Politics & Power Quote by Norman Borlaug

Borlaug’s sentence works like a moral indictment dressed in technocratic clothing. He doesn’t romanticize poverty or frame it as an unfortunate backdrop to “development.” He names it as erasure: a “forgotten world,” not because it’s distant, but because powerful institutions have practiced selective attention. The phrase implicates the reader before any policy argument even begins.

The structure is deliberate: “primarily,” “most,” “more than fifty percent” - the language of a scientist tallying evidence - then the emotional payload: “hunger as a constant companion” and “fear of famine a continual menace.” Those aren’t statistics; they’re atmospheres. Borlaug compresses an entire political economy into two recurring sensations: appetite and anxiety. Hunger is personified as something that walks beside you; famine is not an event but a looming threat. That shift from measurement to lived experience is the rhetorical pivot that makes the line sting.

Context matters. Borlaug, the agronomist credited with accelerating the Green Revolution, spent his career battling a comforting idea popular in wealthy countries: that famine is inevitable, culturally ingrained, or nature’s harsh arithmetic. This quote rejects that fatalism. By emphasizing that the “forgotten world” contains a majority of humanity, he flips the map: the true periphery is the rich world’s attention span. The subtext is blunt - if half the planet lives under “continual menace,” then indifference isn’t neutrality; it’s complicity.