Welcome to our collection of quotes by Norman Borlaug. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Norman Borlaug
Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.
Borlaug received his B.S. in forestry in 1937 and Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position with CIMMYT in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations.
Borlaug was often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. According to Jan Douglas, executive assistant to the president of the World Food Prize Foundation, the source of this number is Gregg Easterbrook's 1997 article "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity." The article states that the "form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths." He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.
Later in his life, he helped apply these methods of increasing food production in Asia and Africa.
I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.
These places I've seen have clubbed my mind -- they are so poor and depressing. I don't know what we can do to help these people, but we've got to do something.
Clearly, we need to rethink our attitudes about water and move away from thinking of it as nearly a free good and a God-given right.
As far as plants are concerned, they can't tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter.
Everything else can wait, agriculture can't.
If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it's up to them to make that foolish decision. But there's absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition.
Roads are essential to any type of agricultural development.
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.
This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.
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?
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.
Without food, man at most can live but a few weeks; without it all other components of social justice are meaningless.
The lack of roads in Africa greatly hinders agriculture, education, and development.
To this day, I enjoy nature, the luxury of undisturbed wilderness, forests, mountains, lakes, rivers and deserts and their wildlife. But I also know that the greatest danger to their perpetuity is the pressure of human population.
Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer to farmers and ideas and business for commerce.
Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the 'Population Monster.'
Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists.
Unless progress with agricultural yields remains very strong, the next century will experience sheer human misery that, on a numerical scale, will exceed the worst of everything that has come before.
Central African farmers don't have any animal power because sleeping sickness kills all the animals -- cattle, the horses, the burros and the mules. So draft animals don't exist, and farming is all by hand, and the hand tools are hoes and machetes.
You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.
Pricing water delivery closer to its real costs is a necessary step to improving use efficiency.
It's amazing how often campaigners in rich countries think poor people don't get backache.
In my Nobel lecture, I suggested we had until the year 2000 to tame the population monster, and then food shortages would take us under. Now I believe we have a little longer.
Abnormal stresses and strains tend to accentuate man's animal instincts and provoke irrational and socially disruptive behavior among the less stable individuals in the maddening crowd.
Supplying food to sub-Saharan African countries is made very complex because of a lack of infrastructure.
When wheat is ripening properly, when the wind is blowing across the field, you can hear the beards of the wheat rubbing together. They sound like the pine needles in a forest. It is a sweet, whispering music that once you hear, you never forget.
The breakup of the former Soviet Union has caused its grain output to plummet, but if the new republics recover economically, they could produce vast amounts of food.
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.
Contrasting sharply, in the developing countries represented by India, Pakistan, and most of the countries in Asia and Africa, seventy to eighty percent of the population is engaged in agriculture, mostly at the subsistence level.
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.
Nevertheless, the number of farmers, small as well as large, who are adopting the new seeds and new technology is increasing very rapidly, and the increase in numbers during the past three years has been phenomenal.
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.
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.
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.
Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless.
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.
Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply.
The destiny of world civilization depends upon providing a decent standard of living for all mankind.
Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.
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.
If some consumers believe that it's better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more.
There are no miracles in agricultural production.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We will be guilty of criminal negligence, without extenuation, if we permit future famines.
Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages -- and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.
One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy.