China’s environment has been affected in the wake of two decades of economic growth. And many farmers have been left behind in a growing gulf separating rich and poor. Now the central government hopes to reduce both rural discontent and greenhouse gas levels with one act – by getting farmers to turn animal manure into energy.
 Cooking with gas is cleaner - and better - than the traditional way.
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Guangxi province in Southern China. Busy farms like this are evidence of the country’s growing prosperity and increasing demand for meat. It’s evidence too of a growing threat posed by one of the world’s most potent greenhouse gases. Over the next year this sow and her piglets will, according to one estimate, produce the equivalent of 9 tonnes of carbon-dioxide through the methane generated by their droppings. Among human activities, agriculture is the largest producer of methane. And China is the world’s largest agricultural producer.
A third of the world’s farmers – more than 210 million farm families – live here. Many own just one or two animals but, when added together, they amount to more than 9 billion cows, pigs and chickens... which, according to China’s Ministry of Agriculture, generate more than 3 billion tons of manure each year.
In many parts of the world, animal waste is left to decompose in yards, sending more methane into the atmosphere. But what if all that methane could be turned into fuel? What impact would that have on the environment and on the lives of poor farmers?
Li Jingming, Secretary General, China Biogas Society: Those who live in the countryside have access to half the energy supplies made available to city dwellers. Meanwhile in rural areas there is a huge volume of bioenergy that could be used. So what we are trying to do is convert that human and animal waste into biofuel.
The vast majority of farmers who live in Guangxi province don’t earn enough to pay for fuel or electricity… if they’re lucky enough to be connected to the power grid in the first place. Yet this place is at the forefront of a renewable energy revolution unlike any other in the world.
Six months ago Xie Oi Shun began producing his own fuel, thanks to some help from a government project supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development or IFAD, a UN agency working in the province to adapt technology to the needs of poor farmers.
Xie Oi Shun, Farmer: The system is very simple. All the waste from the animals is routed through a canal behind the stable. Even human waste from this toilet. It all flows into a biogas digester…a large tank buried underground. The waste come in here and as it ferments inside the gas builds up and travels back out through this tube. You can see the tube up there…it takes the gas into the house where we use it to cook.
 Methane from animal manure and human waste can be collected for biogas.
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Liu Chun Xian, Farmer: We used to cook with wood. The smoke made my eyes tear and burn and I always coughed. The children too were often sick and had to go to the clinic, which was expensive. Now that we’re cooking with biogas things are much better.
Although burning methane produces some residual carbon dioxide… not burning it is believed to be 22 times more damaging to the atmosphere. In capturing and using methane as fuel for cooking and lighting, Xieqi is actually reducing its global warming effect. It’s a simple solution that many countries are now applying… but none as widely as China. As waste decomposes inside Xieqi’s new biogas digester, he's left with another fuel – an organic fertilizer high in nitrogen. For most of the last six month Xieqi has been pouring the fertilizer over his vegetable plants.
Xieqi Shun, Farmer: Since applying the fertilizer to my cucumber plants, they’ve grown much bigger than before, when used chemicals. They even taste better.
Although biogas technology has been used in China for nearly 50 years, it has only recently become a regular feature on Chinese farms. The reason? Poverty. Despite the country’s rapidly expanding economy, a growing income gap exists between city and country, driving hundreds of millions of farmers from their fields in search of a better life. Now one of the ways the central government is trying to make rural life more appealing is by offering farmers cash incentives to build biogas digesters so that they can produce their own fuel cheaply.
Li Xia, Deputy Director, Guangxi Rural Energy Office: A biogas tank can produce about 400 cubic meters of biogas. Just 1 cubic metre of biogas can meet the daily energy needs of rural households, mainly for cooking three meals. So for poor farmers, biogas digesters turn waste into treasure.
 Collecting wood for fuel is time-consuming.
