Agriculture's Energy

Thomas D. Rogers's first monograph was a social, cultural, and environmental history of sugarcane labor in twentieth-century Pernambuco. It traced the transformation of engenhos, the old, preindustrial system of sugar production, into usinas, the highly capitalized and mechanized sugar factories that employed proletarianized labor. Rogers's richly researched second book, Agriculture's Energy, provides an expanded view of Brazil's sugarcane industry. Rogers achieves this grander scale and scope in two ways. First, he moves beyond Pernambuco to look at sugarcane production in São Paulo (the top state in national sugarcane production by the mid-twentieth century) and other states. Second, he frames sugarcane production's evolution after 1950 as part of a larger story about the modernization of Brazilian agriculture and agribusiness. Rogers focuses on Proálcool, the government-sponsored program that, from 1975 to 1990, provided sugarcane planters with incentives to produce ethanol fuel, sparking a rapid, countrywide change away from gasoline. Four years after launching the program, the country's first ethanol-fueled car was released to consumers. By the mid-1980s, about 90 percent of all new cars sold in Brazil ran exclusively on alcohol produced from sugarcane, relying on the more than 12 billion liters of ethanol produced domestically under Proálcool. Yet, despite the importance of ethanol-efficient vehicles to Proálcool's story, Rogers's book is ultimately about agriculture, not cars. He presents Proálcool as emblematic of the agriculture-based modernization that changed the Brazilian countryside over the last 50 years.Agriculture's Energy is divided into two parts of three chapters each. Part 1 follows the evolution of the modern sugarcane industry in Brazil as it expanded beyond the Brazilian Northeast and shifted to energy production. Chapter 1 shows the steps taken by sugarcane insiders to modernize the sector prior to the 1960s. They mostly relied on technological research (much coming from the United States), government planning (state and federal), and synergy between the agricultural and industrial sectors, all of which anticipated the radical changes experienced in the Brazilian countryside in the 1970s. Rogers shows that, as Brazil's most industrialized state, São Paulo was much better positioned to benefit from these changes than the older centers of sugarcane production in the Northeast. The next chapter contrasts two “revolutions” affecting the countryside in the 1960s. On the one hand, peasant unions, many formed by Northeast sugarcane workers, pressured the government to curb land concentration and promote agrarian reform. On the other hand, the adoption of ideas from the US-inspired Green Revolution promoted rapid growth in agricultural productivity while leaving fundamental problems (e.g., access to land) unaddressed. In chapter 3, Rogers argues that Proálcool should be understood neither as a reaction to the 1970s oil shocks nor as a solution to the sugar industry's excess capacity but rather as a development program, one among the many that the military dictatorship in Brazil implemented in the 1970s. Rogers argues that “agriculture fueled by vast inputs of chemical fertilizers, mechanized and therefore supported by a machine industry, and managed by finance- and marketing-savvy bureaucrats was by the 1970s a recognized and relevant arena of development. Proálcool was a clear model of this approach” (p. 110).The second part examines Proálcool's consequences in three areas: labor, pollution, and food security. Chapter 4 focuses on the appearance of a highly mobile and uprooted class of rural worker that formed most of the ethanol-producing farms' workforce during Proálcool. These workers received few benefits and were routinely exploited, their transient nature allowing bosses to avoid state oversight and labor law compliance. Rogers uses a series of court cases to unearth how these workers fought back against their exploitative conditions. The following chapter sheds light on the establishment of a government framework to regulate and manage the significant water pollution generated by ethanol mills in the 1980s. This is probably the weakest chapter in an otherwise superb book, as it fails to flesh out the stakeholders affected by such pollution. Readers are left without a clear understanding of who precisely the people were who resisted the dumping of sugarcane waste into local rivers or the reasons behind their protests. The shortcomings of this chapter are more than compensated by the outstanding last chapter, in which Rogers traces how the expansion of sugarcane production and the success of Proálcool, with its reliance on land concentration and expansion, were linked to food scarcity, particularly among its labor force of highly mobile and poorly paid rural workers, and stifled agrarian reform.Agriculture's Energy ends with an epilogue that deals with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's first presidency amid a second ethanol boom fueled by the development of flex-fuel cars in Brazil after 2003. Overall, Rogers does an outstanding job tracing the historical complexities of the ethanol industry, which he demonstrates cannot be thought of in isolation from a larger narrative of agricultural modernization. At the same time, he does not refrain from showing the ethanol industry's adverse impacts on different sectors of Brazilian society. To understand Brazil today, one cannot ignore the profound transformation experienced in the last decades in the countryside, and Rogers makes the case that sugarcane ethanol was a crucial piece in this process of change

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