Norman Borlaug (1914 – 2009)
American agricultural scientist, and humanitarian.
"Thanks to the Green Revolution, the real price of food is half or less than it was in 1960 which means those who spend the highest portion of their income on food - the urban and non-farm rural poor -- garner the most benefit from it."
"It is very likely that Dr. Borlaug is directly responsible for saving more lives than anyone else in the twentieth century... Dr. Borlaug has never stopped fighting, teaching, inventing, or caring... The world owes Dr. Borlaug endless amounts of gratitude"
"Borlaug's work saved the Indian sub-continent from mass starvation. In his 90 years on this planet its human population has grown from about one billion to more than six billion. Without the hybrid wheats it was Borlaug's life's mission to develop and promote among the world's poorest farmers, few believe that this population could have been sustained."
"You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery."
"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."