India has toiled to exorcise the ghost of food scarcity ever since the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, when an estimated four million people withered to death largely because the nation depended on foreigners for food, says the International Herald Tribune.

Self-sufficiency became the mantra after British rule ended in 1947. When the use of American hybrid seeds in the 1960s spawned a "green revolution" of more fecund farms, food security became the hallmark of sovereign India.

Now all that appears to be over.

This year, the country imported wheat for the first time since 2000. And then this week, traders worldwide bid up wheat prices after a startling forecast by US wheat producers that India is set to become the world's largest importer this year, pulling ahead of Egypt with eight million tonnes of imports from Australia, the US and other exporters. The figure was about 50% higher than analysts had projected.

"I'm quite confident, as are most of the traders, that when the year is over, India will probably import eight million tonnes," Mark Samson, Vice-President for South Asia at US Wheat Associates, a trade group representing American wheat producers and state governments, said in a telephone interview from Singapore.

The group's forecast helped drive the price of wheat to a two-year high on the Paris commodity exchange.

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