China to focus on non-food crops for biofuel

The Chinese government said it will focus on using crops other than corn and rapeseed to meet the country’s biofuel needs. Vice Chairman Yin Chengjie of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress said that the premise of China’s bioenergy development strategy was maintaining food safety, and so will try not to compete with food supply, by using crops such as grain as feedstock. China produces 700 million tons of wheat stalks each year, compared to only five million tons of grain crops. An increasing number of rural households have learned to recycle grain stalks by adding them to livestock manure into methane pools for power generation. By the end of 2008, some 30 million households built their own methane pools with an aggregated yearly methane output of 12 billion cubic meters, equivalent to 17 million standard coal. (April 21, 2009)