Biofuel craze is water madness

If water were a globally traded commodity, with unmet demand in China and India reflected in its price, the world might shed its newfound craze for biofuels.

It is bad enough that some of us need ethanol distilled in Scotland to lubricate our evenings. Growing corn to make ethanol to run sport-utility vehicles is downright silly; nowhere more so than in China and India.

As many as 400 Chinese cities are facing water shortages; farmers in the most populous nation are forgoing millions of tonnes of grain production every year. Per-capita availability of water is expected to shrink to alarming levels by 2030.
How serious is the shortage? “The only thing that worries me about the China story is the water problem,” said commodities investor Jim Rogers, chairman of Beeland Interests in New York and a fan of China.

“If China cannot solve the water problem, that could be the end of the story,” said Rogers, who co-founded Quantum Fund with George Soros and then went biking around the world.

Amid this water scarcity, China has gone on to become the world’s third- largest bio-ethanol producer after Brazil and the United States, pouring thousands of gallons of water to grow a tonne of corn, and then using more water to turn the corn into ethanol.

What a colossal waste. As recently as December, the Chinese government came up with controls on corn-to- ethanol projects so as not to lose more precious water to producing fuel at the expense of food.

The Standard