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Much of what makes life hard and farmers poor is often related in one way or another to a lack of energy. Energy for cooking and lighting homes. Energy to fuel new enterprises or to ease the burden of daily living. Instead, farmers like Pan Long Jinging, a member of China’s Yao ethnic minority, spends as much as three hours a day travelling into the forest to collect wood just to cook meals. She has no other choice. Although electricity is available in her village, it is not reliable. And, even if it were, she hasn’t the money to pay for it. If she and her family want to eat, they need wood to burn. Wood is among the primary sources of fuel used by most Chinese farmers. Burning wood not only sends more greenhouse gas carbon-dioxide and soot into the atmosphere, but the demand for wood is contributing to China’s rapid deforestation - a problem the government in Guangxi is now trying to get under control.
Jiang Gui Mi, Farmer: In many of the forests around our village the government forbids us to cut trees. My wife must spend more and more time travelling to find wood for fuel.
Increasingly the government is putting pressure on farmers to apply good environmental practices. Protecting the forest is paramount. Zhou Ze En is a forest guard. Each day he patrols the forests around his community to ensure that no one has been cutting trees.
Zhou Ze En, Forest Guard: I walk around the forest to check, to find if there are any people who are cutting trees, if I find the thieves I will catch him and send him to the local forest police station.
But Zhou is catching fewer thieves these days. The forest he patrols happens to be in the same region where the government and IFAD have been promoting biogas production among the poorest farmers. As a result, IFAD estimates that 7,500 hectares of trees are now saved each year. But more importantly, saving trees is saving farmers’ time, according to Thomas Rath.
Thomas Rath,China Programme Manager, UN agency IFAD: Usually women here have to collect fuel wood everyday two or three hours. So they don’t have to do that if they use biogas. This time they can devote to improving their literacy, technical skills, business skills, they can do economic activities at home and generate income.
For many poor farmers, one of the rewards of producing biogas has been the free time it gives them – because with time they can take steps to change their lives.
PART TWO
Since Liu Chun Xian’s family began producing biogas on their farm six months ago, she no longer spends three hours a day collecting wood for cooking. Instead, she’s taken training that’s helped her make improvements to the family’s tea farm, which now earns more money. Thousands of poor farmers across the province have done the same, contributing to a drop in rural poverty.
Thomas Rath, China Country Programme Manager, IFAD: This project started in 2001 and three years later we could see overall the households had moved up from poverty to low income and even out of poverty. After three years 10 percent had already moved so 20,000 households.
 Villagers building a biogas digester.
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Few places illustrate the economic impact that biogas production is having on China’s farmers as this place – the village of Fada. Lu Gui Hong is the village mayor. His community has become a model of what the government envisions is the future for China’s small farmers.
Lu Gui Hong, Mayor of Fada: Just a few years ago the village was very poor. But since the government project brought us biogas technology and helped us develop our crops, people have been doing much better. Some of the farmers are so rich they are building new houses like that.
Throughout Fada people are busy building biogas digesters. Each one costs about 260 US dollars of which the government pays half. By the end of the year all 73 households here will be equipped to produce their own biogas fuel. It’s an example of what the Chinese government, in its 11th five-year economic plan, refers to as a new socialist village – environmentally sustainable, socially harmonious and prosperous.
Lu Gui Hong, Mayor of Fada: Farmers used to spend a lot of time collecting wood. As you can imagine it wasted a lot of time. Since we constructed biogas digesters, farmers have a lot of time to find other ways of earning money. For example, in my village we now grow tobacco and organic tea.
In the last five years, with more time to spend improving crops, farmers in Fada have increased tea production from 400 kilos to 2,500 kilos a day. At the same time, average income in the village has quadrupled to just over 1 US dollar per day. The rise is significant in a country where the extreme poverty line sits at 26 US cents per day.
Lu Gui Hong, Mayor of Fada: In the next few years, we hope to pull down all the old houses and build new ones. We hope to continue to improve living conditions and to make the environment greener and people's lives richer. In 20 years from now, you won’t see any wood smoke at all coming out of houses here.
