At age 85, Indian geneticist Monkombu Swaminathan is a remarkable specimen of human optimism.
The widely acknowledged Father of India’s 1970s Green Revolution that is credited with increasing wheat production exponentially, saving millions of lives from recurring famine, is on a new campaign.
Hunger in Asia can be eradicated by 2015, “in my lifetime,” he said in Ottawa last week, there to promote his new vision of an “evergreen” revolution of sustainable food and social development and en route to Edmonton to receive his first Canadian honourary doctorate from the University of Alberta.
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A score of other universities already have extended the honour.
Canada’s International Development Research Council has supported Swaminathan through his long career.
He is promoting a holistic approach to tackling hunger that involves food production, environmental sustain-ability and social equity that allows poor people to buy food.
As the world marks World Food Day Oct. 16 while close to one billion people are chronically hungry and all the tall talk of governments over 20 years has failed to reduce that level, Swaminathan’s message is a powerful expression of hope.
“Hunger today, in my view, is not a problem of nature,” he said in Ottawa. “It is a man-made problem. It can be eliminated if there is a will to do so.”
He comes by the optimism honestly. He has seen the power of the marriage between political will and science to tackle a problem as seemingly intractable as starvation in India.
As a young geneticist working in the United States and specializing in potato research, he was offered the job of running a potato chip operation. Instead he returned to India where famine was a recurring blight.
Swaminathan worked with plant breeders, politicians and farmers to organize import of dwarf wheat varieties that turned the country from a food basket case to an exporter.
Yet India remains the country with the largest number of hungry people in the world.
As an appointed MP in India’s parliament, he is promoting a bill to make access to food a legal right, guaranteeing all citizens at least 25 kilograms of rice each month.
In his life, Swaminathan has rubbed shoulders with greatness in his pursuit of a better food policy and a better food source.
In the 1960s, he worked with American plant breeding icon Norman Borlaug to find high-yielding dwarf wheat that would flourish in India. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work to find varieties that increased production and reduced hunger.
And in 1962, Swaminathan completed a PhD thesis at Cambridge University in genetic research. In the lab next door were scientists Harry Crick and James Watson who in 1963 won a Nobel prize for discovering the genetic DNA that is the building block of life and the basis of all genetic research since.
“I missed it by a year,” he jokes. But Swaminathan has made an amazing impact on world hunger and he continues to dream of better days ahead.
It is a fitting touch of optimism for World Food Day.
