By Arani Acharya

In 1951, shortly after independence and the partitioning of the subcontinent, the monsoon rains failed to arrive in parts of India and Pakistan. The previous year’s harvest had already been poor, and this shock plunged the subcontinent into an acute food crisis. Shrewd rationing policy by the Indian and Pakistani governments and emergency imports from the U.S. helped prevent the drought from escalating into a massive famine of the sort that repeatedly afflicted the subcontinent under British colonial rule. Nevertheless, thousands perished from hunger. 

Already reeling from the economic impacts of Partition, Bengal found itself in a precarious position. The division of the subcontinent along religious lines severed West Bengal from much of the fertile agricultural hinterland it relied on, which mostly ended up on the other side of the border. Overnight the state became dependent on the rest of India for its food supply. Across the Radcliffe Line, East Pakistan fared little better. Still reeling from Partition and limited by unequal investment from the central government, it saw only a 1% annual growth in its rice production in the 1950s – outpaced by population growth.

Cold War Geopolitics and Wheat

The drought crisis arrived at a convenient time for Washington. Keen to court newly independent South Asian governments during the Cold War, President Truman signed into law the India Emergency Food Aid Act on June 15, 1951. He declared that “This act is an expression of the spontaneous, heartfelt desire of the American people to help the Indian people in their time of need.” The law provided India $190 million in loans for the purchase of 2 million tons of American grain. In the following year Congress authorized $15 million in loans through the Mutual Security Act of 1951 to the Pakistani government for the purchase of 150,000 tons of wheat, facilitated by the Export-Import Bank. The U.S. promised both governments that the interest payments on these loans would be reinvested in the subcontinent. This cooperation laid the groundwork for a further 700,000 tons of wheat to be provided to Pakistan in 1953 through a patchwork of aid programs and loans. These shipments helped draw Pakistan away from Soviet influence and towards America. In 1949 and 1952 respectively the USSR supplied Pakistan with 126,000 and 150,000 tons of wheat imports. 

The success of these grants and loans, Cold War calculus, and massive agricultural surpluses in the U.S. inspired the 1954 creation of Eisenhower’s Food For Peace program by Congress through Public Law 480 (P.L.480). Under the program, India and Pakistan became the two largest recipients of American food assistance worldwide. Pakistan received hundreds of millions of dollars in wheat grants during the sixties, including 1 million metric tons shipped during the 1969 drought which saw a 90% reduction in rainfall across southern districts. Through the 1960s India received more than $1.5 billion of P.L.480 assistance, including 15 million metric tons of American wheat. The 1966-67 Indian food shortage saw 8.1 million tons of wheat shipped in one year alone.

Contrary to Truman’s pronouncement, however, food aid was never purely humanitarian. During the 1965 India-Pakistan war, the Johnson administration threatened to cut food assistance to India and leveraged its position to ensure that “the Indian government would implement agricultural reforms and temper [its] criticism of U.S. policy regarding Vietnam.” Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri responded with the “Shastri Vrat” – a nationwide fast every Monday aimed at reducing dependence on American grain, and called on Indians to eat just one meal a day in order to preserve supplies for the army.

After the 1971 Liberation War, Food for Peace grants helped sustain newly independent Bangladesh, with over 1.5 million metric tons of wheat shipped between 1971 and 1986. Food shipments fluctuated over the years as ties between Washington and Dhaka waxed and waned, including over a half million tons of wheat shipped in 1975 following the previous year’s flood-induced famine. This aid was crucially delayed by many months because Bangladesh was trading jute with Cuba, a longtime American foe. By the time Bangladesh stopped trading with Cuba and American aid was finally disbursed, hundreds of thousands of Bengalis had already died of hunger. McHenry and Bird write that “The U.S. government employed its food aid leverage in Bangladesh for the most trifling of political purposes.” This withholding demonstrates the hard-hearted geopolitical calculations behind American generosity during the Cold War.

The Culinary Legacy of P.L.480 Wheat

The Food For Peace program left a legacy far beyond the realm of geopolitics. It permanently reshaped eating habits in the countries it served. The wheat that arrived in the subcontinent through P.L.480 was hard red wheat of the kind grown in the American Great Plains, typically fed to livestock animals. It made firmer and darker-colored chapatis than those made from subcontinental soft wheat varieties. 

Prior to the 1950s, wheat-products were relatively scarce in the villages of Bengal. Though the average Bengali was familiar with rutis, luchis, singaras, parathas, sooji’r halwa, and leavened breads, these were sporadic luxuries made from relatively expensive wheat grains imported from North India and West Pakistan. These dishes were mainly consumed in cities by wealthier households, and infrequently prepared in more rural areas. Sometimes they were prepared using rice and gram flour.

