Norman Borlaug Quotes

There's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.

As maize became important for human food worldwide, modern agricultural research on maize breeding continued the corn breeding begun thousands of years ago in the Central American highlands.

We're close to losing our essential diversity. Look at our wheat crops - we rely on a handful of grain crops and plants that we've refined and bred over hundreds of years.

Surely, if we are going to be better at producing food of the right value, then we have to accept that genetic technology... is going to be part of that.

We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.

The fact is that humans have been shaping the genetics of what they eat for thousands of years. Genetic engineering simply speeds up the process that used to take generations. Preventing people from getting things like golden rice or disease-resistant cassava destroys human life, and does not spare the environment in any way.

Perhaps it matters little whether the international community chooses to celebrate crop diversity, but it profoundly matters that the international community takes action to conserve it.

In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

To affordably feed the next billion people, we must have higher-yielding crops with even greater nutritional value. America should be at the vanguard of the innovative advances that will make this happen.

In the food case in particular, one of the technologies that could help there - genetic technologies that could create better crops with higher yields and less need for water and fertilizer - is tremendously feared. Very little of that fear is scientifically grounded.

Whether we consciously realize it or not, the biodiversity with which we are most familiar, and the biodiversity with which we have most intimate historical, cultural and biological connections, is that associated with food plants.

I am interested in agricultural corporations and how they function. The idea that they own the genetics of our food supply is a really compelling thing to me.

We've gotten so far away from our food source. It's been hijacked from us. But if you get soil, plant something in it and water it, you can feed yourself. It's that simple.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

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

I think the only real knowledge I had before I went to Iowa was what I learned from 'Food Inc'. But once I got there and developed these extensive relationships with the farmers, I realized that we're basically made of corn.

All the food we eat, whether Brussels sprouts or pork bellies, has been modified by mankind. Genetic engineering is only one particularly powerful way to do what we have been doing for eleven thousand years.

It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops.

New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods.

Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture - from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding.

All the food we eat - every grain of rice and kernel of corn - has been genetically modified. None of it was here before mankind learned to cultivate crops. The question isn't whether our food has been modified, but how.

Now listen, the one thing about agriculture is we've lost our manufacturing, we've lost a great deal of jobs overseas, lots of our industry. The last thing in the world we need to do is lose the ability to produce our food.

No civilization worthy of the name has every been founded on any agricultural basis other than that of cereals.