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Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00021482-10338111

1533-8290

Jeffrey T. Manuel,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Growing crops for automobile fuel is a major activity of industrial agriculture in the twenty-first century. Yet the history of biofuels, especially outside the United States, remains surprisingly little known. Jennifer Eaglin's Sweet Fuel does a significant service for agricultural historians by documenting a key era in biofuels history: Brazil's national alcohol fuel program. In 1975, Brazil launched a National Ethanol Program, or Proálcool, to supplement, and later replace, gasoline with alcohol distilled from sugarcane. Sweet Fuel describes the program's origins, its evolution, and its unanticipated consequences for Brazil's environment and agrarian labor relations.Proálcool's roots were planted in the 1930s when Brazil's government propped up the ailing sugar sector just as it had previously done for coffee. President Getúlio Vargas mandated a 5 percent mixture of alcohol in gasoline. The 1960s and 1970s were dominated by a military dictatorship and modernization of Brazil's economy. Large sugar producers like São Paulo's Biagi family took advantage of this era to expand and modernize. Yet this era's focus was on producing sugar for the international export market, rather than domestic ethanol. When the 1973 oil crisis drove up prices, however, Brazil's reliance on imported oil caused an economic crisis. Alcohol fuel offered a way to offset domestic oil consumption while also supporting sugar producers.The Proálcool program developed in two phases. First, in 1975 President Ernesto Geisel mandated a 20 percent ethanol mixture and set a target to produce three billion liters of ethanol by 1980. Eaglin focuses on the Biagi's Santa Elisa mill to demonstrate how large, industrialized sugar barons dominated the Proálcool program. Proálcool's second phase shifted from supplementing gasoline with ethanol to a crash program to fully replace gasoline with alcohol. Key to this phase was the all-ethanol car, a Brazilian engineering triumph that hit the roads in 1977.As ethanol production increased under Proálcool, pollution from vinasse (nutrient-rich wastewater from sugarcane distillation) became a national problem. Old laws on the books were supposed to regulate vinasse pollution, but enforcement was limited and most producers ignored the regulations with impunity. Facing atrocious pollution levels, municipalities tried to crack down on producers who dumped vinasse into rivers beginning in the 1950s. There was some success, but without stronger state or national regulation, producers often evaded local enforcement. Eaglin details the shifting agencies tasked with regulating vinasse pollution, calling them “acronyms of confusion” (105). Finally, in 1978 the national government officially banned dumping. Most vinasse was then stored in large retention ponds, which Eaglin calls “lakes of sacrifice” (120).Proálcool also caused labor strife in the agro-industrial sugarcane regions of São Paulo. Sweet Fuel offers good background on the shift from permanent to temporary labor in Brazil's cane fields during the second half of the twentieth century. Describing the grueling, dangerous work of cutting cane by hand, Eaglin paints a striking contrast between Proálcool's modern goals and its reliance on exhausting hand labor well into the 1980s. When growers tried to intensify production in 1984, workers struck and burned cane fields. Initially, workers won many concessions, though their implementation was erratic.Proálcool sputtered through the late 1980s and 1990s. Bad harvests led to worry that ethanol supplies would not meet demand, while cheap imported oil weakened the program's original justification. Throughout the 1990s, ethanol advocates focused on the fuel's environmental benefits. Despite new green rhetoric, however, problems of air and water pollution remained significant. Proálcool limped to its end in the late 1990s as Brazil was buffeted by high inflation and neoliberal reforms that framed Proálcool's subsidies as unaffordable. Brazilian ethanol rebounded in the early 2000s, however, with the launch of flex-fuel cars that allowed drivers to choose either gasoline or ethanol depending on price and preference. And as global concern over greenhouse gas emissions increased, sugarcane ethanol's value as a fuel with lower emissions than gasoline was celebrated worldwide.A great strength of Sweet Fuel is simply introducing Brazil's ethanol program to English-language readers. It is a story that anyone interested in modern agro-industrial development and the imbrication of agriculture and energy during the twentieth century should know. Eaglin also establishes that Proálcool and the problems of ethanol production had origins before the 1970s energy crisis. It is a helpful reminder of long-term continuities in Brazil's sugarcane sector, although focusing on the decades before the 1970s at times shortchanges what did actually change under the Proálcool program.Sweet Fuel concludes with what Eaglin argues are Proálcool's lessons for energy transitions more broadly. For example, Eaglin emphasizes that turning agriculture into an energy source brings the problem of spatially unequal costs and benefits to farming. City dwellers benefit from cleaner air while maintaining car-dependent lifestyles. But the agro-industrial countryside bears the costs in the form of polluted water and air. I enjoyed these lessons and found them interesting tools of comparison. But agricultural historians who balk at prescriptive history might be less enthusiastic, especially since many of the lessons are aimed at energy systems more than agriculture. Nonetheless, Sweet Fuel has begun a much-needed conversation on biofuels' past, present, and likely future.