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USDA Global Conference on Agricultural Biofuels: Research and Economics international perspectives session B Non-food feedstock and the road map of China’s bioethanol industry Shi-Zhong Li Institute of New Energy, Tsinghua University Beijing, PR China Given China’s ongoing economic growth and associated growth in energy demand and environmental degradation, the maintenance of social and ecological sustainability requires the development and utilization of alternative renewable energy sources. The development of bioethanol technology for transportation is of great importance in this perspective. In this paper, how to produce ethanol from non-food feedstock should be emphasized, and a road map for bioethanol in China is presented. The central challenge is to produce sufficient feedstocks without disrupting current production of food and feed as well as forest products. Cassava, sweet sorghum and lignocellulose will be ideal options at different stages to produce ethanol cost-effectively. Currently, ethanol from starch is a mature technology, hence tuber crops, such as cassava, sweet potato, etc. can be used as feedstock to produce ethanol, and cassava is an ideal option, since it doesn’t threat food safety. The potential of ethanol from tuber crops is more than 10 million tons. Sweet sorghum is an emerging feedstock. With its outstanding features of high biomass production yield, high sugar content and high tolerances to waterlogging, draught, salty and alkalinity, sweet sorghum should be an alternative feedstock to grain or sugarcane. However, sweet sorghum ethanol has not been commercialized till the technological breakthrough made by Tsinghua University. For seasonal reason, it’s difficult to produce ethanol from fresh sweet sorghum juice like sugarcane ethanol in brazil, US and India try to overcome the technical hurdle for dozen of years. In China, a novel solid state fermentation technology for the production of ethanol from sweet sorghum stalk has been dev