M. S. Swaminathan Quotes

It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.

In a world of growing food demand, Africa is home to two-thirds of the world's unexploited arable land.

Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.

Industrial agriculture freed many people to pursue lives their parents and grandparents could never have. It made America modern.

How we grow food has enormous effects on the environment - climate change as well as pollution of air, water, and soil.

The agricultural potential of Africa is unlimited.

We have already broken the link between food production and population. This will soon be complete.

Farm subsidies are a matter of national food security

Some environmentalists demands are counter productive. Avoiding pesticides for example means farming more land less efficiently, which leads to higher prices, more hunger, more disease …, and less biodiversity.

Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive land abandonment, is a widespread by-product of current practices in agriculture and animal husbandry. Since 1945, 11 percent of the earth's vegetated surface has been degraded—an area larger than India and China combined—and per capita food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.

Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.

We are turning everything on this planet into food for humans. We'll eat it and, if we can't eat it, we'll kill it and take its place and just move it out of the way.

The time has come to recognize that food, how we produce it, process it, package it, sell it, cook it and eat it, is as important as any other issue.

People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.

Without food, we cannot survive, and that is why issues that affect the food industry are so important.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture represents two-thirds of all employment, governments are proving that resource commitments yield success. In 2004, African heads of state pledged 10 percent of their national budgets to achieve 6 percent annual growth in agriculture. By 2008, 20 African countries had met or exceeded that 6 percent target.

I have always said there is only one thing that can bring our nation down - our dependence on foreign countries for food and energy. Agriculture is the backbone of our economy.

Food is national security. Food is craft. Food is everything, when you think about it.

Our human population continues to expand at such a scary rate - it's unbelievable.

I grew up in a family of peasants, and it was there that I saw the way that, for example, our wheat fields suffered as a result of dust storms, water erosion and wind erosion; I saw the effect of that on life - on human life.

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

Modern agriculture has been accurately described as a way of turning oil into food. As the price of oil continues to rise, so will the price of food.

I don't know how the poor farmers deal with such situations in real life. It's really sad.