Japanese farmers convert rice farmland to ethanol

Yasuji Tsukada has meticulously tended his terraced rice paddies to grow top-quality rice for Japan’s demanding consumers for decades. Tsukada is among the 360 farmers in the renowned rice-growing region in central Japan who is on the forefront of an effort to develop a new type of biofuel. A group of Japanese farmer cooperatives, with some government funding, started a project last year to turn rice into ethanol, a fuel that can be mixed with gasoline to power automobiles. The cooperatives have asked farmers such as Tsukada to start growing cheap, high-yielding rice to be processed at what could be the world’s first rice-ethanol plant, to open early next year. While the country imports most of its raw materials and food, it is self-sufficient in rice production, and even has a surplus. Warehouses are brimming with rice and the countryside is dotted with rice paddies left fallow or converted temporarily to other crops to prevent overproduction. “We have the land, people and technology to make this happen in Japan,” says Shigenori Morita, a professor of Agriculture at the University of Tokyo. (June 25, 2008)