ON YOUR RICE PLATE…. Earl Butz, a former US Secretary of - TopicsExpress

ON YOUR RICE PLATE…. Earl Butz, a former US Secretary of Agriculture, is notorious for one sentence that he uttered ‘If food can be used as a weapon we would be happy to use it.’ IRRI had been set up in 1960 as part of America’s efforts to control and direct rice research in Asia, even though American is hardly a rice eating country. A famous plant-breeder had once said, in regard to rice: ‘He who controls the supply of rice will control the destiny of the entire Asiatic orbit. IRRI was established on the basis of a note written by a Rockefeller official in 1959. Both the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations put up the money to start the institute, which was established formally in 1960. Already this international institute, always run by American directors, was facing the collapse of its High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) strategy, as seed after seed fell victim to waves of pest epidemics. The IRRI is not a premier institute of science. It is a privately-controlled agricultural research centre. Even so, it is difficult to conceive of a man with Swaminathan’s record becoming its director general. The Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI), at Cuttack, had been working on the different problems associated with rice culture ever since it had been set up in the late 1950s. Dr R.H. Richharia took over as its director in 1959, and a number of competent scientists had come up with interesting works. When the news arrived that the Indian government was planning, at the insistence of IRRI experts, to import the new IRRI seed in bulk into India, violating the country’s laws, Dr Richharia, CRRI director, objected. The government found Dr Richharia’s advice contradictory to it’s plans, the government decided to retire Dr Richharia, at that time he was one of the world’s leading rice specialists. Moreover, Douglas Emswinger of the Ford Foundation boasted that he had better access to Pandit Nehru than any of the latter’s cabinet colleagues. Two major developments totally ruined the prospects of a land overflowing with rice and honey. • The first was economic: the oil price hike which would make Green Revolution inputs so expensive • The second major problem: also irreversible, arrived in the form of disease and insects due to the growing of varieties with a narrow genetic base. In India, again, Dr Richharia stood in the way. After he had been retired from service at Chandler’s insistence, Richharia had gone to the Orissa High Court, where for three years, alone, he fought a legal battle that ruined his family, disrupted the education of his children, and brought tremendous strains on his wife’s health. The legal battle was successful, for in 1970, the Court ordered his reinstatement as director of the CRRI. He had redeemed his honour. In the meanwhile, the Madhya Pradesh government had appointed Dr Richharia as an agricultural advisor, and the rice man set about his disrupted rice work once again, with his usual zeal. Within the space of six years, he had built up the infrastructure of a new rice research institute at Raipur. Here, this extraordinarily gifted and imaginative rice scientist maintained over 19,000 varieties of rice with a small budget of Rs. 20,000 per annum, with not even a microscope in his office-cum-laboratory, situated in the neighborhood of cooperative rice mills. His assistants included two agricultural graduates and six village level workers, the latter drawing a salary of Rs.250 per month. Richharia had created, practically out of nothing, one of the most extraordinary living gene banks in the world, and provided ample proof of what Indian scientists are capable of.