Owing to the wet tropical climate of Bengal, wheat is only grown in certain drier regions during the winter months. The overwhelming majority of Bengalis’ daily caloric intake comes from rice, which grows prolifically in the fertile soils of the Ganges delta. Emergency rations in West Bengal, Bangladesh, and erstwhile East Pakistan saw the large-scale distribution of wheat to the Bengali peasantry. Through ration shops, relief programs, restaurants, and eventually ordinary markets, the grain gradually became a daily fixture in our cuisine. 

The same American foreign policies contributed to wider availability of wheat across the rest of Asia as well, creating new markets for wheat based foods and reshaping local culinary traditions. In 1958 in Japan, against the backdrop of postwar food shortages, government efforts to increase wheat consumption, and increasing wheat imports from the U.S., industrialist Momofuku Ando invented instant ramen. By flash frying wheat noodles he created a cheap, shelf stable, and filling meal which he sold across the country through his company Nissin.

In 1971 the Indonesian industrial tycoon Sudono Salim opened the Bogasari Flour Mills in Jakarta, the first large-scale flour mills in the country and today the largest in the world, after years of sending U.S. wheat imports to Singapore to be ground into flour at a premium. The following year, Salim’s companies began producing instant noodles that would eventually be sold under the globally beloved Indomie brand. In Maharashtra, the local devotional folk song “Bappa Morya Re” by poet Harendra Jadhav preserves the memory of P.L.480 wheat in popular culture by specifically mentioning the “red modaks” made for Ganesh puja using American red wheat when rice was unaffordable. Across Asia, the partial caloric substitution of rice led to greater culinary normalization of wheat products.

These shifts are not limited to wheat. Dry milk, rapeseed oil, soya beans, and corn all found their way into Bengali kitchens through Food for Peace assistance. P.L.480 grants also funded the establishment of agricultural universities, power generation plants, irrigation projects, and malaria eradication schemes across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. 

Of course U.S. policy is not the only reason that Bengalis eat so much more wheat today than in the past. Urbanization, globalization, state rationing, economic development, and the Green Revolution did most of the work. Nevertheless, American policy made the grain far more accessible and familiar to the culture, rapidly accelerating its proliferation. Today, rutis, parathas, luchis, pantuas, phuchkas, and other wheat-based foods are daily staples for Bengalis, as opposed to the occasional indulgences of the past.

The Green Revolution

In the 1950s and 60s the great American agronomist and Nobel Peace Laureate Norman Borlaug, along with colleagues, developed semi-dwarf high-yielding disease-resistant strains of wheat while working at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico. American institutions including the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations funded the adoption of these strains in India and Pakistan, alongside U.S. backed agricultural development programs. 

Local scientists selected and bred wheat strains for South Asian conditions in Borlaug’s labs in Mexico. The Indian scientist MS Swaminathan worked with Dr. Borlaug to develop the Kalyan Sona and Sonalika strains that increased yields threefold. Pakistani scientist Manzoor Ahmed Bajwa collaborated with Borlaug to create the Mexi-Pak strain that was quickly adopted across the country. These varieties greatly increased South Asia’s wheat production as part of the broader Green Revolution, further spreading the grain on the market. High yielding rice and maize strains were also developed and adopted. Food aid had provided short term relief but exposed South Asian governments to American political leverage. The Green Revolution mostly eliminated this dependence.

Food For Peace Today

Food has always been political – deeply tied to trade and state policy. The Food for Peace program has been a strikingly effective tool in America’s soft power arsenal, wielded both as a force for humanitarian relief and as a geopolitical weapon. Senator George McGovern once famously described P.L.480 as being “a far better weapon than a bomber in our competition with the Communists for influence in the developing world.” Its history raises the contemporary question – what happens when a country abandons one of its most important means of international assistance?

Today the Food for Peace program has been largely gutted in the Trump administration’s efforts at improving government efficiency. Following DOGE’s closure of USAID, Food for Peace has been punted to the Department of Agriculture which lacks the same international disaster relief infrastructure, raising questions that the program may increasingly serve domestic agricultural interests rather than the broader diplomatic goals that originally shaped it. This year, only seven countries have been selected to receive American grain, overlooking many hunger-stricken regions of the world such as Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Mali. 

After threatening the Indian government with an end to U.S. assistance during its inconclusive 1965 war against Pakistan, President Johnson remarked that “Food is a powerful tool in the hands of this government.” He was right. American policymakers would do well to remember that wheat is not just calories, but a means of projecting influence around the world. The history of Food for Peace reminds us, however, that geopolitics does not end in smoke-filled rooms or in minefields and missile silos. Sometimes it ends on the dinner table. The luchis and rutis we eat today carry a history that stretches from the wheat fields of Kansas to the villages of Bengal.