Norman Borlaug quotes

Norman Borlaug was an American scientist, agronomist, and humanitarian credited with sparking the Green Revolution. His innovative work in developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops helped save millions from starvation, especially in developing countries. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest contributors to global food security in the twentieth century. Here are 42 of his quotes:

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

Norman Borlaug

During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago.

Norman Borlaug

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

Norman Borlaug

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

Norman Borlaug

Therefore I feel that the aforementioned guiding principle must be modified to read: If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.

Norman Borlaug

The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

Norman Borlaug

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.

Norman Borlaug

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

Norman Borlaug

I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called "organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.

Norman Borlaug

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

Norman Borlaug

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.

Norman Borlaug

There are no miracles in agricultural production.

Norman Borlaug

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

Norman Borlaug

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.

Norman Borlaug

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.

Norman Borlaug

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.

Norman Borlaug

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

Norman Borlaug

I am but one member of a vast team made up of many organizations, officials, thousands of scientists, and millions of farmers - mostly small and humble - who for many years have been fighting a quiet, oftentimes losing war on the food production front.

Norman Borlaug

Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

Norman Borlaug

It is a sad fact that on this earth at this late date there are still two worlds, "the privileged world" and "the forgotten world". The privileged world consists of the affluent, developed nations, comprising twenty-five to thirty percent of the world population, in which most of the people live in a luxury never before experienced by man outside the Garden of Eden. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

Norman Borlaug

It's a free society. But don't tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That's when this misinformation becomes destructive.

Norman Borlaug

Water covers about 70 percent of the Earth's surface. Of this total, only about 2.5 percent is fresh water, and most of this is frozen in the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland, in soil moisture, or in deep aquifers not readily accessible for human use.

Norman Borlaug