This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.
Interpretation
Fertilizer is essential for feeding the world's growing population.
Norman Borlaug emphasizes the critical role that fertilizer plays in agricultural production, which is vital to sustain a rapidly increasing global population. Without the use of fertilizers, he warns that the ability to produce enough food would collapse, leading to dire consequences for humanity.
In practice
In a speech about sustainable agriculture, you might quote Borlaug to underscore the importance of modern farming techniques.
During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago
We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life. For a decent and humane life, we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing, and effective and compassionate medical care.
We are 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.
Nevertheless, the number of farmers, small as well as large, who are adopting the new seeds and new technology is increasing very rapidly, and the increase in numbers during the past three years has been phenomenal.
Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer to farmers and ideas and business for commerce.
For, behind the scenes, halfway around the world in Mexico, were two decades of aggressive research on wheat that not only enabled Mexico to become self-sufficient with respect to wheat production but also paved the way to rapid increase in its production in other countries.
'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.
Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws,' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.
The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.
I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.
Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.
Geology has shared the fate of other infant sciences, in being for a while considered hostile to revealed religion; so like them, when fully understood, it will be found a potent and consistent auxiliary to it, exalting our conviction of the Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.