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Enter The Inconvenient Fruit, a different kind of hybrid.
THE INCONVENIENT FRUIT, ITS ORIGIN IS EASTERN.
Belonging to the inconvenient class, fossil fuels are non-renewable; so, making them the major energy source for
cars should not have been the case in the first place. Those gas-guzzling-and-therefore-gas-emitting cars have
become the antithesis of man’s civilized progress.
We need to completely junk fossil fuels in favor of biofuels – that’s an inconvenient truth. Meanwhile, hybrid cars
in many states in the US now use 10% to 90% ethanol to gasoline blends while Brazil now uses 24% (Madhu
Chittora, 2 May 2005, projectsmonitor.com). We do have a choice of source: The Yankee gets his bioenergy from
Zea mays (corn); the Brazilian gets his from Saccharum
officinarum (sugarcane); the Indian gets his from Sorghum bicolor
(sweet sorghum). To each his own species.
As I see it, ICRISAT’s advocacy of
a ‘Grey to Green Revolution’
(William Dar 2007, Nurturing
Life In The Drylands Of Hope,
ICRISAT, Andhra Pradesh, India,
in CD) is the Institute’s global
mission. So: Growing sweet
sorghum for ethanol production
is implementing a Grey to
Green Revolution towards
achieving a global vision.
Let’s go Indian, choosing the inconvenient fruit. Among those I
call the climate crops, sweet sorghum is relatively unknown
among those species that catch the CO 2
from the air and turn it
into food, feed, fuel, fertilizer for the survival of the species. I
know that to advocate sweet sorghum as the global source of
ethanol for biofuel is to advocate a relatively unknown and largely
unappreciated crop in Asia, Africa and America – to write two
major feature articles on this poor man’s crop may be on my
part an inconvenient froth over an inconvenient fruit. This should
not be the case at all.
Meanwhile, they have gone Indian at the campus of the
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
(ICRISAT) in Andhra Pradesh. They have come up with what I shall
refer to here as the sweet sorghum initiative. For having come
up with the initiative, the concept if not the term, for having led
Team ICRISAT in the rediscovery and nurturing of sweet sorghum as an energy crop, for having successfully marketed
the idea of sweet sorghum ethanol first to the private and government sectors in India, for now boldly propagating
sweet sorghum as the climate crop in Africa and Asia:
Dr William Dar, Director General of ICRISAT in faraway India, Filipino, is My Global Manager of the Year (2006).
Since there is no such award, it has been necessary to invent it. I have 7 reasons choosing Dar as my global
manager because he has chosen:
An Inconvenient Truth