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

We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life. For a decent and humane life, we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing, and effective and compassionate medical care.

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

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.

Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer to farmers and ideas and business for commerce.

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

For, behind the scenes, halfway around the world in Mexico, were two decades of aggressive research on wheat that not only enabled Mexico to become self-sufficient with respect to wheat production but also paved the way to rapid increase in its production in other countries.

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.

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.

One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy.

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

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

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.

Everything else can wait, agriculture can’t.

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.

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

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

There are no miracles in agricultural production.

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

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.

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.