GuardianUK | Brazil's Ethanol Slaves

[Shallah Kali]

Brazil's ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2029908,00.html

They come here because they are forced from their homes by the lack of work," said Francisco Alves, a professor from nearby Sao Carlos University who has spent more than 20 years studying Sao Paulo's migrant workforce. "They will do anything to get by."

That includes working 12-hour shifts in scorching heat and earning just over 50p per tonne of sugar cane cut, before returning to squalid, overcrowded "guest houses" rented to them at extortionate prices by unscrupulous landlords, often ex-sugar cutters themselves.

Faced with exhausting work in temperatures of over 30C (86F), some will die. According to Sister Ines Facioli, from the Pastoral do Migrante, a Catholic support network based in nearby Guariba, 17 workers died between 2004 and 2006 as a result of overwork or exhaustion.

But the annual exodus from the northeast continues, and as foreign investment in the ethanol industry increases the numbers are expected to grow further.

[hunter]

1. The true face of ethanol is not pretty.

Not here in the United States, not in Brazil.

[NNadir]

2. There seems to be a lot of rumbling about this great biofuel lately.

The time was when you could say "ethanol" and hear a huge cascade of cheering.

Now it seems that about half the ethanol articles one reads today are of the "not so fast," variety.

Where have I heard this kind of carping before?

I'm still sort of agnostic on ethanol. I think that there are places where it makes sense, but the number of such places hardly includes the entire planet. My guess is that ethanol is of marginal utility. It's neither as good or as bad as advertised, but it represents a huge investment in resources for very little return.

[hunter]

3. It's very much a labor and land use issue to me.

Industrial scale monoculture is very hard on the land and the people who live on it.

No matter what scale we could hope to produce ethanol on (though certainly only a very small fraction of our current fuel use) we could always do better by simply increasing the fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet, and reducing the total number of vehicles on the road.

We don't need to replace diesel and gasoline with alternative fuels, we need to restructure our society so that cars and trucks are much less important to us.

If most people didn't need cars to get to work or go shopping, and regarded cars mostly a a nuisance not worth the bother of owning, we wouldn't be in this pickle.

[NNadir]

4. If you're looking for me to disagree, I won't.

;-)