ETHANOL AND FOOD: SAME PLANT, SAME TIME

+ Click to Enlarge AS TALL AS A TRACTOR CAB: Sweet sorghum grows to three metres without irrigation and the stalks can be used for bioethanol production while the grain at the top is used for food.

May 15, 2008
By Deborah Zabarenko

A corn-like plant that can grow as high as an elephant's eye on some of Earth's driest farmland shows promise as a "smart" biofuel that won't cut into world food supplies.

Mark Winslow of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics said sweet sorghum – used mostly as animal feed in the United States - had a three-metre stalk that could be turned into ethanol without damaging the food grain that grows at its top.

He said sweet sorghum produced eight units of fuel for every unit of fuel used to make it, unlike corn-based ethanol which uses one and a half times as much energy in its production as it offers as an end product.

Use of corn-based ethanol also pushed up demand for this crop on international markets and affected the supply of grain for food; that would not happen with sweet sorghum, he said.

"Sorghum isn't traded internationally, it's grown and consumed locally in dry areas," Winslow said. "Since you're producing the grain on this plant, it's not a trade-off as it is with corn."

The institute is an NGO based in Patancheru, India that focuses on "smart crops" and production systems aimed at helping poor dry-land farmers without hurting the environment.

It has teamed up with the Tata group's Rusni Distilleries and some 791 farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, to produce more than 40 000 litres of ethanol daily from locally grown sweet sorghum.

The farmers who grow it can still use the grain to feed themselves, turning it into traditional porridge and flatbread, and their livestock, while selling the fuel-producing sugary liquid contained in the stalks to the distillery.

Winslow said the crop could survive without irrigation but would also tolerate flooding and even some salinity. It didn't threaten sensitive rain forest like palm oil in south-east Asia and sugar-cane in Brazil because it grew in arid areas.

Sorghum grew in some of the poorest places in Asia and Africa, he added, and had the potential to keep limited resources from these parts of the world at home, rather than sending them to oil-producing countries.

The US, the world's largest sorghum producer, is organising a conference in 2008 on using sorghum as biofuel. Other countries exploring this possibility include Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Mozambique, Uganda, China, the Philippines, Indonesia and Brazil. - Reuters

The National African Farmers Union of South Africa's Gauteng representative, Dr M Raphesu, said the union, which represents thousands of sweet sorghum producers in South Africa, would not be attending because "we do not have the resources".