Within this European program, EUBIA contributed to promote the most promising European bioenergy technologies for commercial applications in rural areas of China.
The Asia-Invest programme is part of a series of initiatives from the European Commission designed to promote mutual benefits and understanding between the European Union and Asia by supporting business cooperation.
It emerged partly as a consequence of conclusions from China’s Rural Energy Development Study, which was completed in 1996, recommending an integrated agricultural development approach to improve the livelihood of farm households in rural China.
Asia Invest analysed the best conditions that help small farm households in expanding organic greenhouse vegetable, fruit, crop and animal farming to increase incomes and to establish integrated farming systems with on farm biogas plants to generate clean energy.
Agricultural wastes from crops, human, and animals can fuel the biogas plants on the farms.The resulting decrease in rural poverty also serves as an incentive for poor farmers and SMEs to participate in current and future RE promotion. The project also considered large biogas plants to treat the waste of large intensive livestock farms, and other bio-energy plants to produce cleaner and more efficient energy to supply rural households.
This project was also of huge importance to the EU, which can offer sound and efficient technology for RE and in particular bio-energy systems for decentralised clean energy production and also for other, high value industrial commodities not yet widely available in China.
Therefore the dissemination of EU technologies and know-how is of great importance in contributing to the economic growth of rural districts in China. Asia Invest thus promoted business cooperation mainly for the production of clean modern energy, by the transfer of sound technologies, its certification to increase the quality of the latter on the national market.