY INTERVIEW: Jimmy Lai on feeling lucky -- and why he's committed to the island state



ASIAWEEK:

COVER: The DoCoMo generation - Japan's leading mobile phone company goes global

Bandwidth Boom: Racing to wire - how underseas cable systems may yet fall short

TAIWAN: Party intrigues add to Chen Shui-bian's woes

JAPAN: Japan's ruling party crushes a rebel ì at a cost

SINGAPORE: Singaporeans need to have more babies. But success breeds selfishness


Launch CNN's Desktop Ticker and get the latest news, delivered right on your desktop!

Today on CNN
 Search

Back to the top   © 2000 Time Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Terms under which this service is provided to you.
Read our privacy guidelines.