A Better Biofuel Economy?

Scientific American:

A farmer in Mozambique grows peas, beans and cassava in rotation—enough to feed the family with a little to spare. The farmer then sells that excess to CleanStar Mozambique, which dries and packages the produce for sale in the capital, Maputo. But the company also takes the surplus cassava, a starch-filled root and local food staple, and sends it to an ethanol fermentation plant built by ICM, a U.S. ethanol company, that employs enzymes produced by Denmark-based Novozymes. The ethanol produced is then sold in reusable plastic bottles to people in Maputo who own one of the 3,000 or so ethanol-burning clean cookstoves sold by CleanStar. When the fuel runs out, more can be purchased at an incipient network of CleanStar shops....
"Ethanol burns very clean," Nagy notes. The CleanStar venture opened its first ethanol production plant on May 17 in Dondo, capable of brewing two million liters of fuel per year. "Charcoal might be cheaper but it has less energy content per kilo[gram]."
The problem in this case is: replacing cheap charcoal, which farmers make by cutting down and burning trees, requires dependence on a much more complex, new and unproved system. "People use charcoal because it is cheap and easy," notes a prominent development expert who declined to be identified because of relationships with various clean cookstove donors and providers. "Ethanol is neither."  The first step in this new process will be convincing farmers to halt charcoal production and slash-and-burn agriculture in favor of a new rotation system. Mozambican farmers currently grow corn and cassava, among other crops. But under the new system, they would grow nitrogen-fixing beans and peas along with staple or cash crops such as cassava, ground nuts, sorghum and soybeans in rotation in fields ringed by trees newly-planted to prevent erosion. "We have enrolled between 500 and 600 farmers today," Nagy says, and the project aims for at least 3,000 by next year. The CleanStar venture also provides each farmer with fertilizer and pesticides as well as technical assistance. As a result of the new rotation system and improved soil fertility, farm family nutrition improves (44 percent of Mozambican children are stunted due to malnutrition and disease) and income can more than quadruple, according to Nagy.

On the face of it, this sounds like it could be a better system, but it is still involves a middleman buying and selling food and taking food out of the market to turn into fuel.  I'll withhold judgement for now.