Nanning is Guangxi’s capital… and an example of how much China’s booming economy is changing the landscape. New building construction crowds the city’s skyline. Just as on the ground new cars crowd lanes once occupied by bicycles. After two decades of rapid growth, China has become the world’s second largest energy consumer after the United States. By 2020, demand is, according to some estimates, expected to double… and the central government is now on a frantic search for more renewable energy options.
Li Xia, Deputy Director, Guangxi Rual Energy Office: Energy shortages are the greatest challenge we face in Guangxi. Coal, petrol and electricity are all in short supply. It’s for that reason we are now trying to use bioenergy to meet the daily energy needs of all rural communities.
But what if farmers producing biogas could also help growing cities meet their energy needs? The Dong Yuan Winery – a privately owned farm in Guangxi – is planning to do just that. Huang Bing Quan, owner and general manager, says he began producing biogas in an attempt to make his rice wine factory more environmentally friendly.
Huang Bingquan, Owner, Dongyuan Farms: Our wine factory produced a lot of organic waste, so we thought a smart way to get rid of it would be to use it as animal feed. But then the animal waste began to pile up, so we came up with the idea of producing biogas.
Today waste from the farm’s animals, which include one thousand head of cattle, flows into 27 large biogas digesters. Together they produce about 2000 cubic metres of gas each day. Some of it is used to cook lunch for Dong Yuan’s 300 staff. But most of it is used for another purpose. It’s being used to produce electricity. Costing about 162,000 US dollars, engineers here built the first biogas-fuelled electric generator in the province. Capable of producing as much as 1 million kilowatt hours of electricity each year, Huang Bing Quan estimates he will have paid off his initial investment in just over two years through energy cost savings.
Huang Bingquan, Owner, Dongyuan Farms: The biogas pits we built solved the pollution problem we had from the wine factory. It provided fuel for our staff canteen, electricity for our factory operation and helped improve the surrounding environment in our community. As a result our costs have dropped and our profits are higher.
But Huang thinks his profits can be even higher. Over the next few years he’ll be adding 10,000 head of cattle and wants to generate enough electricity to sell to 200,000 people.
 Biogas digester on Dongyuan wine farm.
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Huang Bingquan, Owner, Dongyuan Farms: I really think this is a good model. You could think of us as a pollution treatment factory that provides energy, protects the environment and offers employment.
Imagine thousands of large farms with biogas-fuelled generators producing electricity for millions of people, that’s the sort of future that the head of China’s biogas society hopes for.
Li Jingming, Secretary General, China Biogas Society: I am confident that more and more large farms will use biogas to generate electricity for urban and rural residents. I’m sure of it. And all this production will ease local energy scarcities and broaden the prospects for biogas development throughout China.
By 2020, China’s central government wants 15 per cent of the country’s energy consumption to come from renewable sources like biogas… and even the poorest farmers are being called upon to help reach the goal. In the village of Fada, Mayor Lu Gui Hong welcomes a group of farmers bussed in from a nearby county. The government is promoting Fada’s success as a new socialist village and educational tours like this are instrumental in encouraging more farmers to build biogas digesters.
In Guangxi, there are now 3 million biogas tanks in operation, according to the government, making the province the largest producer of biogas in China if not the world. As each one routes animal and human waste into biogas digesters they not only prevent vast amounts of methane from escaping into the atmosphere but an estimated 8 million tons of standard coal and 13 million tons of firewood from being burned each year, according to IFAD.
Zhang Mingpei, Director General, Guangxi Department of Agriculture: Forest coverage in Guangxi is now 70%, which is ranked ahead of all provinces in China. When you visit Guangxi you see trees, green mountains and clean rivers, flowers and birds everywhere. Guangxi is now a beautiful province and biogas has contributed foremost to this.
As the rainy season begins in West Guangxi, Liu Chun Xian no longer worries about finding dry wood or venturing out in the bad weather. China’s central government wants to have 50 million households – a population the size of France and Germany - producing biogas by the end of the decade. It’s hard to predict what impact so many farmers might have in reducing China’s greenhouse gas emissions or in generating energy but, for rural families like this one, it’s proof of what a simple technology can do to improve lives.
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