From cellulose talk to wood stock

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: nurturing non-food alternatives in its stead. Oil-bearing tree species such as Jatropha, Pongamia and Mahua offer excellent alternatives. These species are already well established in the tropics. Handled diligently, they can be raised as commercial crops in wastelands that do not compete for space with food crops, and above all provide in situ employment opportunities to the millions of uneducated and unskilled farming families at their own rural backyards. However, efforts at commercialisation must be preceded by appropriate technological and agricultural interventions to ensure suitable planting materials, awareness of cropping intricacies, produce offtake mechanisms and processing units.

Likewise, cellulosic alcohol from stalks of cereal crops would be a worthy option, as it won’t cut into the availability of grain for food although it would reduce the availability of dried fodder available for animal feed. So too ethanol from bagasse from crushed sugarcane and wood chips. But fermentation efficiency has to be improved before these options become commercially viable.

In the Indian context, cassava, a crop well acclimatised to local soil and climate, is a serious candidate for ethanol production from its starchy tubers. Unlike in Africa where it is a food staple, here its tubers are processed into starch that goes into making sago and fried foods.

It goes without saying that conservation and improvements in fuel efficiency are just as important and auto manufacturers have to be committed for making tangible savings through concerted R&D. In the meantime, targets set for the mandatory mix of biofuels will have to be reviewed and altered appropriately based on the learning curve. The bottomline, though, is that denuding rainforests and reserve lands in the quest for meeting a misplaced imperative of the now must be avoided to save ourselves from drastic repercussions in the future.