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Professor Yuan Longping, an established Chinese rice expert, dubbed
as the "father of hybrid rice", has been mulling a new project to
make fuel alcohol with rice.
Yuan, a member of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese
People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the top
advisory body, made the proposal to the ongoing session of the
CPPCC National Committee in Beijing.
The huge surpluses of early-ripening indican rice in southern
China, or a kind of a high-yielding, long-grained rice with rich
amylose, is an ideal raw material for making ethyl alcohol for
industrial use, he acknowledged.
As
matter of fact, Prof. Yuan said he was going all out to promote the
project so as to tackle the problem with the surplus rice. By
employing a high technology he himself developed, the yields of a
hybrid early ripening indican rice soared to around 10 tons per
hectare. So, local farmers said they were happy to have such high
yields but difficult to sell the less-tasty rice out. As more
strains of yummy rice are within the easy reaches of consumers, the
sale of such early ripening rice poses a problem.
"It's not ideal to eat, but it could be used to produce ethyl
alcohol," said Prof. Yuan, who brightened up by the ways of
processing surplus grain into ethyl alcohol in the northeastern
granary provinces of Jilin and Liaoning .
In
his proposal to the first session of the 10th CPPCC National
Committee, Prof. Yuan suggested building a special distillery with
an annual output of 300,000 tons of fuel ethyl alcohol in Changde
city, central-south China's Hunan Province.
"The distillery would cost a little more than 100 million yuan
(US$12 million), but the benefits are great, as 300,000 tons of
fuel ethyl alcohol equals to approximately one million tons of
petroleum. This could save China a lot of foreign currency when it
still depended heavily on oil imports. And it also meant higher
income for farmers," he added.
And Prof. Yuan is delighted for another reason. "Then, I could go
on with my researches on further increase of yields for the
early-ripening indican rice," said Yuan, a winner of the preeminent
State Science and Technology Award in 2001.
(Xinhua News Agency March 12, 2003)
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