China’s low-key jump onto biofuel bandwagon

China is not a newcomer to the global drive for biofuel. It has long been producing bio-ethanol from corn (maize), a national staple crop. However, as the scale of bio-ethanol production for industrial use dried up the corn supply for human consumption, “people began to worry about food security”, said the scholar, who asked not to be named.

According to the scholar, that was “China’s lesson with bio-ethanol”. It turned out to be quite controversial. The collective emotional resistance to the idea of using food as fuel ran deep. After all, this is a country where close to 70% of the population are farmers and many of them are poor.
“China is a country where if the agricultural sector collapses, then the whole country collapses,” said a foreign expert who works at the same Beijing research institute as the scholar cited above.

China experienced what many historians call the greatest famine in human history in the 1950s and 1960s. And while going through the Cold War, it felt more strongly the importance of food self-sufficiency, elevating it to the level of national security. To this day Beijing orders provincial governments to reserve a certain amount of arable land for agricultural cultivation.

But that is by no means an indication that China is no longer researching and developing biofuel. “It’s safe to assume that anything researched in other countries is also being experimented [with] somewhere in China now, including cutting-edge biofuel technology,” said the foreign expert.

Indeed, Yang Xiongnian, a senior official with the Ministry of Agriculture, said China is “researching all kinds of biomass energy options, and others including sorghum ethanol and coal-based diesel oil”.

Asia Times