Sweet Fuel

Producing less than half the carbon emissions of gasoline, Brazil's sugar-based ethanol (which Brazilians refer to as álcool) has been upheld as an alternative to the fossil fuels that accelerate global warming. Jennifer Eaglin traces the remarkable story of the Brazilian ethanol industry's development from the 1930s to the present, when flex-fuel cars, powered by any combination of gasoline and ethanol, account for over 80 percent of light vehicles. Although hailed as a renewable energy model, the program was embroiled in authoritarian politics, corporate subsidies, labor exploitation, and water pollution. Like other hallmarks of Brazilian developmentalism, ethanol represents both a striking leap of economic and technological modernization in a late industrializing, historically oil-poor nation and a litany of socioenvironmental harms. With meticulous attention to policymaking and technical detail, Eaglin focuses on the Ribeirão Preto region of São Paulo, the epicenter of Brazilian ethanol production by the 1980s, to plot the many twists and turns in this high-profile energy policy's evolution.Collaboration among state agencies, the agribusiness and automobile sectors, and agricultural and engineering research centers lies at the root of the Brazilian ethanol industry's success. Government support dates to the 1930s, as the Getúlio Vargas government's Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool (IAA) sought to boost sagging Northeastern sugar production amid the global price collapse and to promote alternative fuel sources for the projected expansion of motor vehicle usage. The IAA set sugar production quotas and prices as the nation's sole sugar purchaser, required 20 percent alcohol mixture of domestically produced ethanol to commercial gasoline, oversaw distribution to gas stations (although output fell far short due to production capacity and price), and incentivized the construction or equipment of distilleries producing anhydrous ethanol (a costlier process, though more suitable for automobile engines). By 1940, there were 32 ethanol distilleries spread between Northeastern and Southeastern Brazil, laying the foundations for the industry's future growth. Ribeirão Preto's entrepreneurial Biagi family, who along with other European immigrants and their descendants modernized sugar production and distillation, benefited from wartime support that favored distillers and from the IAA's postwar policy tilt from Northeastern to Paulista producers.With the creation of Petrobras in 1953, the petroleum-focused program for national development under Juscelino Kubitschek, and higher export demand for Brazilian sugar following the Cuban Revolution, ethanol's luster seemingly faded, but IAA commitment to price parity for sugar and ethanol remained steady, as did private sugar interests' promotion of ethanol as an alternative fuel. Their moment arrived in the 1970s, when the military government, having previously subsidized expanded sugar production in order to boost agroexport revenues, moved to ramp up ethanol production after oil prices quadrupled in 1973–74 (Brazil relied on petroleum imports for more than 80 percent of domestic consumption at the time) and sugar prices collapsed in 1975. Through operational know-how and scale, financing eligibility restrictions, and political connections, large-scale Paulista producers such as the Biagis were poised to seize the opportunity for cheap credit and technological innovation. Unveiled in 1975, the Programa Nacional do Álcool (Proálcool) offered Central Bank financing for agricultural and industrial investment and mandated a 20 percent ethanol mixture in the national fuel supply.Under the military, efforts to develop ethanol-fueled cars involved cane producers and distillers as well as automobile manufacturers, leavened by ample nationalistic pronouncements. The second global shock of 1979 deepened government commitment to expanding Proálcool and the distribution networks at gas stations in collaboration with Petrobras. Notwithstanding initial consumer skepticism, ethanol cars accounted for 90 percent of Brazil's market by the late 1980s. Although Proálcool faltered once more in the early 1990s due to a mix of economic, political, and environmental crises that affected sugar and petroleum prices, producers and government officials repackaged ethanol as a “green fuel” and thus ensured ongoing state support through the decade—and positive publicity in light of international denunciations of Amazonian deforestation. The launching of the flex-fuel car in 2003 and spikes in global petroleum prices fully resurrected the alternative fuel industry.Eaglin's book deftly historicizes not only Brazil's distinctive energy transition but ethanol's shadier side. The dumping of vinasse, a putrid byproduct of the distillation of higher-purity ethanol alcohol, has contributed to troubling levels of water pollution and contamination of local waterways. Eaglin examines the product's baleful ecological and public health impacts, alongside fitful efforts at waste management and antidumping enforcement. Surface tanks for containment disfigured landscapes, while vinasse often seeped into groundwater when producers illegally discharged the liquid waste in local waterways. In other words, ethanol may contribute less to air pollution and global warming than petroleum, but at the cost of environmental sacrifice zones for affected rural geographies. Similarly disposable have been plantation workforces, assembled largely of temporary laborers by producers to circumvent labor and social welfare legislation extended to full-time workers. Protesting labor speedups, low pay, high-priced supplies, and unsanitary and unsafe conditions, cane workers in São Paulo's Guariba region successfully struck in 1984, with the support of the progressive Catholic Church. The labor protest obtained most of the workers' demands and, critically, brought greater national attention to ethanol's social costs.As Eaglin concludes, the history of the world's most successful biofuel program offers a cautionary tale in energy transition: renewable sources' benefits are limited in the absence of a more fundamental rethinking of global automobile usage. Eaglin's sweeping analysis of the origins and impact of Brazil's ethanol fuel project will be of significant interest to historians of Latin America, the environment, and energy policy

Agricultural economics · Biofuel · Business · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Ethanol fuel · Fossil fuel · Government (linguistics) · Modernization theory · Renewable energy · Renewable fuels · Waste management · Brazilian History and Foreign Policy · Engineering · Rural Development and Agriculture