The "Environemental" movement seems to completely ignore the rule of unintended consequences. Who knows, maybe that's their intent...

The Circus of Horrors Behind Brazil's Biofuel Show
Written by Raúl Zibechi
Wednesday, 08 August 2007
Brazil is staking its claim as a great emerging power thanks to the leadership it maintains in biofuel production. The price of this ambition is paid by the environment and by the cane cutters, who are the invisible characters in this story.

"When the airplane passed, pouring out that bath of poison, my father was soaked. He fell ill because of the toxins that are sprayed over the cane. This is the end for many young people here, " says a female cane cutter from the region of Ribeirão Preto, in São Paulo state.

"The people work and they give them a slip of paper to shop with in the supermarket. The people don't see money, just the bill of what they owe," confirms a worker from the same region, where seven of every 10 cane cutters did not finish primary school. (1)

Other cutters explain that they are cheated by the scales that the bosses control - they calculate that they have to carry 110 kilograms (242 lbs) for the scale to reach 100 (220 lbs). Almost all of them were lured from Brazil's poorer Northeast by promises that they would earn very high salaries.

Many moderate analysts see working conditions as reminiscent of slavery. But the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said before the G-8 Summit that biofuels have "enormous potential to generate jobs and income" and that "they offer a real option for sustainable development." (2)

Behind the "politically correct" jargon lurks a reality poised to destroy the Amazon, a reality that destroys millions of young bodies and promises lucrative business to investors. The very name biofuels seems to be destined to foment the confusion.

João Pedro Stédile, head of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), points out that the defenders of ethanol "use the prefix bio to make it seem like it's a good thing," and that because of this its opponents prefer to call it like it is and use the term "agrofuels" because the term refers to agriculturally produced energy. (3)

Backtracking Four Centuries

According to the ex-governor of São Paulo state, Claudio Lembo, agrofuels will spread monoculture farming across the whole country. Although he is a conservative politician and member of the Liberal Front Party (now the Democratic Party), he thinks that Brazil "backtracked 500 years to the same place" as it was as a Portuguese colony.

In his opinion, agricultural land will be lost when used for sugarcane and the history of those four centuries will be repeated, when "thousands were expelled from their communities by the leviathan of monoculture, which creates concentrated wealth." (4)

Looking closer at the cane cutters' working conditions, a terrifying world appears - a world that should give people who are enthused by the idea of substituting fossil fuels with agrofuels something to think about.

According to various reports, around a million people work in the industry, of which 500,000 are in the agricultural sector. Close to 80% of cane harvesting is manual. The workers only get paid if they reach the output set by the bosses, which in the Ribeirão Preto region is some 12 tons a day, double the 1980 target. If they don't reach it, they aren't paid at all. (5)

To reach this output target they must work some 10 or 12 hours a day, but sometimes 14, many of these under the burning sun. Many parents bring their small children to help them reach the production goal. Although the numbers of working children have declined, in 1993 one in every four cane cutters in the state of Pernambuco was between seven and 17 years old, and many did not receive any salary.

In the last two harvests, 14 people died as a result of excess work. The cutters are recruited in other regions and have to live in the same hacienda, in mattress-less cabins, with neither water nor a kitchen; they have to cook in tins over little bonfires and buy their groceries in the same hacienda at prices exceeding market values.

The cane is cut after being burned, which facilitates harvesting but gravely endangers the environment and produces serious respiratory complaints.

In the Piracicaba municipality, in São Paulo, hospitalizations of children with respiratory problems increase 21% during periods of cane burning. For every 10 tons, the cutter must make 72,000 machete blows and flex their legs 36,000 times. They lose around 10 liters of water per day and walk 10 km a day while they complete their job. The monthly salary ranges from US$ 150 to US$ 200 a month. According to the sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, the cutters' average lifespan is less than that of colonial slaves. (6)

The minister of Labor, Carlos Lupi, admitted before the International Labor Conference in Geneva that part of the production of cane in Brazil is done with degrading work in awful conditions: "They work without protection and even lose fingers." (7)

Maria Aparecida de Moraes Silva, who has studied the work on sugarcane plantations for 30 years now, affirms that 45% of the cutters come from the Northeast. The migrants are preferred by employers because while far from their families they tolerate the abuses unquestioningly, and after the seven-month-long harvest they return to their villages, making it difficult for them to organize unions. (8)

They Call This Progress

Little by little harvesting machines are being introduced that do the work of a hundred people. As a result, the plantation owners have raised the cutters' productivity targets. They order them to cut the cane closer to the ground, as the machines do. The result is that they now choose younger and younger workers who receive one dollar per ton.

The economic daily Valor Econômico explains how people fall into servitude: "There is a manpower middleman who covers the poorer states, especially in the North and the Northeast. He chooses the youngest ones. When they get on the bus to go to the city where they are contracted, the cutters get in to their first debt, for the transportation.

The middleman earns 60 reais (about US$ 30) for every worker that he takes. It is not unusual for him also to be responsible for the sale of the first goods that the workers need. He becomes the 'owner' of this manpower through the accumulation of debt." (9)

The expansion of cane cultivation destroys the social fabric. In the region of the small city of Delta, in Minas ...


more at http://www.brazzil.com/content/view/9949/1/

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

But the hippies love to talk about it as they piss on Bush and drink ther $4 a cup Starbucks.

