Brazil has begun a counterattack on the European Union’s measures for certifying crop-based fuels, which could lead to import barriers for this energy source coming from the South American giant.

Sugarcane plantation in Brazil Credit: Courtesy EMBRAPA

Brazil is the world’s leading producer of sugarcane ethanol.

The EU’s certification requirements for ethanol and biodiesel are intended to ensure that their production and use represent a substantial reduction in emissions of greenhouse-effect gases, as compared to fossil fuels, and that they do not come from the encroachment of rainforests, wetlands or protected areas.

These requirements are part of the implementation of the bloc’s Renewable Energy Directive, which will enter into force in December 2010.

But “to associate the production of biofuels with the deforestation of the Amazon shows a lack of knowledge about the Brazilian reality, a protectionist move without scientific basis,” Robert Michael Boddey, an expert from the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency EMBRAPA, said in a Tierramérica interview.

The Europeans must understand that Brazil is not the Netherlands, Belgium or Portugal. “What we have in excess here is land,” he explained, “and although the cane fields are multiplying, and some crops have had to move to other areas, it doesn’t mean that deforestation is going to increase.”

The expansion of sugarcane production, the raw material for fuel alcohol (ethanol), is occurring in three states outside the Amazon: in Goias in central Brazil, Mato Grosso do Sul in the southwest, and São Paulo in the southeast, where cane fields are taking over pastureland.

“In some regions of Brazil, there is one cow per space the size of Maracaná Stadium (in Rio de Janeiro). We could put four more cows in that same space,” Boddey said.

“That way, we could have four Maracanás more for the cane fields. Imagine if we were to do that with 1,000 cows,” he said. The Europeans “don’t understand these proportions.”

The proof is that the pace of Amazon deforestation has been slowing in Brazil since 2005, he said.

Cid Caldas, the general coordinator for sugar and alcohol at Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, told Tierramérica that sugarcane plantations are permitted only on eight percent of Brazilian territory.

The rest of the territory, which includes “active vegetation” ecosystems like the Amazon, in the north, and the Pantanal wetlands, in the west, is protected, he said.

In the view of environmentalist Marcel Gomes, it is reasonable to criticise the different consequences that biofuels have for small and large farmers alike.

“When sugarcane is extended to an auspicious region, those who once produced various types of crops are obligated to grow sugarcane or soybeans, the raw materials for biofuels,” said Gomes, coordinator of Repórter Brasil, a social journalism organisation that tracks issues related to slave labour and biofuels.

That change “does not affect the country’s food security, but it does affect the small farmer who made a living from those fruits and their sales.”

Rogério Rocco, a legislative candidate from the Green Party in October’s elections and former superintendent of the governmental Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Resources, believes the country should remember its past negative experiences with monoculture.

“The crop monoculture of coffee and sugarcane devastated the Atlantic Forest (along the Brazilian coast). Today only eight percent of that original vegetation remains,” Rocco told Tierramérica.

With the aim of limiting those risks, the government is carrying out an incentive programme worth 2 billion dollars to promote agricultural development that — among other objectives — will make use of some 15 million hectares of degraded pastureland over the next 10 years.

Another project for the same period seeks to expand the rotation system that alternates crops and cattle to four million hectares.

In addition, EMBRAPA developed a system for climate zoning in order to determine which areas are appropriate for which crops, providing information to the 26 Brazilian states on their different climates and seasonal changes, as well as the composition of their soils.

With that map, farmers can invest and cultivate what is best adapted to an area’s characteristics.

Gomes recognises that Brazil’s biofuels cannot be blamed for the 2007-2008 global food shortage — just prior to the international economic crisis.

The tortilla — the thin disk of unleavened bread made from maize, a basic food in Mexico and Central America, and widely consumed in the United States — saw a price hike that resulted from a sharp increase in petroleum prices.

The high oil prices shifted the energy demand towards maize-based ethanol, heavily subsidised in the United States — in turn driving up maize prices.

“Automatically, the people who relied on maize for food suffered,” Gomes said.

The activist said the United States and EU hide their protectionism against Brazilian biofuels behind their “environmental barriers.”

“In 2008, the Irish farmers alleged that Brazilian beef did not go through sanitary controls before being exported,” in order to prevent entry of a product that had comparative advantages, he said.

Furthermore, he said, “there could be fear that the technology of Brazilian biofuels, of very high calibre, could be exported to Africa or Mexico, and threaten both European and U.S. farmers.”

Caldas pointed out that in 2008 Brazil was blamed for the rising international food prices as a result of its “expansion” of bio-ethanol.

The U.S. financial crisis erupted in October of that year, international oil prices fell, and the matter was forgotten.

By 2017, the Brazilian government wants to end the practice of burning off the sugarcane stubble in fields of more than 150 hectares, which pollutes the air and sickens workers during the harvest.

