Gas imports or solar panels?
Plant photosynthesis isn’t exactly efficient at all: 6% (It’s even lower than this maximum!) The industrial-scale corn-to-ethanol is something of a insanity, since agriculture is intensively polluting/destructive and ridiculously water hungry.
Using the same land area and producing hydrogen with solar, and then converting the H2 to hydrocarbons in a industrial complex would probably be way better. (I would like to know some numbers for this…)
Also, some plants actually like growing in shade. So, the solar-panel-fields don’t exclude using the land also for growing food simultaneously, if the panel arrays are raised from the ground level and placed a bit more sparsely.