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BEIJING, Dec 5: After years of bumper harvests, China has more corn than its 1.3 billion people can possibly eat and is turning some of the surplus into cheap fuel for vehicles, state media said on Wednesday.
China’s corn output exceeds demand by 10 million tons every year prompting state economic planners to work out ways to cash in on the over supply, the Xinhua news agency reported.
One example is a plant in the northeastern city of Jilin which expects to produce 600,000 tons of corn-based alcohol fuel annually once it becomes operational in 2003.
Such new uses of corn may help ease the financial burden on the country’s rural population, who have encountered great difficulties in recent years as their incomes have fallen far behind those in the cities, it said.
China, a net importer of oil since 1993, is also desperate to find new alternative sources of energy to reduce its dependence on overseas suppliers and planners are hoping corn fuel could help reduce import volumes.
A further advantage of corn-based alcohol fuel is that it is good for the environment and when burnt does not produce substances harmful to the human body, Xinhua said.
However, there is one caveat: gasoline can contain no more than 10 per cent alcohol fuel if automobile parts are to stay intact, a grain alcohol expert told Xinhua.
SHANGHAI: The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) has introduced new regulations aimed at removing loss-making firms from the country’s bourses.
Under the rules effective from January 1, companies will be delisted if they fail to return to profit in the first half of the year after three consecutive years of net losses, the China Securities News said.
Formerly loss-making firms could trade under the ‘Particular Transfer’ status after being suspended from normal trading on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges for an indefinite period.
Stocks with Particular Transfer status are only traded on Fridays while those with Special Treatment status are traded every session but with a daily upper and lower limit of five percent compared with 10 percent for ordinary shares.
The PT status which allows listed firms to be traded every Friday was just a transitional way to ease investor worries that their shares will eventually become useless papers, Lu Min, analyst of Northeastern Securities.
The CSRC delisted the first firm, Shanghai Narcissus Electrical Appliance Industrial Co. from the exchange earlier this year and the new rules indicate more firms will be axed.
Although loss-making stocks fell sharply today, some investors still saw gold amid the worst performers.
Any company reporting net losses for three consecutive years will be suspended, unless these losses are the result of retroactive changes to previous years’ accounts.—AFP
