Biofuel and food crops

The use of food crops – such as maize – for biofuel, is a worrying trend in a world where many are starving.
Why not use a plant that isn’t a staple diet for millions?

Corn uses one-and-a-half times as much energy in the production of ethanol as it offers in the ethanol end-product. Hardly an efficient use of a valuable food-stuff, is it?

Sweet sorghum (that’s millet), on the other hand, produces eight units of fuel for every unit of fuel used to make it.

What’s more, sorghum isn’t traded internationally, like corn is. The concern that food stocks of corn could be depleted, because of the demand for ethanol, is what’s driving the price beyond the reach of millions of families.

Sorghum grows in some of the poorest places in Africa and Asia. Apparently, the crop can survive without irrigation, tolerates flooding, and can even withstand some salinity. And unlike palm oil in south-east Asia, and sugar cane in Brazil, it doesn’t threaten rain forests.

According to Mark Winslow, of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, based in Patancheru, India, the 3-metres-long stalks of sweet sorghum can be turned into ethanol, without damaging the food grain that grows at the top of them.

The Institute focuses on crops and production systems aimed at helping poor, dry-land farmers, without harming the environment. It has teamed with the Tata Group’s Rusni Distilleries, and about 790 farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, to produce more than 40,000 litres of ethanol daily from locally-grown sweet sorghum.

The farmers can still use the millet grain to feed their livestock, and their families, turning it into nutritious traditional porridge and flatbread. The sugary liquid contained in the stalks they sell to the distillery for production of ethanol. In this way, families and livestock are fed, and biofuel is produced, all from the same crop. That’s not possible with maize.

America is the world’s largest grower of sorghum, and is organising a conference on the use of sorghum as biofuel. Other countries exploring this possibility include Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Mozambique, Uganda, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Brazil.

It’s reported that the Gauteng representative, Dr M Raphesu, of the National African Farmers Union of South Africa, which represents thousands of sweet sorghum producers in South Africa, said Union representatives would not be attending the conference in America because ‘we do not have the resources’.

In view of the breath-taking amount of money being ‘invested’ to kick balls about here in 2010, what do you think of Dr Raphesu’s statement?

Source: an article by Deborah Zabarenko, at http://www.motoring.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4400683