A top adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged the United States and other nations to overhaul its system for sending food aid to countries in need. Professor Jeffrey Sachs said countries should be given resources to help grow their own food.

Jeffrey Sachs: “If you help them to grow more food rather than shipping food aid, you’ll produce an escape from poverty. If you ship food aid, you’ll meet one-fifth of the food needs, people will suffer, it will be very expensive, and you’ll do nothing to help them get out of poverty”

Jeffrey Sachs also said the United States and Europe should cut back on production of biofuels.

Jeffrey Sachs: “The second thing I believe we need is to cut back significantly on our biofuels programs, which were understandable at a time of much lower food prices and larger food stocks but do not make sense now in a global food scarcity condition. In the United States, as much as one-third of the maize crop this year will go to the gas tank, and this is a huge blow to the world food supply.”