BRAZIL: Charges of Abuse Cast Cloud on Ethanol Boom

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 13 2006 (IPS) - Allegations that sugar cane workers have been literally worked to death in appalling working conditions have tainted the euphoria of Brazil’s sugar cane and ethanol industry, which has already begun to benefit from high oil prices, climate change and free trade.

Complaints that the price of fuel alcohol, or ethanol, produced with sugar cane has been raised too high also threaten to cast a shadow on the sector’s promising future, as the growth of domestic consumption and exports surpasses expansion of output.

It is curious that the allegations are coming just when Brazil’s ethanol is experiencing a boom on the international market, and after Brazil triumphed in its legal action against European sugar subsidies in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a representative of the industry who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS.

At least 11 workers have died in the last two years of causes related to or aggravated by exhaustion and poor working conditions on sugar cane plantations, according to a report by the Brazilian Platform for Economic, Social and Cultural Human Rights (DHESC), a network of civil society organisations.

But according to Claudio Manesco, director of communications for the Sao Paulo Sugar Cane Agribusiness Union (UNICA), “no cause and effect relationship was proven. The latest death was caused by Chagas disease.”

Chagas disease is transmitted by a parasite-carrying insect.

Working days of over 10 hours, pay based on productivity, low wages and inadequate food and housing are some of those factors, which Costa said had been detected in October on a visit to Ribeirao Preto, Brazil’s leading sugar and ethanol producing region, in the state of Sao Paulo.

Twenty years ago, sugar cane workers cut five or six tons of cane a day, compared to twice that today, noted Costa, a university professor and social worker. She explained that pay based on the amount harvested forces workers to push their limits.

Furthermore, she said, they live in crowded camps or huts, “sleeping 10 to a room, with just one bathroom.”

There have also been many cases of work-related accidents, including severed limbs, and the necessary safety equipment is not always used in the difficult conditions in which workers harvest cane, under the scorching sun, wielding machetes in the ashes and soot of the burnt cane which many suspect are carcinogenic, Costa added.

Reports of deaths related to the precarious working and living conditions on sugar cane plantations are not new. But since 2004, the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Service for Migrants and trade unions of rural workers have been documenting the most obvious cases, she explained.

The labour oversight office, labour authorities and university researchers also verify the cause of work-related deaths.

Antonio de Padua Rodrigues, technical director of UNICA, told IPS that companies in the sector respect the country’s labour laws and offer the best working conditions in the Brazilian countryside, with formal contracts for nearly all of the workers.

He admitted, however, that there were abuses, especially in activities that were contracted out.

The cane cutters have an official working day of seven and a half hours and receive a flat salary regardless of the amount they cut, he said. But if they cut more than six tons, they receive extra benefits, which is why some choose to work overtime, but “never the 12 hours” alleged by the denunciations, he argued.

Today’s greater productivity is the result of technical advances in harvesting, with better equipment that makes the job safer and requires the cutters to do less walking, said Rodrigues. There are also larger numbers of more experienced and thus more productive cane cutters, while more intensive and genetically enhanced crops have also helped to boost yields, he added.

UNICA instructs its member companies to strictly comply with all legal standards and improve labour relations, as well as to respect the environment, because this is “a sector under intense scrutiny” due to its new role in the economy, and any misstep could be used as justification to block its exports, said Manesco.

Thanks to the growing use of ethanol as a substitute for gasoline in various countries, as has been the case in Brazil for 30 years, or as an additive to reduce the pollution created by petroleum derivatives, the sugar cane industry is enjoying an unprecedented boom.

Domestic consumption has risen sharply since the wide-scale introduction in 2003 of dual-fuel motor vehicles, which can run on either gasoline or ethanol or a combination of the two in varying proportions. In Brazil there are already 1.2 million of these cars, which accounted for 71 percent of the automobiles manufactured last month.

Exports of Brazilian ethanol have risen more than ten-fold in the last five years, reaching almost 2.5 billion litres last year, out of a total production of 16 billion litres.

UNICA forecasts that Brazil’s ethanol production capacity will increase a further 40 percent by 2010, but this will still be insufficient if potential exports fully materialise.

Japan alone could import six billion litres annually if it raises the proportion of ethanol added to gasoline from three to 10 percent, as a means of reducing smog and scaling back imports of increasingly high-priced oil.

The greater domestic and international demand for ethanol has cut into the reserves created to compensate for the period in which no sugar cane is cut in Brazil, which lasts from December to April. As a result, the price of ethanol rose eight percent in December alone, triggering the threat of government intervention to prevent a rise in inflation.

Due to government pressure, UNICA, which accounts for almost two-thirds of Brazil’s total ethanol production, agreed to reduce prices by four percent and prevent further increases.

“It was a tempest in a teapot,” because once harvesting begins again in a few months, the sugar cane supply will return to normal and prices will come down, said Rodrigues.

Moreover, the proliferation of dual-fuel cars means that consumers can switch back to gasoline and stabilise demand, he added.

In any event, the sugar cane industry must take care to avoid a repeat of the crisis of the late 1980s, when insufficient production threatened to destroy the country’s ethanol programme, an initiative that regained its credibility thanks to the emergence of dual-fuel cars.