biofuel or biofool ?

Isn't "communist" rhetoric great? You can convince yourself that plant produce, that 3/5 of the world's population would pay to get on their dinner plate, is not food.

Thus China can use that land to grow stuff to produce biofuel.

Suggestions by the Min. of Agriculture, China-Daily 8 May 2008, were that China could grow some biofuel crops on 100 million hectares, and that four companies are interested in processing the crops. Those plant crops are only sugar cane, sweet sorghum, cassava and rapeseed.

The land is 'unsuitable' to grow grain, but we've all seen rice growing in Longji in terraces 20m by 1m wide. And I've seen sweet potatoes growing in 3m by 2m terraces in west Hunan.

Maybe the honourable minister will encourage them to switch, to grow cassava for biofuel. They may earn more money and then they could buy sweet potatoes from ......?

Aren't yellow fields of rape flowers so photogenic in Sichuan? Ever tried eating rape seeds? Admittedly you can process cooking oil from them, after you remove the toxins. But as China imports way more than it exports, this is probably a red herring.

I also see Chinese companies want to grow rice in Ghana. Maybe it has a high yield but it's only 1/5 that of potatoes, but potatoes aren't food, so we need to use four times the quantity of water to grow 1/5 the quantity of the fluffy white stuff that produces the smallest people in the world. By my math, that's twenty times the water to get rice in your bowl compared to spuds on your plate. (Now you know why I failed math).

But the x20 times water argument can apply to rice anywhere, except maybe when it's aerobic rice (rice with exercise ! ) Actually, aerobic rice is irrigated 2 or 3 times, thus saving water, and reducing methane leakage into the atmosphere... though south China has more than enough water and so do the monsoon countries in a normal year.

I read China is already the world's biggest producer of spuds, but that doesn't excuse the biofool excuse. Neither does the idea of second-generation biofuel from plant residues such as corn stalks. I was talking to a guy on the weekend who's trying to breed up 'maize' with higher sugar content in the stalks, which sounds reasonable. NZ used to have s.th called sweetcorn, which may be just maize with sweet cobs and I recall the stalks were sweetly edible.

So I still reckon using 100million ha to grow primary produce for biofuel is just stupid. Unless C-D screwed up their translation of zillions of mu into millions of ha, which is quite likely. In which case you can stop reading. Unless Chinese ag produce is already so expensive other countries can't afford to buy it.

I kept notes for this one a few weeks back, situation may have changed... and they could buy sweet potato from NZ hahaha except I doubt they could afford them. Imagine the Food Miles! Let's leave that one on simmer for a minute....