Sugar cane plantations in Brazil

Brazil, the world's leading producer of ethanol from sugar cane, would like to play a major role in the energy scenario of the future. Its declared aim is to satisfy 10% of the global demand for petrol by the year 2025. This would entail a fivefold increase in the area of land devoted to sugar cane cultivation, from 6 million hectares to 30 million hectares. Accordingly, a Memorandum of Understanding on biofuels has already been agreed with both the EU and the USA. Outputs, exports and export revenues have been skyrocketing for several years now. The outlook is not good, however, for the majority of the population. The smallholder families, the indigenous and the poor are unlikely to benefit from the ethanol boom. In fact, the downside of full tanks in the industrialised nations is empty stomachs in other countries. For Brazil this means:

Land concentration and forced evictions
Small farmers and indigenous groups are being forced from their land by the major export-oriented corporations to make way for sugar cane plantations. Terror and murder are frequently the instruments of choice. In the poorest region of Brazil, the Northeast, an estimated 35,000 families have been driven off their land in the past 15 years, causing the loss of livelihood of about 150,000 people. The consequences are rural exodus and migration to the urban slums.

Obstruction to agrarian reform
The structure of land ownership in Brazil is extremely unbalanced. For many years now, Brazilian organisations have been calling for the implementation of the most urgently needed agricultural reforms, to ensure a more equitable land distribution and food security. Brazilian movements now see these reforms under threat from the agrofuel boom, which will concentrate the land in the hands of even fewer people.

Competition for land to grow food
Growing competition for land use between sugar cane and staple foods has resulted in higher food prices, which are disastrous for the poor. Brazil's Ministry of Agriculture has already recorded declining production areas for staple food (1990-2005: beans –19.9%, wheat –11.9%, tomatoes –9.8%), while the areas for monocultures such as sugar cane and soy are expanding steadily (1990-2005: sugar cane +35.8%, soy +99.8%).

Human rights abuses/Exploitation
Apart from favourable factors such as climate, the “competitive advantage” of the Brazilian ethanol trade is also based to some extent on social dumping, slave labour and child labour. MISEREOR's partner CPT, the Brazilian Land Pastoral Commission, has documented that in 2005-06 at least 19 sugar cane workers died from exhaustion in the State of São Paulo.

Encroachment into environmentally sensitive regions
In its national Agroenergy Plan 2006-2011, Brazil's Ministry of Agriculture identifies large areas which could be potentially suitable for energy crops. The areas in question include extremely vulnerable, species-rich ecosystems such as the Cerrado Savannah, the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal wetlands. Opening up these regions for sugar cane or other energy crops would mean the irretrievable loss of ecologically intact environments.

Ecological implications
The ethanol boom is intensifying an unsustainable farming model based on monoculture and an export-oriented agricultural sector. The environmental implications are serious and include the pollution of watercourses and groundwater by pesticides and fertilisers, causing poisoning and deaths among the population, leaching of the soil and the loss of biodiversity. At the same time sugar cane is such a thirsty crop that the plantations are worsening water scarcity in Brazil's arid regions.