Ex-food chief: Crops for fuel is OK
Even the former UN World Food Program Executive Director Jim Morris supports ethanol, this is great to see! As he points out, “food should be used to feed people before being turned into fuel, but [he] also thinks it’s moral to use food for fuels.” Well said.
C.S. Prakash
Ex-food chief: Crops for fuel is OK
NewsTalk
May 5, 2008
In his five years as executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, Jim Morris saw global hunger from an uncomfortably close vantage point.
So, one might expect him to criticize the idea of turning corn and soybeans into alternative fuels. After all, the ethanol and biodiesel plants popping up in Indiana and elsewhere across the Midwest siphon food away from people who are starving to death at the rate of one every five seconds.
But that’s not what he thinks.
Now president of the Indiana Pacers, Morris still believes food should be used to feed people before being turned into fuel, but he also thinks it’s moral to use food for fuels.
“We have a fair balance,” he says. “It’s not an either-or situation.”
Morris, who helped launch amateur sports in Indianapolis and once led Lilly Endowment, quickly adds caveats.
More countries need to get over their fears of biotech crops. Genetically engineered crops are hardier and have great potential to increase food production, he says, a notion China and India have begun to embrace but Africa still needs to learn.
