In some regions of Nicaragua, sorghum used to be the poor man

Once, plant breeders dreamed of plumper tomatoes, heartier soybeans and juicier corn kernels. These days, visions of squat poplars and earless corn stalks are dancing in their heads. They are hoping these new fangled crops will make cost-effective biofuels.

One way to cut greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere may be to exploit a particular talent some plants have of locking away carbon. All we need to do is choose the right strains of crops to grow, and they will sequester carbon for us for millennia. That's the idea of two agricultural scientists in Australia, who say the trick is to grow grasses such as wheat and sorghum, which lock up large amounts of carbon in so-called plantstones, also known as phytoliths.

Underlying objective of food security programme in India is to ensure the availability of foodgrains to the common people at an affordable price. The PDS system in India is based on the wheat and rice model, which in many areas were never the staple grains for household consumption. It was millets and pulses which were core to dryland farming and consumption in the country.

Sweet sorghum is a special type of sorghum which accumulates sugars in its stalks. The unique high carbon assimilation capability of sorghum crop coupled with another desirable trait of accumulating high levels of extractable sugars in the stalk can be exploited for extensive use of sorghum as raw material for manufacturing ethanol, jaggery, syrup and paper.However, with the ever increasing demand for industrial and fuel-grade ethanol, the scope of using sweet sorghum in ethanol industry as a supplementary raw material to sugarcane molasses is catching up.

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