[ON AGROFUELS] CNS Reports: Agri-Bonanza’s Ripples – Church Cautiously Watches Ethanol Boom

Agri-bonanza’s ripples – Church cautiously watches ethanol boom
By Barbara J. Fraser
8/16/2007

Catholic News Service (www.catholicnews.com)

DOURADOS, Brazil (CNS) – As the bus rolls along between endless fields of corn on the highway from Campo Grande to Dourados, it is difficult to believe that malnutrition was one of the major social problems that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had to tackle when he took office.

The southern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which borders Bolivia and Paraguay, became part of Brazil's agribusiness boom, with corn and soy plantations stretching beyond the horizon. Now it is poised for the ethanol bonanza.

With oil prices around $70 a barrel, investors see ethanol as the wave of the future – an alternative to gasoline from a renewable source that produces fewer greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.

Nevertheless, bishops and church workers in Brazil are watching the boom in ethanol production with concern.

"In Brazil, the quest for ethanol-based energy cannot come at the cost of ecological equilibrium, agrarian reform and food security, or violate the fundamental rights of human beings," the bishops said in a statement in March.

Brazil and the United States produce about 70 percent of the world's ethanol. Brazil distills about 4.4 billion gallons a year, and most of the new vehicles sold in the country can run on either gasoline or ethanol. Brazil is also a major exporter of the alternative fuel, and da Silva has vowed to increase production.

When U.S. President George W. Bush visited Brazil in March, the two leaders signed an agreement to promote ethanol use and production. Brazil is aiming for total production of more than 9 million gallons a year by 2015.

Critics, however, say the alternative fuel has a down side. In the United States, the demand for corn to produce ethanol has been blamed for pushing up the price of foods, including tortillas in Mexico and milk from corn-fed dairy cows.

Brazil's ethanol is made from sugar cane, and proponents say it does not compete with the food market and is cheaper and more cost-effective than corn-based ethanol.

But in the state of Sao Paulo, where 80 percent of Brazil's ethanol is produced, growing sugar cane is twice as profitable as growing soy or corn. Cane fields are displacing livestock and traditional food crops, such as corn and oranges, said Isidoro Revers of the Brazilian bishops' Pastoral Land Commission.

While government officials say there is no danger that the Amazon rain forest will be cleared for sugar plantations, because the climate is not suitable, Bishop Erwin Krautler of Xingu, who has lived in the Amazon for four decades, said the expansion of sugar cane plantations is pushing soy farmers and ranchers into the Amazon.

With a vision of development that "only thinks in terms of profits and the exporting of soy and ethanol," farmers are "invading the Amazon from the South," Bishop Krautler said. "Soy farms are advancing, as is sugar cane."

In Mato Grosso do Sul, farms are switching from soy to sugar cane because cane growers will pay higher prices to lease land, said Egon Heck, regional coordinator of the church's Indigenous Missionary Council, or CIMI for its Portuguese initials.

Speculation is driving up land prices in the area, where Guarani indigenous people are fighting for the right to return to their ancestral lands. The higher land prices make the struggle even more difficult, Heck said.

Many of the Guarani work on the sugar cane plantations, which provide virtually the only jobs in parts of rural Mato Grosso do Sul. The manual harvesting of sugar cane is hot, heavy labor, and workers often suffer cuts from the sharp cane.

While a study by Utrecht University in the Netherlands found that wages on sugar cane plantations were slightly higher than in other types of agricultural work, they are little more than the minimum wage of $150 a month – far below the $700 that a trade union group says is necessary to support a family of five in Brazil.

Harvesting jobs are a magnet for unemployed laborers from other parts of Brazil. The Catholic Church office that ministers to migrants estimated that about 40,000 migrant workers help with the sugar cane harvest in Sao Paulo state. Many are bused to the farms by middlemen who charge them inflated fees for transportation, meal and supplies, creating debts that the workers cannot repay and forcing them into a form of slavery.

Such labor is even more common in northern Brazil, where Labor Ministry inspectors raided a sugar cane plantation in early July, freeing 1,000 workers who were being held in slavelike conditions.

The introduction of mechanical harvesting equipment on some farms has led growers who still use manual labor to demand higher production from cane cutters. Where laborers were expected to cut eight tons of cane a day a decade ago, they may be expected to cut 16 tons now, said Revers of the Pastoral Land Commission. The commission has recorded at least 19 cases of workers who have died in the fields from exhaustion.

The sugar cane and ethanol industry is estimated to have directly created more than 400,000 jobs, but observers say those are likely to dwindle as the industry becomes more mechanized.

"Within four or five years, an area that is employing 2,000 people for the harvest now will be employing four or five to operate the machinery," Heck said. "The indigenous people will end up without land, without employment, without anything."

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
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