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BRAZIL: Clean Gasoline Fuels Soybean Production

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 3 2008 (IPS) - The Brazilian government has decided to move up the deadlines for obligatory addition of biofuels to gasoline and diesel fuel, a measure that will boost the production of soybeans, the oilseed crop with the lowest yield and that causes the most environmental damage.

Soybean field near Eldorado in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Credit: Gerson Sobreira

Soybean field near Eldorado in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Credit: Gerson Sobreira

In January it was determined that two percent of biodiesel should be added to fuels derived from crude oil, a proportion that is to rise to three percent as of Jul. 1.

Although the National Programme for Biodiesel Production and Use planned for a five percent mixture to be introduced in 2013, Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao said the target date would be brought forward to 2010.

"The trend indicates that a five percent mixture will be in use by early 2009," Sergio Beltrao, the head of the Brazilian Biodiesel Union (Ubrabio), an association of producers and researchers of biofuels, their raw materials and equipment, told IPS.

The sector already has the "nominal installed capacity" to produce the 2.8 billion litres a year of biofuels that would be needed to provide a five percent mixture in fuels, he said.

Soybean production will benefit for many years into the future, because it is the only crop "available in sufficient volume, and for which the industrial structure and logistics are adequate to provide a reliable supply to meet the demand," Beltrao said.


Orlando Cristiano da Silva, a researcher with the National Reference Centre on Biomass (CENBIO) at the University of Sao Paulo, is concerned by the growing incentives for soybean production.

He told IPS that soybean farming does not promote "social inclusion, which is one of the government’s goals," and its expansion "may" increase deforestation of the Amazon region.

It would be "better to promote other oil-bearing plants, especially palm trees, in the biodiesel production chain," but moving the goal-posts forward "unfortunately creates dependence on soybeans, because production can respond rapidly to increased demand," he said.

The African palm, which the researcher has studied for many years, has proved its high productivity, superior by far to that of soybeans, in the state of Pará in the eastern Amazon region. It is also capable of contributing to the recovery of deforested and degraded areas, but its potential continues to be neglected, he complained.

There are drawbacks to using the African palm tree, which is widely grown in Malaysia and Indonesia, for reforesting the Amazon jungle, because by law reforested areas must preserve 80 percent of the original tree species.

Brazil has hundreds of native palms, some of them with extremely high oil yields, but they are not produced "on a commercial and permanent scale," which takes a long time, da Silva said. The same is true of the physic nut tree (Jatropha curcus), which has produced good results in India but is hardly known in Brazil.

Other crops such as cotton seeds, sunflower seeds and peanuts will always be produced on too small a scale to contribute significantly to a huge energy market.

So for the coming years, there are few alternatives to soybeans. Castor oil, selected for a small farmer programme in Brazil’s semi-arid northeast, is too viscous for use in fuels but is in great demand by the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.

The African palm, better known in Brazil as "dendé", has the right growing conditions and the potential for "large scale production within five years," on a total of one million hectares, Silva said, adding that "everything depends on government and entrepreneurial decisions." This species of palm can produce oil three years after planting.

Beltrao admitted that "a wider variety of raw materials would be desirable, but the biofuel programme cannot wait." Therefore, soybeans will be the predominant source of biodiesel for many years, although it is "unanimously" recognised that it is neither the most productive nor the most energy-efficient, he said.

But generating greater demand by moving the deadlines forward will stimulate biodiesel production across the board, including newer alternatives, he argued. This is why Ubrabio supports the use of higher mixtures, with 10 to 20 percent biofuels, in some types of vehicles, such as buses, trucks and train engines, especially in large cities.

The biodiesel programme has created an incentive for production of raw materials on family farms in poor areas, by means of tax breaks that reduce costs by up to 10 percent. But Beltrao said this was "not enough," and that this incentive should be expanded and others created.

In this programme, what matters is not only the cost of the product, but also its social and environmental benefits, which means that the most energy-efficient plant sources, and those that generate the most employment and income for small farmers, must be promoted, he said.

 
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