Sweet BBC? Sorghum: Growing Crops, Raising Hell
Frank A. Hilario
September 12, 2009
About climate change, the BBC has been dawdling too, I believe. Now I'm glad the BBC is documenting biofuels. A very revealing BBC editorial last year reported on the giant leap of Europe's mankind to convert plants into biofuels, meaning bioethanol and biodiesel. A great leap backward. 'Recent reports have warned of rising food prices and rainforest destruction from increased biofuel production' (Roger Harrabin, 'EU rethinks biofuels guidelines,' news.bbc.co.uk). The Europeans are learning the lesson that if you are growing a biofuel crop, you may also be raising hell.
Earlier, the BBC reported what Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme said the critics were worried about biofuel production in 2007, pointing to 'the destruction of Indonesia's peat swamps as an example of biofuel folly' (15 November, entangledstates.org). The 'massive subsidies to promote American corn production for ethanol,' according to William Laurance (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama), has encouraged the growing of soybeans in Brazil, where large areas of grasslands are being cleared and converted to soybean farms (news.mongabay.com). And why is that? The huge US subsidies for biofuel have elevated prices of biofuels (not to mention foods and feeds) all over the world, so everyone wants a bite of the gigantic pie. This has been your Bush's Biofuel Folly.
That is a little background as to why the BBC went to India and specifically asked Dar about his Institute's research on sweet sorghum as well as its advantages over other biofuel crops used for producing ethanol, the preferred gasoline additive for energy-conscious countries like the US of A and India, where ICRISAT is based.
Like I said, you can't talk about biofuel and what ICRISAT has been doing with sweet sorghum without mentioning Rusni. Sweet sorghum is a favorite subject of mine – so, thank you, BBC. That has been so since I learned about Dar and ICRISAT and their Sweet Sorghum Initiative (my term). On 26 February 2007, I wrote 'An Inconvenient Truth: William Dar, The Filipino As Global Manager,' americanchronicle.com), where I said, 'We need to completely junk fossil fuels in favor of biofuels – that's an inconvenient truth,' and I chose sweet sorghum as 'the inconvenient fruit.'
On 24 June 2007, I wrote 'Al Gore of Science,' my term referring to William Dar and his ICRISAT's 'Science with a human face' (americanchronicle.com). In that essay, I called sweet sorghum a multiplier crop, and enumerated the reasons (briefly now):
(1) It multiplies the planted fields – This crop grows anywhere, including the marginal lands, infertile, heat-challenged.
(2) It multiplies the farmers – More farmers can afford to grow sweet sorghum since it doesn't ask for fertilizers and pesticides, these two being the bulk of the cost of farming these days.
(3) It multiplies the carbon gas-guzzlers – This crop quaffs more of carbon dioxide, a pollutant, per unit space than other crops. To produce more organic matter, it needs more carbon dioxide to process with sunlight; you've heard of it – it's called photosynthesis.
(4) It multiplies the consumers – It has multiple uses and, therefore, products: food, feed, fuel, fertilizer, fodder, fence.
(5) It multiplies the water – It grows with little water, no need for irrigation, so a little water goes a long, long way.
As a matter of fact, Dar of ICRISAT told the BBC that sweet sorghum lorded over other ethanol crops such as corn (which the Americans prefer) and sugarcane (which the Brazilians favor) for several reasons (restated below, in my terms):
(1) Sweet sorghum is soil-friendly. Dar said sweet sorghum had the ability to thrive in soils where there is little water (that is, drought is no object), or soils that are saline ('salty') or alkaline ('sweet'), where corn and sugarcane would languish.
(2) Sweet sorghum is water-friendly. This crop grows in waterlogged soils of the world where corn and sugarcane could not. Yes, it can grow in both drylands and wetlands.
(3) Sweet sorghum is ethanol-friendly. It produces more (equivalent) ethanol a day than sugarcane.
(4) Sweet sorghum is farmer-friendly. Where sugarcane takes a year to grow to maturity, sweet sorghum needs only 4 months. So, a producer can grow 3 crops a year. Translation: While the sugarcane grower has been yearning the whole year through, the sweet sorghum farmer has been earning all the time.
(5) Sweet sorghum is a miser's hope. Where sugarcane is profligate with water, this crop is niggardly with this valuable element. Sugarcane: 'Water, water everywhere!' Sweet Sorghum: 'Just one drop to drink, please.'
(6) Sweet sorghum is a bean-counter's dream. This crop costs less to grow that it's a budget officer's dream come true.
(7) Sweet sorghum is an extensionist's fantasy. Dar says that because of this crop's many advantages over sugarcane, the willingness of small farmers to adopt sweet sorghum as a choice crop is high. I say sweet sorghum brings to life the idea that Ernest F Schumacher made famous in the 1970s: 'Small is beautiful.'
Not only that; as I pointed out on 15 October 2007, sugar is sweet, but sweet sorghum is sweeter (see my 'Seeds For My Sweet,' thesweetsorghuminitiative.wordpress.com). 'Sweeter' means you get more sugar per unit of volume.
