Hyderabad: It was in a brightly-lit room in Mexico City, Mexico, where on June 18 US Secretary of State John Kerry announced to the world that India-born Dr Sanjay Rajaram had been named this year’s winner of the prestigious World Food Prize. Dr Rajaram wins this award for successfully crossbreeding the winter and spring wheat varieties, which have been two distinct and isolated gene pools since the dawn of farming. And because of this breakthrough, the scientist has been able to breed over 480 high-yielding wheat varieties... and the seeds from that stunning effort can now be found spread over 50 countries, across six continents.
No other individual has had that sort of impact in the fight against world hunger — except perhaps Dr Rajaram’s mentor Norman Borlaug — Nobel Peace prize winner, the man who set up the World Food Prize in the first place and the only other scientist apart from Rajaram, who had the “extraordinary ability” to identify plants ideal for crossbreeding, just by looking at them.
But Norman Borlaug passed away in 2009 and now it’s just Dr Rajaram and a handful of others, trying their best to solve a problem that has been haunting the industrial age for years — hunger, which kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria and TB... combined.
“The numbers are certainly overwhelming,” says Dr Rajaram. “But that’s why we need to persist, attempt and achieve. Food security must stop being just a dream and the world’s governments must work towards implementing it.”
Early Years
But Dr Rajaram has always worked against the odds. Born in Varanasi in 1943, his family lived off a plot of land growing wheat, rice and maize. The children however, were given education at a school five kilometres away, at a time when much of the country was still new to chalk. “After my education here in India, I went off to Australia for my PhD and soon I joined CIMMYT (the International Maize and wheat improvement centre) in Mexico, where my career as a plant breeder started.”
“You have work with the people. You cannot be seen as the person shouting the orders. This job needs you to step up… and prescribe real-world solutions at the very basic level. My background in farming helped a lot and we were successful in implementing several ideas that eventually led to better yields.”
He continues: “Every country is unique — there’s climate patterns, culture, the financial situation and each of the nations I visited needed a different set of solutions. There’s no single model you can completely rely on.” Dr Rajaram’s solutions became part of what is widely described as the world’s first “wheat network”, a global exchange of “genetic information and innovations among researchers”. His varieties of wheat were strong in nutrition, delayed the onset of the dreaded rust and were able to survive the harshest of conditions. Wheat then — the primary source of nutrition for 4.5 billion people in over 100 countries — had found new hope, in the hands of a man from Varanasi.
“As food scientists, our sole mission is to make sure the planet is able to sustain the population and that there’s enough nutritious food despite economic deficiencies,” adds Dr Rajaram.
The India challenge
It’s been 45 years in Mexico for Dr Rajaram and now, since his stint as the head of CIMMYT, he’s moved into consulting. Which is why his more recent efforts have been at home. “India is indeed a paradox. Despite a space programme, 300 million people in this country go to bed on a hungry stomach. Food security and storage still remain a problem and there is need for stronger policy-making. But we haven’t lost the plot. The private sector must play a stronger role in farming and the right education must not be limited to board rooms because the know-how needs to reach the average farmer. His is, and has been for a while in this country, the most important job.”
Dr Rajaram is currently consulting with a project backed by a major private player up in the North. “I have my roots here. Like I said, each country needs its own set of solutions and India is very, very different. The soil, the people, language, the economy… it’s as diverse as it gets and my work here will continue for a while.”
‘Learning will never stop’
After nearly half a century in the field, Dr Rajaram says his work is still not finished. “In science, you never stop learning. I have been doing this all my life and I’ve never really had time. As far as hobbies go, well, there’s a bit of music I like to listen to and that’s pretty much it. I have been on a constant journey pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and today, there’s still work left. Perhaps the only regret is maybe I should’ve spent more time with my family while the children were growing up but my job needed that commitment… it really needed those extra hours from me. News of the award certainly reached my family and it has been all over the news and everyone’s certainly delighted. But again, there’s still work tomorrow and that’s good… because the learning must never stop and the world must not go hungry.”
