“I often get asked the question, can we feed all of the inhabitants of the world? This is an easy answer: Yes now, and yes in the future.
The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome keeps wonderful statistics. Country by country, they list the number of undernourished people. In a second set of tables, they list the number of calories per day by which they are undernourished. Not a lot of people take the time to do the math. Cargill does. If you multiply one list by the other, you come up with the number of calories the world is short: 985 million people times the number of calories per day, and you come up with 30 million tons. This is one-sixth the amount of grain that we use to create transportation fuels.”
—Greg Page, CEO, Cargill, addressing the Economic Club of Minnesota in November on Cargill’s efforts to address both caloric and economic famine
