Robert Zoellick Quotes

The food shortages and high prices have certainly sparked the world media's attention, particularly since they're coming in such diverse places, being everywhere from Haiti, to Senegal, to Bangladesh, to Egypt - a range of countries. That sort of caught the media off guard, and serves the media's prurient interests insofar as "it bleeds, and so it leads".

I'm terrified about the world food shortages. Vegetables could quite easily become tomorrow's currency.

Population growth is exceeding farmers' ability to keep up...Our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door.

Thousands of Mexicans gathered in Mexico City to protest high food prices. The protest only lasted an hour, because everyone had to leave for their jobs in Los Angeles

There is a polarizing and dualistic experience occurring politically and economically in the world, and I believe we are near the peak of a cyclical and truly chaotic time.

I was convinced that the world was in the departure and paging.

Food is available, but it cannot be shipped into an area, so the people in that area suffer the consequences.

Everything in Haiti right now is a priority.

We have been getting out of the situation where we found ourselves in the early '90s, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the Russian Federation became what it is - you know, with no borders, with no budget, no money, and with huge problems starting with lack of food and so on and so forth.

So that a famine price is vague, and the plan subject to all the inconvenience now experienced.

To feed a nation is never easy!

I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.

Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net. When disaster strikes - the economy gets blown, people lose a job, floods, war, conflict, bad governance, all of those things - there is nothing to fall back on.

It is a dangerous thing for the educated classes of important countries not to speak foreign languages. We are heading into an era of greater mutual incomprehension among peoples, when demographic trends are destabilizing many countries, when Latin America is economically unstable, when communist societies are unstable, when we may be on the edge of chaos.

There are 6 million people in the world. With organic farming, we will only be able to feed 4 billion of them. Which 2 billion will volunteer to die?

… half of the potatoes were ruined by the rot, and that no one could guarantee the remainder. Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark, in which states the potato disease had likewise deprived the poorer class of its usual food, have immediately taken energetic means, and have opened the harbours, bought corn, and provided[for the case of a rise of prices. Sir Robert proposed the same thing for England, and, by opening the ports, a preparation for the abolition of the Corn Laws. His colleagues refused …. The whole country cries out: the Corn Laws are doomed.

For anyone who understands the current food crisis, it is hard to listen to the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, without gagging ... Zoellick waxed apocalyptic about the consequences of the global surge in prices, arguing that free trade had become a humanitarian necessity, to ensure that poor people had enough to eat ... The reason we’re seeing such misery as a result of this spike has everything to do with Zoellick and his friends.

There will be pestilence and famine in Central Europe next winter. This is likely to be followed by political revolution and Communist infiltration.

We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the Potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. The crops about Dublin are suddenly perishing…. Where will Ireland be in the event of a universal potato rot?

The whole district seemed swept of food and a third of the population would be without food at Christmas, two thirds starving before February and by May 1848, there would be a total starvation.

We as politicians have to understand that the greatest threats to our security are no longer conventional military ones. You cannot nuke a famine.

We could easily be facing starvation in the U.K. if the weather effect continues as it is. We need to be building resilience in our communities.

It sounds like an extremist thing to say, but what do people think is going to happen to human beings when there's not enough food?

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.