Ethanol production has put the Chinese government in an unpleasant bind

Ethanol production has put the Chinese government in an unpleasant bind, as fears rise that the environmentally friendly gasoline additive is also fueling politically dangerous increases in the price of food – particularly pork, a key staple. With the ethanol industry gobbling up a growing share of China's corn harvest, authorities have stomped on the brakes to slow what one official report calls "blind" investment in distilleries.

China cannot sacrifice food security for energy. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao offered the latest sign of government concern when he made a highly publicized visit last weekend to a piggery and a meat market in Xi'an, about 750 miles southwest of Beijing. The price of pork has gone up by 29 percent over the past year and the price of live pigs by 71 percent, according to the Agriculture Ministry. In a country where people eat more pork than anywhere else in the world except Germany, that jump in the price of a staple has dominated recent headlines and sparked grumbling. Pushback on 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 continuing rise in corn prices since the beginning of this year suggests that the central government is having its usual difficulty in controlling developments in China's provinces. But the crisis has not deterred the authorities from pursuing other ethanol distilling projects and biofuel experiments. A state-owned grain and oils conglomerate will launch a pilot project later this year to process cassava – a starchy tuber that is not considered a food in China – into ethanol. Plans are also under way to plant tens of thousands of acres of jatropha – also inedible and grown in wastelands – by the end of the decade.