I say burn the oil till its gone, then worry about it. That will kill a few birds with one stone. The Middle East can rot after the oil is gone and no one will give a flip. Global warming if it exists will be stopped. Not a bad deal.

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1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

Secondly we don't want to do that hear. Yeah lets ruin our farmland on a farce.

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1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

WOW!! DITTO...Very well said Hatti..

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[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

Huh? Run the wells til they're dry and then figure out how to resolve a insatiable thirst for fuel?

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1974 240D 3.0L 4(M) - 250K -OM617.910 + 300D FW + Rajay turbo power!
1977 6.9 3(A) - 84k

What I would like to know, is why everybody keeps talking about growing corn for ethanol, and all of the resulting increases, because of the price of corn going up. Did something happen that I don't know about? Like the ability to grow crops other than corn for its sugar?? Down in southern Florida, a cane sugar plant is about to shut its doors (if it hasn't already), because they can't sell their sugar cheap enough. I hear of farmers getting paid NOT to grow crops - can't they plant sugarbeets (or corn)instead? I haven't heard anything about other starch/sugar rich plants being planted for ethanol purposes....did our scientists/farmers suddenly get amnesia?

I am leaving room for objectivity on my part...there probably are a few things that I am not aware of; some of them might even be good counterpoints to mine. However, if I don't know what they are, then surely many, many others don't know them either.

So.....why is only Corn being mentioned as a starch/sugar source? Propaganda? A good reason to drive up the price of corn and related items derived from corn?

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It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. Robert A. Heinlein


09 Jetta TDI
1985 300D

Won't be gone in our lifetimes, so we don't have to worry about it at all. I wish we could watch the future generations when all machinery and weapons don't work anymore and they can't use plastics and manufactured fibers. Suckers.



ADM

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1984 300TD

Oh Yeah, "The Postman", Kevin Costner

"Water World" also.. And wasn't one of the "MAD MAX" movies about that also..?

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[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

Oil isn't going to run out in my lifetime and I'm much younger then most here...

Oil won't run out all of a sudden, the price will rise over a period of years or decades. As the price goes up cheaper replacements will be produced.

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

ADM isn't going broke. No reason why they cannot diversify their source for raw materials, and avoid catastrophy should there be some sort of corn blight.
I don't think we could grow enough corn to fuel the entire country with ethanol anyway - what we need are many alternatives that are cost effective, not just one or two.

__________________
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. Robert A. Heinlein


09 Jetta TDI
1985 300D

Also as prices rise, oil presently considered not economically recoverable will become profitable.

Incidentally, that's the origin of those capped wells stories you hear about the evil oil industry raping the unsuspecting consumer. If the company drills a well that turns out to be uneconomical the company will not necessarily fill it in and plug it. They may cap it until the oil prices rise sufficiently to make it economically recoverable.

In my area the whole of the coastal region to several miles offshore was shot in seismic 3-d back in the 1990's. They kept records to depths below what was economically produceable at that time ($30/bbl or so, I guess). So withh prices at $60 or $70/bbl, those deep records suddenly became valuable and drilling kicked-up in 2002 or so. Also, seismic surveying, data processing and analysis (which requires the greatest number of non-gov supercomputers on Earth) improved so most of the area is being reshot!

Drilling engineers can't physically drill as deep as the seismic records -- around 50K ft - nearly 10 miles. But the current seismic processing gives something like 50 ft accuracy at that depth -- meaning if you could get the drill stem down 10 miles you could hit a target sphere 100 ft in diameter = about 50 barrels of oil. It would take a lot of high-priced oil to pay-out at a depth beyond current engineering. But it could happen.

Want to buy into oil leases on land not currently producing but has good prospects at $50K ft? How much can you risk and for how long?

Yes, lets use MORE of our farmlands to grow corn for fuel rather than food. That way the corn prices will be even higher and you will pay $3 for a Coke/Pepsi and see a similar jump in anything that uses corn or high fructose corn syrup. Remember when that bottle of Coke/Pepsi used to cost $0.50 or $0.75 rather than the $1.25 it averages now?

Corn is NOT the answer. Everyone needs to end this obsession to use one of our primary food sources as a fuel and start thinking of how we can use our waste products as fuel.

Well, colour me impressed. I had thought the article might bring out a slew of $4 coffee drinking hippies that would tell me how Gaia loves veggie-burners. Incidentally, I like veggie burners. I think the idea is cool and using the waste oil from restaurants is kinda nifty. But there's no way it'll work on grand scale.

Now, a few months back someone posted about some algae process to make agrafuel that sounded kinda far-fetched. It would be neat if that process were actually viable - not that I really know anything about that process, but what the hey.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

I'm gonna have the State pay me to cut down Malaleuca's and convert my car to run on wood gas...and apply for alternative fuel tax credit to boot. With the extra money, I can buy CO2 credits to make up for the wood that I will be burning. After all, if other people can buy clean air, why can't I?

__________________
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. Robert A. Heinlein


09 Jetta TDI
1985 300D

don't really know the answer to your question. I do know that there is a substantial government subsidy for corn syrup, although I really don't think it's bad for you. Brazil, it seems, is concentrating on sugar cane for it's energy needs. I think that any single crop, read monoculture, is not really the best way to go.

I do know that when I get the option I buy cane sugar rather than beet sugar. But I'm an arrogant snob, so there you go.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone