Norman Borlaug Quotes

There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today. With organic farming we could only feed four billion of them. Which two billion would volunteer to die?

The green revolution has an entirely different meaning to most people in the affluent nations of the privileged world than to those in the developing nations of the forgotten world.

You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.

Everything else can wait, agriculture can’t.

Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply.

Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world.

Almost certainly, however, the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.

This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.

Without food, man at most can live but a few weeks; without it all other components of social justice are meaningless.

The destiny of world civilization depends upon providing a decent standard of living for all mankind.

Cereal production in the rain-fed areas still remains relatively unaffected by the impact of the green revolution, but significant change and progress are now becoming evident in several countries

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.

Yet food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry.

Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply.

There are no miracles in agricultural production.

Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages - and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.

We are 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.

Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists.