Bush to sign biofuels pact in Brazil - AP

[Eugene]

Bush to sign biofuels pact in Brazil
President Bush to Sign Biofuels Pact With Brazilian Leader Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva

By DEB RIECHMANN

SAO PAULO, Brazil Mar 9, 2007 (AP)— President Bush sees the new agreement with Brazil
on ethanol as a way to boost alternative fuels production in the Americas and get more cars
running on something other than gasoline.

Demonstrators upset with Bush's visit here worry that the president and his biofuels buddy,
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, really have visions of an OPEC-like cartel on
ethanol.

While Bush's nemesis in Latin America, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, is using his vast
oil wealth to court allies in the region, Bush is sealing the deal Friday on an ethanol
agreement with Brazil where nearly eight in 10 new cars run on fuel made from sugar cane.

Call it ethanol diplomacy.

-snip-

Some protesters, carrying stalks of sugar cane, protested the ethanol agreement, which is
being formally signed by officials with the State Department and the Brazilian foreign ministry.
The demonstrators warned that increased ethanol production could lead to social unrest
because most operations are run by wealthy families or corporations that reap the profits,
while the poor are left to cut the cane with machetes.

-snip-

Full article: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2937056

[sam sarrha]

1. wonder what the agreement is..

[fasttense]

2. If there is a way for the bushes to screw the middle class or poor

with any decision, he will do it. He really hates poor and middle class people. It's like he sees "kick me" signs on everyone who isn't a member of the ubber rich.

[Shallah Kali]

4. well the poor in Brazil are being screwed - sugar cane workers are treated little better than slaves

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/030707EA.shtml

n many ways, things have changed little on the sugarcane plantations since colonial times.

"The problems with production today are very similar to the problems it generated hundreds of years ago," says Maisa Mendonça, Director of the São Paulo-based NGO Rede Social. Sugarcane fieldworkers endure some of the hardest labor in the world.

According to Mendonça, Brazil has the lowest cost of production in the world because of the industry's dependence on labor exploitation, including massive slave labor, and its refusal to implement environmental regulations. In São Paulo the cost of production is US $165 per ton; in Europe it is US $700 per ton. I n São Paulo the median monthly salary for a field laborer on a sugar cane plantation is US $195; in Pernambuco it is US $167.

It is estimated that 40,000 seasonal migrant laborers from the Northeast and Minas Gerais state work in the annual harvest in São Paulo. They work long hours in extremely hot temperatures, cutting as fast as they can because their pay is based on the weight of their cuttings.

Maria Aparecida de Morães Silva, at the State University of São Paulo, reports that the required rate of productivity for cane cutters is increasing. In the 1980s, the average rate of productivity demanded of an individual cutter was between five and eight tons of sugarcane cut per day; today it is between 12 and 15 tons. From 2004 to 2006, the Pastoral of Migrants registered 17 deaths from excessive labor in São Paulo, and in 2005 the state's Regional Delegation of Labor registered 416 deaths of workers in sugar-based ethanol production.

[papau]

3. Pointless con job - ABC media doesn't explain special $.54 tarriff on ethanol imports will stay

Indeed, this "treaty" does nothing to make affordable ethanol available in the US (there is a quote about the tariff by the Brazil Pres, and Bush saying this has nothing to do with our not keeping out of the US any ethanol via that $.54 traiff, but it doesn't show up until the 19th paragraph in a 22 paragraph article).

Our American media is very good at reprinting GOP handouts.