M.S. Swaminathan is more than a guru to Indians. He is a living legend. A green legend, to whom rural India – if not the entire sub-continent – owes a great debt. After all, he is the revered Father of India's Green Revolution, the first Food Laureate of the World Food Prize and world renowned pathfinder in the journey to achieving a hunger-free world.
Professor MS Swaminathan, president of the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, stands tall among Asia's environmental activitists, for he has walked the talk.
To him, peace and security are the pre-requisites to socially, environmentally and economically sustainable development.
Which is why it is imperative the world's population must have access to food, he says.
In 1971, when accepting the Ramon Magasaysay Award for Community Leadership, professor Swaminathan cited Roman philosopher Seneca, who said: “A hungry person listens neither to reason nor to religion, nor is bent by any prayer.” It is a given, he says, that where hunger rules, peace cannot prevail.
He has spent all his adult life striving to create a new world order that ensures food on the table for everyone – initially in his homeland, and now elsewhere in Asia and Africa.The International Commission on Peace and Food that he chaired spelt out a clear three-point strategy for lasting peace in its report in 1994 titled Uncommon Opportunities: An Agenda for Peace and Equitable Development.
It urged concurrent attention to the interrelated components of food security:
· Availability, which is a function of balance between production and/or procurement and demand.
· Access, which is a function of jobs or work livelihoods for income generation.
· Absorption, which is a function of clean drinking water, primary health care, primary education and environmental hygience.
Prof Swaminathan repeatedly emphasises that our common future depends on our common present, and that bridging the nutrition divide is fundamental to bridging all other divides.Widely respected for his effective advocacy for sustainable development, especially using environmentally sustainable agriculture, sustainable food security and the preservation of biodiversity, his motto is simple: “If conservation of natural resources goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right."
In 2005, he was quoted as saying:"I am firmly convinced that hunger and deprivation can be eliminated sooner than most people consider feasible, provided there is a synergy among technology, public policy and social action".
He often answers serious questions and requests with the reply: "Why Not?".His positive attitude perhaps stems from his happy childhood, strongly influenced by the strong moral character and work ethic of his parents.
Unfortunately, his father, a surgeon, died suddenly when Swaminathan was a 11 years old. Swaminathan bonded with and learned much from his uncle, a teacher and scholar of English literature, Tamil and Sanskrit at Madras University.
His early schooling was at the Native High School and later at the Little Flower Catholic High School in Kumbakonam. He was only 15 years old when he graduated from high school in 1940. He went to college at Maharajas College in Trivandrum and earned a Bachelor’s degree in zoology.
Swaminathan was strongly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s unique belief in ahimsa or non-violence to achieve Purna swaraj (total freedom) and swadeshi, (self-reliance) on both a personal and national level.
During this time of wartime food shortages he chose a career in agriculture and enrolled in Coimbatore Agricultural College where he graduated as class valedictorian with another B.Sc, this time in Agricultural Science.
He learned an important lesson while doing field extension work at Coimbatore: Men and women toiling daily in the fields know their jobs better than a scientific expert. "Trust the judgement of farmers."
In 1947, the year of Indian independence, he moved to the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi as a post-graduate student in genetics and plant breeding and obtained his post-graduate degree there with high distinction in Cytogenetics in 1949.
He began his lifelong association with UNESCO when he received a UNESCO Fellowship to continue his IARI research on potato genetics at the Wageningen Agricultural University's Institute of Genetics in the Netherlands. Here he succeeded in standardizing procedures for transferring genes from a wide range of wild species of Solanum to the cultivated potato, Solanum tuberosum.
In 1950, he moved to study at Cambridge University's the Plant Breeding Institute at its School of Agriculture. He earned his Ph.D degree there in 1952 for his thesis, "Species Differentiation, and the Nature of Polyploidy in certain species of the genus Solanum – section Tuberarium". His work presented a new concept of the species relationships within the tuber-bearing Solanums.
Degrees in hand, Swaminathan accepted a post-doctoral research associateship at the University of Wisconsin's Department of Genetics to help set up a United States Department of Agriculture Potato Research Station.
Despite his strong personal and professional satisfaction with the research work in Wisconsin, he declined an attractive offer of a full time faculty position there, because his purpose of getting an excellent foreign education was to equip himself for serving the cause of Indian agriculture. He returned to India in early 1954.
Since Cambridge, Prof Swaminathan is said to have garnered 56 other doctorate degrees from various national and international universities.
Apart from presiding over the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, itself a recipient of the Noble Peace Prize, Prof Swaminathan set up the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, India, in 1988. This is actively engaged in promoting the concept of community banks as an instrument of sustainable food and nutrition security, with all the state governments in India.
The idea is that such food banks (CFBs) could be started at village level, with initial food supplies coming as a grant from governments and donor agencies like the World Food programme.Later, these can be sustained through local purchases and from continued government and international support.
Today, Prof Swaminathan is, like the rest of us, preoccupied with the issue of climate change. To him, the climate change menace stands at three levels: global, urban and rural.Earlier this year, on the sidelines of a conference, he said: “Climate change, right now, is at a very high level, with its implications discussed across the globe, but mainly at mega conferences and summits.
“With the issue being further divided between developed and developing countries, it is at a stage where we don’t accept our responsibility in the first place. People beyond these conference halls are stuck in their day-to-day life.
“Taking the example of India, most people here are concerned about their local problems. For those in rural areas where we work, things could go out of hand to affect survival and livelihood issue, if the issues of climate change are not addressed fast.
“We see the effects of climate change coming up, but people are not able to see its larger picture as they are still caught in their individual concerns of securing food, income and livelihood.”
So what can we do?
The good professor believes time is against us and that we need a feasible solution urgently.
“We also have to work out other issues like food security and strengthening the capacity of our local community to fight droughts or floods. We need to educate them and make them aware. There is a lot to be done in the cities too, where people again don’t acknowledge it much,” he said, referring mainly to India but with reference to the rest of the world.
But he was surprisingly upbeat about the corporate role in India in addressing climate change.
“We do see some good moves. Talking about ITC’s e-choupal, the models are indeed business, but with people like YC Deveshwar at the helm, the socially beneficial aspects are also considered. The commitment to address local issues is increasing and so is public sector participation.
“But, besides the desire to look for more participants, I want support for the programmes that are running. The content creation at these knowledge centres must be stronger with newer queries of the farmers being answered . Then comes the capacity building of local people.
“But there is a lot more to be done still.”
His dream today is for an Evergreen Revolution – achieving productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm.
With Professor M.S. Swaminathan – a living green legend – nothing is impossible.
