Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [27]
This piece of purple prose concluded with an exhortation: “Write to us for a brochure entitled ‘The Exciting World of Union Carbide.’ In it you’ll find out how our resources in the different domains of carbon, chemical products, gases, metals, plastic goods and energy continue daily to work new wonders in your life.”
“New wonders in your life.” This eloquent promise was soon to find a spectacular opportunity for fulfillment. It was at a time when India was trying desperately to banish the ancestral specter of famine. After the severe food shortages at the beginning of the 1960s, the situation was at last improving. The source of this miracle was an apparently unassuming batch of Mexican grain. Christened Sonora 63 by its creator, the American agronomist and future Nobel peace prize winner, Norman Borlang, the grain produced a new variety of high-yielding corn. With heavy ears that were not susceptible to wind, light variation or torrential monsoon rains, and short stems that were less greedy, this fast growing seed made it possible to have several harvests a year on the same plot of land. It brought about a great change, the famous Green Revolution.
This innovation suffered serious constraints, however. In order for the high-yielding seeds to produce the multiple harvests expected of them, they needed lots of water and fertilizer. In five years, between 1966 and 1971, the Green Revolution multiplied India’s consumption of fertilizer by three. And that was not all. The very narrow genetic base of high-yield varieties and the monoculture associated with them made the new crop ten times more vulnerable to disease and insects. Rice became the favorite target for at least a hundred different species of predatory insects. Most devastating were the small flies known as green leafhoppers. The stylets with which they sucked the sap from young shoots could destroy several acres of rice fields in a few days. In the Punjab and other states, the invasion of a form of striped aphid decimated the cotton plantations. Against this scourge, India had found itself virtually defenseless. In its desire to promote the country’s industrialization, the government had encouraged the local production of pesticides. Faced with the enormity of demand, however, locally manufactured products had shown themselves to be cruelly inadequate. What was more, a fair number contained either DDT or HCH (hexachlorocyclohexane), substances considered so dangerous to flora, fauna and humans that a number of countries had banned their use.
Finding themselves unable to provide their peasants with a massive supply of effective pesticides, in 1966 Indian leaders decided to turn to foreign manufacturers. Several companies, among them Carbide, were already established in the country. The New York multinational was interested enough to dispatch one of its best scouts from its sales team to New Delhi. It chose the young Argentinian agronomical engineer, Eduardo Muñoz. After all, hadn’t this engaging sales representative managed to convert the whole of South America to the benefits of Sevin? Muñoz promptly proved himself up to the task by inaugurating his mission with a masterstroke.
The legendary emperor Asoka who had spread the Buddha’s message of nonviolence throughout India would have been amazed. On a winter evening in 1966, the hotel in New Delhi that