Friday, February 19, 2010

Bloggers' Ethanol Distillery With Sweet Sorghum Plantation

They say bloggers are all discussions and no action. Well, they can all be wrong. We bloggers can switch to anti-poverty action mode, guerilla style right now. How? First we plan to create a model sweet sorghum plantation with ethanol distillery in the Philippines. A million or so bloggers and their friends contributing $10-up each over a few months capitalizes both sorghum plantation and a 40,000 liters/day ethanol distillery. Total project cost is around $15 million. Hired consultant experts design the farm and distillery. Technology comes from India’s International Crop Research Institute for Sub-arid Tropics. Farm site is 1,000 hectares of denuded Philippine upland plots, all leased from State. The distillery rises on a company-purchased plot at a nearby town with power lines. Three-wheel tractors cultivate the land, creating contoured strips and plots. Reforested mini-dam nets, and concrete cisterns with pumps for raising water to mountain tops provide year-round irrigation. Worker teams plant sweet sorghum, feed the plants foliar fertilizer, prepare and apply compost, and spray organic pesticides. Strip cropping assures daily harvests and feeding of stalks to the distillery. Contract growing of sweet sorghum to local farmers raises harvests to several thousand-hectare volumes.

The 40,000 liters/day distillery should spout out ethanol which when sold profits at an astonishing 80% of sales! The stratospheric profit rate is based on Brazilian experience using sugar cane as feedstock, and lower gasoline prices in early 2000s . Sweet sorghum as feedstock promises even higher profit rates due to several factors: (1) Sweet sorghum can be ratooned (cut at base) for up to three crops a year without replanting, versus just one crop per year for sugar cane; (2) Sweet sorghum needs two-thirds less water than sugar cane; (3) Sweet sorghum has higher brix (sweetness) content than sugar cane; (4) Sweet sorghum can be grown in several types of soil, is drought-resistant, and can even withstand heavy rain or flash floods; (5) More sweet sorghum plants grow per hectare compared to sugar cane; (6) Brazilian style sugarcane planting require enormous amounts of expensive soil-applied commercial fertilizer and pesticides. Our sorghum plantations save up to 60% in plant food costs thru low-cost foliar and compost fertilization. Highly-effective organic pesticides developed locally saves up to 70% in pesticides.

Given these factors, our ethanol distillery can be expected to earn seven-figure clean profit weekly, peso basis. We have to reward blogger contributors and investors with dividends that are way above average stock market returns to encourage local copies of our profit-making model. The rest of profit goes towards construction of another distillery and plantation model in another place to transform habitual skeptics and cynics into believers. The target: spread the profit-making word among thirty million Filipino employees. Visions of ‘sideline income’ quadrupling salaries can drive the employee masses to pressure government into passing a law that lends capital to thousand-employee groups that plan on building sweet sorghum farms and distilleries, plus all manner of agribusinesses. A mere fourth of state budgets (some P140 billion yearly) can build scores of distilleries and plantations when leveraged by foreign investments. The law should require a 1st World joint venture partner for every group. Foreign joint venture partners quadruple local capital thru dollar investments and 20-year equipment loans. Locals get their farm machines and distillery equipment without investing more pesos. As in the 3rd World past, world anti-poverty development banks may grant the equipment loans at state guaranty. This time however, employee half-ownership of the giant projects ensures trillions of dollars worth of stock shares and dividends flooding the masses instead of bottling up among the few oligarchs and state officials. This time also, the mass-initiated loans get invested in productive enterprises that pay taxes at gargantuan scale, enough to repay new and decades-long state loans. State credit-worthiness rises to stratospheric levels, enabling Philippine regimes to keep borrowing for mass-initiated anti-poverty projects.

Since good laws are forever, the Philippine ‘mass projects financing law’ should keep creating distilleries, sweet sorghum plantations and all manner of agribusinesses for all time, with expansions all over the tropics. Billions of bottom poor get employed while employee masses quadruple their salaries thru ‘sideline dividends’ and ownership of shares paid for by their companies’ world-scale operations. The Philippine model copied by other 3rd World countries produces planet-size multi-benefits: Energy prices way down thru use of E75 fuel (75% ethanol, 25% gasoline). New jobs for bottom poor created in millions each year throughout the tropics, for all eternity. Denuded lands thick with greenery. Vehicle pollutants greatly reduced thru ethanol use. The disastrous effects of global warming toned down.

As one may see, blogging nets have great potential power to redeem the world’s poor while rebuilding the planet’s overused ecologies. Millions of e-talents with worldwide reach have the potential to guide world politicians towards creating economic and political democracy in the 3rd World. The grassroots should begin managing public resources (thru laws initiated by blogging nets) instead of perpetually depending on a few politicians to solve planet-scale problems.

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