Sugar Is Sweet.

Sweet Sorghum Is Sweeter

Waterlogged sweet sorghum in the Philippines (courtesy of icrisat)

From faraway India comes what I call the Sweet Sorghum Initiative (SSi), starting with this crop as the source of ethanol. Between a seed of sweet sorghum and a liter of ethanol, there lies many a great untold story. I shall be telling you those stories here from now on.

You are looking at an image of a crop of sweet sorghum planted in a farm in the Philippines that is waterlogged. The plants have tilted towards the ground that is wet, and yet they look robust – because they are. This is a trial planting of a sweet sorghum hybrid from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (icrisat), photo courtesy of icrisat. ‘Semi-arid tropics’ refers to wastelands such as drylands and wetlands, where the soil conditions are extremes for plants to grow: rainfall fails, irrigation is unaffordable, soil fertility is very low, and farming is discouraging. Now comes a hardy crop like sweet sorghum that can grow where most crops will not, and you can expect an optimum harvest all the time. And with hybrids, you can expect even more.

Sweet sorghum is a crop for low-income farmers, for entrepreneurs, and for mitigation of climate change all at the same time – that is the message I gather from the sweet sorghum initiative.

While I invented the term, the sweet sorghum initiative is really that of icrisat, an international research center under the aegis of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (cgiar). What icrisat has done is successfully package the sweet sorghum production technology with processing technology and ‘sold’ this package to the Indian Government at Andhra Pradesh. As a result, now the Rusni Distillery is producing ethanol from the sorghum stalks and grains. From computations done at icrisat, sweet sorghum ethanol is much cheaper to produce than corn ethanol or sugarcane ethanol. The poor farmers are enriched, the entrepreneurs receive their just due, the government is happy it can help, and the environment is cleaner with less exhaust of carbon dioxide from cars and trucks and such that use gasoline-ethanol blends.