As pork prices soar, Chinese put brakes on corn for ethanol
With a famine less than 50 years in its past, China remains sensitive about using food for fuel.
from the May 31, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Pushback on ethanol
Ethanol has been trumpeted as the alternative fuel of the future, offering cleaner energy and new opportunities for farmers in developing countries.
China's current Five Year Plan sets the goal of using biofuels for 15 per-cent of the country's transport needs by 2020; already gas stations in a number of provinces mix 10 percent ethanol into the gasoline they sell.
But critics around the world have recently begun to question the unconsidered effects of large-scale ethanol production, such as increasing competition for human or animal food supplies. And in China, where an estimated 30 million people died in a famine less than 50 years ago, many have reservations about using food for fuel.
As ethanol factories large and small have sprung up in China's corn producing regions in recent years, they have begun to compete with animal-feed manufacturers for raw materials.
The industrial use of corn nearly doubled between 2001 and 2005, to 23 million tons, according to a study released last December by the National Development and Reform Committee, China's chief economic planning agency. That represented 16.5 percent of the corn harvest in 2005.
The result, said the report, is a shortage of corn. "Corn supplies to the processing industry compete with supply for [animal] feed, which impacts the development of stock-breeding."
The proportion of China's corn crop used for nonfood purposes is dwarfed by the 30 percent of American corn that goes into ethanol, and Chinese ethanol production – estimated at 3.7 million tons by the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center in 2005 – was a quarter of US levels.
But "China is different," argues the FAO's Mr. Zhang. "America and Brazil have huge land areas and plenty of water," he points out. "China has shortages of water and arable land, and it is a deficit country," importing more grain than it exports.
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