Bio-fuels in Brazil: A Bitter Harvest

Bio-fuels have been sold as a solution to our dependency on fossil fuels, or perhaps, more accurately, as an attempt by the developed world to avoid having to change anything significant in its consumption of energy. This is despite recognition that bio-fuels are clearly not the panacea that some have claimed them to be. As well as being a major cause of the global food crisis, production is increasingly associated with human rights abuses, water depletion, and environmental destruction. It is very much a case of full tanks at the cost of empty stomachs and broken communities.

I’m in Brazil, looking out over a landscape stretching to where the Atlantic glimmers on Brazil’s north east coast. I see swamps and tiny islands where a community of fisher folk lived before they were forcibly moved up here by the sugarcane plantation owners. I can see the ongoing work to extend the plantation, cutting down ancient mangrove swamps as they go. In Brazil, every year, thousands of small scale farmers and their families are forced off their land with threats and violence. Whole communities have been broken up.

Jock Thorlby, a native of Edinburgh, had met me at the airport. Jock has been in Brazil for 40 years. For the past 20 years he has been working with SCIAF’s partner, the Pastoral Land Commission (Comisao Pastoral da Terra - CPT), who struggle side by side with landless and impoverished communities throughout Brazil. I’m here to see how CPT is responding to the human and environmental destruction caused by the sugarcane boom. A further paradox of sugarcane expansion is that it is becoming a major cause of destruction to the forests considered to be the lungs of the world

Campaigning for worker’s rights and supporting the resistance of small communities of subsistence farmers in the face of plantation owners’ violence is at the heart of CPT’s mission. As we drive all we see is sugarcane, planted right up to the roadside. Disconcertingly, no food crops can be seen. The cane has overrun the best agricultural land. In Brazil, 70% of food is produced by small and medium sized farms, but this is quickly diminishing as producers are either removed from their land or opt to grow sugar cane, believing it to be more lucrative. Jock tells me of plantation owners offering attractive returns to farmers, then, once the crops have been planted, reducing the payments to a fraction of what had been promised. Many families go hungry as a result.

In the last year, CPT has recorded and denounced the deaths of 28 peasants resisting forced removal, including the killing of a 12 year old girl who was shot while trying to take a bucket of water from a plantation irrigation channel. CPT explains that their annual reports are designed to ‘inform consciences’, and to ‘open hearts’ to the human costs of the struggle for survival in rural Brazil. With SCIAF funding CPT is also supporting the ‘Alianca’ occupation, a small community of landless farmers who are holding out for their right to cultivate small plots of land. Their hope is that eventually they can secure enough land to feed their families and live in dignity.

Over the last week I have seen how the ethanol boom in Brazil cannot be a solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Governments importing agro-fuels from Brazil,” says Jock, “should first establish safeguards in production to protect land rights, livelihoods, workers rights and food security. But, in the end, we need to face the fact that rich countries need to reduce their energy consumption to sustainable levels and to pay the climate debt they have created, rather than transfer the problem on the poorest and most vulnerable.”

- By SCIAF's Latin America Project Officer Chris MacLullich

Find out more about SCIAF projects in Brazil.

Read SCIAF's Brazil Country Profile.