PL 480 and its effect on India
In 1965 India was having severe shortage of Rice and basic cereals. US stepped in and helped with a program of funding through which rice from US was supplied to India through 600 ships over a year. In turn India agreed through Treaty of Rome to more private access in the agriculture and fertilizer sector.
This link gives a perspective from US of this issue
“The USDA tapped logistics specialists who had served in the Army Quartermaster Corps in World War II. They leased an Esso supertanker longer than a football field, theManhattan, and anchored it in the Bay of Bengal to act as a floating harbor, because India's ports were insufficient to handle so vast a scale of imports.Trains delivered U.S. Midwestern wheat to ships awaiting them in Galveston, Texas, and New Orleans. About two ships a day left for India, more than 600 in all, according to Brown’s 2013 memoir, Breaking New Ground. They docked to the Manhattan and emptied their grain into it. Thirty-foot boats called dhows then filled up with grain and carried it up the Ganges. About one-fifth of the U.S. wheat harvest in 1965 was shipped to South Asia. India produced only 77 million tons of grain, 18 million tons below the official demand projections.”
Treaty of Rome opened up Indian Agriculture and Fertilizer industry to private entities. Main points of this treaty:
You can read the full document of Treaty of Rome here
Why is it called PL 480: “Public Law 480 also known as Food for Peace (and commonly abbreviated PL 480) is a funding avenue by which US food can be used for overseas aid.”
India paid for this through Books!
“American Congress and various US libraries were able to use rupees from Indian purchases of U.S. agricultural products (PL 480) to buy Indian books. The USAID New Delhi Field Office implementing the program started the thorough and systematic acquisition of publications in the modern languages of South Asia. Today, the South Asian collection in the USA holds material in over fifty modern languages used in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The majority of the 350,000 publications are in Hindi (20 percent), Bengali (15 percent), Urdu (13 percent), and Tamil (11 percent). Other languages represented in large numbers include Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Kannada. ”
More details here
Did this program affect the Indian farmers badly?
From USDA sponsored study:
Full text is available here