Meanwhile, in Manila, on his birthday the other day, 11 September, in pursuit of a book I'm writing for the UP Los Baños Alumni Association on successful graduates of the College of Agriculture to celebrate the College's centenary this year, I was talking to Emil Q Javier, once Chancellor of UP Los Baños, once President of the University of the Philippines (UP) System, once Secretary of Science – under President Ferdinand E Marcos, of whom he speaks fondly, and whose birthday he shares. And since when I interview people, it's more a conversation than a Q&A session, the talk drifted to William Dar, whom he knows, and of course about ICRISAT and, of course, about sweet-stalked sorghum. Among other things, Javier was pointing out the need for contiguous or near-enough areas of thousands of hectares to supply economically sweet sorghum stalks for an ethanol distillery plant for a year-round operation. Let's leave that problem to the managers.
Javier also had an idea that made sense if you considered the sugar plantations as given: There are marginal areas in those plantations, unproductive soils, so why not populate them with sweet sorghum instead? You then get maximum results from minimum resources.
On my part, where a capitalist cannot put up an ethanol distillery for lack of economic supply of sweet sorghum stalks, and where farmers cannot get inside sugarcane plantations, I like to think of jaggery, that which farm families can produce in a village-scale sweet sorghum industry, and the many cottage products they can produce from that unrefined sugar. (In the Philippines, jaggery is panutsa in Tagalog, sinakob in Ilocano.) Having read Schumacher in the 70s or 80s, I prefer to think small.
In contrast, the Americans prefer to think big, like shooting for the Planet Mars; and when they ignore something, it's huge, like the United Nations. On 04 February 2007, I called sweet sorghum sweet-sounding names: 'Discovery Sorghum' and 'The Great Climate Crop' (americanchronicle.com). That was a great discovery to me. That was also the time I discovered that the Americans had ignored Sorghum bicolor (sweet sorghum) as their source of ethanol, preferring Zea mays (corn), even as they had ignored the Kyoto Protocol (what's that?), even as they had refused to pass a Biofuels Act (had they even considered it?). They had been ignoring one of their own kind, Al Gore, because he was talking about an inconvenient truth: that man was a major cause of global warming. The Nobel Prize Committee agreed and gave Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jointly the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (msnbc.msn.com). The Nobel citation read in part:
His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.
On one hand, the Nobel Prize created huge political waves all over the world by acknowledging what Al Gore referred to as 'a true planetary emergency.' On the other, the use of American corn mainly for ethanol has created huge economic waves of woe for Filipinos, not to mention the food processors and meat producers in the US and elsewhere. Since much American corn goes today to ethanol, the supply has shifted direction, and this has jacked up the price of American corn that, quite frankly, hilarious it isn't anymore (see my 'Why American corn isn't funny anymore,' 07 May 2009, americanchronicle.com). Nobody's laughing. We Filipinos are fond of imported goods we even import American corn to feed our imported poultry and imported livestock. We have to unlearn our expensive taste. Then we can laugh better.
The Americans have to unlearn their expensive thinking themselves. They think that growing sweet sorghum is an extravagant waste of time and resources. Case in point: On 20 March 2006, the Americans in OK (Oklahoma State U) had considered sweet sorghum for ethanol production, then discouraged themselves, concluding that sweet sorghum was 'economically unfeasible' since the juice could not be stored and therefore had to be processed immediately, and the harvest season for the crop was only a few months (reported by David Page, redorbit.com). They had Internet access, but they probably weren't paying attention to what was going on elsewhere, such as in India, such as at the campus of ICRISAT, where since 1980 research on sweet sorghum has been ongoing (icrisat.org). That isn't OK with me.
Where there is a will, there is a won't – so, the OK researchers failed to consider that you could stagger the planting of the crop so that you have feedstock the whole year round. You have quite a few of 'a few months' throughout the year, right? In the case of sweet sorghum, you have 3 sets of 4 months to grow the grains and stalks of this sweet crop. No, don't forget: When you grow sweet sorghum for ethanol, the grains are extra income, whether they become food for the table, feed for the birds, or feedstock for ethanol.
I realize the Indian Indians know better; as I mentioned earlier, with Filipino William Dar as Team Captain of ICRISAT, Indian AR Palani Swamy as the entrepreneur of Rusni has established in Andhra Pradesh, India an ethanol distillery plant fed through a sweet sorghum supply network. You can't ignore the small farmers. And since the Rusni technology is multi-feedstock, it accepts sweet sorghum grains as well as sugarcane for producing ethanol ('Biofuel Bonanza Should Benefit the Poor,' December 2008, icrisat.org). You can't ignore the big farmers. No downtime. The Rusni ethanol plant showed success in 2007; the OK Americans had quit on sweet sorghum a year too early, in 2006.
Going back to the clear and present danger of damaging forestlands arising from growing biofuel crops, this is the connection I see: In the Philippines, if you plant Jatropha curcas (jatropha) for biodiesel in non-agricultural lands, meaning in logged-over areas, you are borrowing from Peter to pay Paul – you are in fact embarking on a short-term journey of changing forestlands into farmlands, that is to say transforming chainsaws into plowshares – and begging for a long-term disaster. You are solving a problem by creating another. You're OK if you don't clear forestlands to plant sweet sorghum or jatropha. I think this is a lesson that to learn we don't have to go to university. Or India.
Personally, while not convinced with jatropha and not converted to sugarcane, while climate change stalks you and me, I prefer to be sweet-stalked by sweet sorghum.
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