Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply.
Interpretation
Food supply is essential for the existence and sustainability of civilization.
This quote by Norman Borlaug highlights the crucial role that an adequate food supply plays in the development and continuation of civilization. Without a stable and sufficient source of food, societies cannot thrive, innovate, or maintain their population, emphasizing the foundational importance of agriculture and food security in human progress.
In practice
During a community meeting discussing sustainability, I quoted Norman Borlaug to emphasize the importance of food security.
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.
When I left NASA, I was looking at how you could use space technologies for developing countries' work.
If numbers aren't beautiful, I don't know what is.
Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.
Kidney transplants seem so routine now. But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean.
I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
I give them experiments and they respond with speeches.
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