Time & Perspective Quote by Norman Borlaug

Borlaug isn’t offering sympathy; he’s issuing an indictment. The phrase “can and must” yokes capability to obligation, collapsing the usual escape hatch of good intentions. In his framing, famine is not a tragic weather event that washes over helpless societies. It’s a failure of foresight, investment, and political will - a man-made disaster in the most damning sense: preventable.

The line is engineered to shame a familiar ritual. “Pious regret” skewers the moral theater that often follows catastrophe: the solemn speeches, the late-arriving aid shipments, the photo ops over skeletal bodies. Borlaug’s “salvage the human wreckage” is deliberately brutal, turning people into the aftermath we pretend to rescue. The subtext is that humanitarianism, when it arrives only after collapse, becomes a kind of alibi. It lets institutions feel righteous while leaving intact the conditions that produced the famine.

Context matters: Borlaug’s authority comes from the Green Revolution, when high-yield crops, fertilizers, and agronomic systems dramatically increased food production in parts of Asia and Latin America. He speaks from the vantage of someone who has seen famine treated as destiny and then partially defanged by applied science and logistics. Yet his target isn’t just complacency; it’s the chronic tendency to underfund boring prevention (research, infrastructure, extension services, governance) while overperforming reactive charity. The quote works because it refuses consolation. It demands a shift from mourning to management - and insists that the moral measure is not how we grieve, but whether we planned.