I now say that the world has the technology - either available or well advanced in the research pipeline - to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called "organic" methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.
Norman Borlaug's 30th anniversary lecture at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo (September 8, 2000), as quoted in Ronald Bailey "Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death" (p. 59), 2002.
