Norman Borlaug

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

From "Eat This!", an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullsh#t!; Quoted in: Gary Beene (2011) The Seeds We So Kindness that Fed a Hungry World. p. 9, 2011

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.

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

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.

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

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.

From his 1970 Nobel Lecture, 1970

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.

1970 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 1970