Lester Brown portrait (How an American With a Knack for Math Saved India From Famine) - Bloomberg Business
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-19/how-an-american-with-a-knack-for-math-saved-india-from-famine
He’d begin his days reading newspapers from around the country, each of which seemed to carry isolated accounts of local droughts. That was one puzzle piece. The head of Esso (now ExxonMobil) in India, whom he met at a diplomatic reception, glowed about business: Indian farmers had doubled their diesel purchases over the previous year to power irrigation pumps running full throttle to water dying crops. One more piece of the puzzle. An embassy official Brown knew showed up at work unexpectedly one day when he had said he’d be in the north duck-hunting. The man had canceled his annual trip because the lake had run dry. Another piece.
The anecdotal evidence piled up and pointed to one conclusion. The country’s farmers would fall dramatically short of the grain needed by Indians, then numbering 480 million. Famine was imminent.
From whatever data he could assemble, Brown projected a deficit of at least 10 million tons of grain