A new fuel should not carry oil's frequent curse: the enrichment of a narrow elite.
Near what remains of the first sugar factory in Brazil, built in 1877 with a sign in Latin over the entrance that translates as “Sweet is the Reward of Work”, Danuza Gomes da Silva swings a glinting knife as she makes her way down the length of a field cutting cane.
She bends to slice the sticks of young cane dropped by other workers from the top of a truck. Again and again she straightens. A band of 12 other labourers plant about 10 acres a day. Sugar cane buds easily from the plowed furrows, and it grows fast. But the work associated with it is hard.
Danuza, round-faced and soft-eyed, makes between $8 and $13 a day. At 35, she has four young children. Only 20 per cent of the 7.5 million acres planted with sugar cane in Brazil is mechanised. “I don’t want to lose my job,” Danuza says.
Machines that plant and harvest are slowly spreading across the expanse of Brazilian cane fields. But Danuza’s harsh existence is a reminder that behind the global buzz over Brazil’s cane-based ethanol production lurk enduring social problems. Ethanol, renewable and relatively clean, is lovely. The life of the migrant Brazilian rural worker, finite and hot, is not.
Seldom has a country seen an image makeover quite as radical as Brazil’s in recent years. From the unserious land of samba, slums, soccer and smoking rain forests, it has become the realm of ahead-of-the-curve ethanol production, flex-fuel cars running on any combination of ethanol and gasoline, and a biofuel revolution that could deliver the world from $100-a-barrel oil.
Where the world once saw Pele and poverty, it now sees prescience: a country where 80 per cent of new cars run on ethanol or gasoline, all gasoline contains close to 25 per cent ethanol, and ethanol accounts for more than 40 per cent of fuel consumption.
These numbers reveal new US targets that might replace about one-sixth of gasoline consumption with ethanol by 2020 for what they are: belated and meager.
In fact, both images hold some truth. Brazil has led the way in demonstrating the potential of ethanol, has the land to expand the industry, uses sugar-based ethanol whose yield per hectare is eight times that of US corn ethanol being developed at the cost of higher food prices and has shown the feasibility of a flex-fuel auto fleet.
If the vast potential of sugar cane ethanol is to be realised, in Brazil as in poor African countries, its development must come in ordered ways that allow the likes of Danuza and her children to benefit. A new fuel should not carry oil’s frequent curse: the enrichment of a narrow elite.
This will depend on several things: the labour standards adopted by the growing hordes of international investors drawn to ethanol; the opening up of the global trading system to this biofuel that many poor tropical countries will be able to produce; and the development of a global traded commodity market in ethanol with established norms. Without such standards, development will stall. So will social progress.
America must do its part, not least by freeing up its ethanol and sugar markets to imports. So must Brazil, by seeing a 35-year-old woman in the sun with children in need of education, and all the myriad people like them, through the billowing CO2-lite clouds of ethanol euphoria.
