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G8-BRAZIL: Guest Brings Biofuel Arguments to Summit

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 5 2007 (IPS) - As a guest at the G8 summit this week in Germany, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will present arguments to convince the leaders of the world&#39s eight richest countries of the importance of biofuels in the fight against global warming.

But the possibility of Brazil becoming a kind of "green Saudi Arabia" in the near future, as the leftist president has stated, has awakened both enthusiasm and worries.

In a context of sky-high oil prices and pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Brazil is in a position to become the world&#39s leading producer of renewable fuels, made from vegetable oils and sugar cane, said Adriano Pires, an expert on energy at the Brazilian Centre for Infrastructure.

South America&#39s giant, which already produces 17 billion litres of ethanol a year, and the United States together account for 70 percent of global ethanol production.

Sugar cane crops currently cover six million hectares of land in Brazil, representing a 13 percent expansion in the last three years.

The sugar cane industry says that in order to meet rising domestic and external demand, output would have to double in the next six or seven years, which would require an increase of three to four million hectares.

But non-governmental organisations like ActionAid International warn that Brazil&#39s biofuel plans may lead to a repeat of what happened with soybeans, a monoculture crop whose expansion led to the destruction of over seven million hectares of Amazon jungle in just five years.

These concerns are shared by Brazil&#39s Landless Workers Movement (MST), which is fighting for faster, more effective agrarian reform.

The expansion of sugar cane crops "is accelerating the historic tendency of the concentration of land ownership," warned Alexandre Conceicao, a member of the MST national leadership in the northern state of Pernambuco.

He also said that once again, as occurred when the country launched its national fuel ethanol programme PROALCOOL in 1975, the accent will be put on a land reform policy "oriented towards the global market with no regard to the domestic production of food."

Furthermore, the MST has protested the "slavery" conditions faced by workers on the country&#39s sugar cane plantations.

"The social cost of this policy is the overexploitation of labour with an army of seasonal workers who cut one ton of sugar cane for 2.50 reals (1.28 dollars) in precarious conditions which have already caused the deaths of hundreds of workers," said Conceicao.

In an interview with IPS, Camila Moreno, an expert in agrarian development at the Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, said the growth of the ethanol industry is breathing life into "a modern-day version of the sugar plantation slave-labour past," along with the expansion of a new form of "ecological imperialism."

Moreno pointed out that large tracts of land have been purchased by international (largely U.S. and European) investment funds, which has brought "a new form of capitalism that was not familiar to Brazil."

That trend became evident in the first "ethanol summit" organised Monday and Tuesday in Sao Paulo, Brazil&#39s largest city, by the Sao Paulo Sugar Cane Agroindustry Union (UNICA), which drew experts and political leaders from different countries around the world.

Sugar cane industry sources confirmed that more than 15 billion dollars are being funnelled into the construction of 77 new ethanol plants that should be functioning by 2012, and the expansion of some of the 300 existing plants in Brazil. The investors include companies from the United States, Japan and China.

But perhaps the clearest recent reflection of the "ethanol euphoria" was the announcement at the sugar cane industry conference by Hungarian-born investor George Soros that he would invest around 900 million dollars in three ethanol factories in the southern Brazil state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

Adeco, a company in which Soros is the main shareholder, already owns 150,000 hectares planted in sugar cane in Brazil.

Celso Marcatto, Food Rights Coordinator at ActionAid Brazil, commented that in order to call biofuels "a clean or renewable source of energy," the social and environmental impacts of the "uncontrolled expansion" of soybean and sugar cane crops would have to be addressed.

The activist said the state should regulate the biofuel production, transport and marketing sectors to keep the country from turning into "one big monoculture crop" or several, including eucalyptus trees (for pulp), soybeans and sugar cane.

ActionAid is calling for protection of family farms and communities of small-scale farmers and indigenous people "against the voracious expansion of big biofuel companies." The group also argues that these segments of the population should incorporate the sustainable production of biofuels as a source of income.

In addition, it proposes the need for zoning, to establish specific areas for biofuel crops with the aim of protecting fragile ecosystems, and the creation of strict government controls and oversight to prevent the expansion of such crops from hurting food production and fuelling exploitative working conditions, especially among sugar cane cutters.

But representatives of the sugar cane industry and the government downplay or outright dismiss such fears.

Geraldo Coutinho, vice president of the association of sugar cane and ethanol producers of Rio de Janeiro, told IPS that although it is important to determine areas where sugar cane can and cannot be grown, Brazil still has "a phenomenal potential to be explored in unproductive or underused land."

President Lula, meanwhile, denied that his plans to make Brazil an even bigger ethanol producer would undermine food sovereignty or further fuel deforestation in the Amazon jungle region as a result of the expansion of the agricultural frontier driven by crops like sugar cane.

According to the president, Brazil dedicates 440 million hectares to agriculture, of which sugar cane accounts for a mere one percent.

Brazilian Vice President José Alencar, meanwhile, said at UNICA&#39s ethanol conference that rather than causing environmental damage, investment in biofuels will contribute to economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection in poor countries.