In the hullabaloo over the U.S.-India nuclear deal, analysts have paid little attention to an equally important accord on agriculture that was announced on President George W. Bush's visit to New Delhi last week.

Under the terms of the deal, a framework for which was drafted when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Washington in July 2005, the U.S. and India will link their agriculture institutes and conduct joint research in biotechnology to develop, among other things, drought- and heat- resistant crops.

Singh said in parliament that the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, as the accord is named, “will become the harbinger of a second Green Revolution in our country.”

India's first Green Revolution also depended to a great extent on American know-how. When Iowa-born agronomist Norman Borlaug gave his high-yielding hybrid seeds to India in 1965, wheat production in the country was 12 million tons. Last year, it was 72 million tons.

Following the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, even publicly funded research in U.S. universities and institutes is patented and licensed out for commercial development to companies such as St. Louis-based Monsanto Co., the world's biggest producer of genetically modified seeds.

If the nuclear deal promises relief for India's power- starved industrial sector, the agricultural agreement has the potential to transform the nation's poverty-ridden countryside. The economics are simply unbeatable.

(www.checkbiotech.org)