Sugarcane is mainly planted in southern China, such as Guangxi, Yunnan, Guangdong, Hainan et al, Its total planting areas were about 20 million acres in 2010 statistically, and Guangxi contribute about 60 percent of the total. Lands suitability for sugarcane is limited. It is very difficult to expand the land for sugarcane production because of the industrialization in China. An additional challenge is the harvesting. High investment requirements and difficulties with mechanization on, for example steep land, increase the risks of the implementation of mechanized harvest. About over 90 percent of the China sugarcane area was still manually harvested. Expansion of sugarcane areas will be affected by the cost/benefit of manual labor. Under the driving of the market opportunities, national policies giving incentives to the sugarcane agri-business, the further expansion of sugarcane areas forecasted for China is expected to about 2 million acres, which mustn’t reduce the availability of arable land for the cultivation of food and feed crops.

There are risks of environmental degradation in different stages of sugarcane ethanol production and processing. Negative impacts have been caused by the lack of implementation of best management practices and ineffective legislation and control. Nevertheless, further improvements are necessary.

A major concern of developing sugarcane ethanol in China is the threat to sugar security. Rapid expansion of bioethanol production could potentially reduce the availability of sugar production, causing a reduction in its supply and increase of sugar price. In recent years, the sugar productions are stably at about 12 million tons, the max exceeded 14.84 million tons in 2008. While the total demand for sugar is about 12 million tons in China. With the combination of the further expansion of about 2 million acres sugarcane areas, and applying the advanced technology, for example: genetically modified sugarcane and improved cultivation techniques, yields can be increased from 5 tons to about 6-7 tons. So the sugar productions in China are expected to over 16 million tons. Based on these estimates, without affecting the supply of sugar, the current potential of sugarcane ethanol production reached over 2 million tons.