Norman Borlaug: Quotes about the world

Norman Borlaug was American biologist. Explore interesting quotes on world.

Norman Borlaug: 10 quotes0 likes

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

From "Eat This!", an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit!; Quoted in: Gary Beene (2011) The Seeds We Sow: Kindness that Fed a Hungry World. p. 9

“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

30th Anniversary Lecture, The Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo, September 8, 2000; Quoted in: Ronald Bailey (2002) Global warming and other eco-myths. p. 59

“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

From his 1970 Nobel Lecture

“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

Reported by Gregg Easterbrook in a January 1997 interview for The Atlantic Monthly.