That move would reduce Brazil’s carbon dioxide emissions by six million tonnes annually — equivalent to the greenhouse gases produced by 2.2 million vehicles.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

Brazil leads the world in biofuel production, and now has to deal with European certifications that could end up creating new trade barriers.

A sugarcane plantation in Brazil - EMBRAPA

Brazil is the world's leading producer of sugarcane ethanol.

The EU's certification requirements for ethanol and biodiesel are intended to ensure that their production and use represent a substantial reduction in emissions of greenhouse-effect gases, as compared to fossil fuels, and that they do not come from the encroachment of rainforests, wetlands or protected areas.

These requirements are part of the implementation of the bloc's Renewable Energy Directive, which will enter into force in December 2010. But “to associate the production of biofuels with the deforestation of the Amazon shows a lack of knowledge about the Brazilian reality, a protectionist move without scientific basis,” Robert Michael Boddey, an expert from the Brazilian government's agricultural research agency EMBRAPA, said in a Tierramérica interview.

The Europeans must understand that Brazil is not the Netherlands, Belgium or Portugal. “What we have in excess here is land,” he explained, “and although the cane fields are multiplying, and some crops have had to move to other areas, it doesn't mean that deforestation is going to increase.”

The expansion of sugarcane production, the raw material for fuel alcohol (ethanol), is occurring in three states outside the Amazon: in Goias in central Brazil, Mato Grosso do Sul in the southwest, and São Paulo in the southeast, where cane fields are taking over pastureland.

“In some regions of Brazil, there is one cow per space the size of Maracaná Stadium (in Rio de Janeiro). We could put four more cows in that same space,” Boddey said.

“That way, we could have four Maracanás more for the cane fields. Imagine if we were to do that with 1,000 cows,” he said. The Europeans “don't understand these proportions.”

The proof is that the pace of Amazon deforestation has been slowing in Brazil since 2005, he said. Cid Caldas, the general coordinator for sugar and alcohol at Brazil's Ministry of Agriculture, told Tierramérica that sugarcane plantations are permitted only on eight percent of Brazilian territory.

The rest of the territory, which includes “active vegetation” ecosystems like the Amazon, in the north, and the Pantanal wetlands, in the west, is protected, he said.

In the view of environmentalist Marcel Gomes, it is reasonable to criticize the different consequences that biofuels have for small and large farmers alike.

“When sugarcane is extended to an auspicious region, those who once produced various types of crops are obligated to grow sugarcane or soybeans, the raw materials for biofuels,” said Gomes, coordinator of Repórter Brasil, a social journalism organization that tracks issues related to slave labor and biofuels.

That change “does not affect the country's food security, but it does affect the small farmer who made a living from those fruits and their sales.” Rogério Rocco, a legislative candidate from the Green Party in October's elections and former superintendent of the governmental Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Resources, believes the country should remember its past negative experiences with monoculture.

“The crop monoculture of coffee and sugarcane devastated the Atlantic Forest (along the Brazilian coast). Today only eight percent of that original vegetation remains,” Rocco told Tierramérica.

With the aim of limiting those risks, the government is carrying out an incentive program worth 2 billion dollars to promote agricultural development that — among other objectives — will make use of some 15 million hectares of degraded pastureland over the next 10 years.

Another project for the same period seeks to expand the rotation system that alternates crops and cattle to four million hectares.

In addition, EMBRAPA developed a system for climate zoning in order to determine which areas are appropriate for which crops, providing information to the 26 Brazilian states on their different climates and seasonal changes, as well as the composition of their soils.

With that map, farmers can invest and cultivate what is best adapted to an area's characteristics.

Gomes recognizes that Brazil's biofuels cannot be blamed for the 2007-2008 global food shortage — just prior to the international economic crisis.

The tortilla — the thin disk of unleavened bread made from maize, a basic food in Mexico and Central America, and widely consumed in the United States — saw a price hike that resulted from a sharp increase in petroleum prices.

The high oil prices shifted the energy demand towards maize-based ethanol, heavily subsidized in the United States — in turn driving up maize prices.

“Automatically, the people who relied on maize for food suffered,” Gomes said.

The activist said the United States and EU hide their protectionism against Brazilian biofuels behind their “environmental barriers.”

“In 2008, the Irish farmers alleged that Brazilian beef did not go through sanitary controls before being exported,” in order to prevent entry of a product that had comparative advantages, he said.

Furthermore, he said, “there could be fear that the technology of Brazilian biofuels, of very high caliber, could be exported to Africa or Mexico, and threaten both European and U.S. farmers.”

Caldas pointed out that in 2008 Brazil was blamed for the rising international food prices as a result of its “expansion” of bio-ethanol.

The U.S. financial crisis erupted in October of that year, international oil prices fell, and the matter was forgotten.

By 2017, the Brazilian government wants to end the practice of burning off the sugarcane stubble in fields of more than 150 hectares, which pollutes the air and sickens workers during the harvest.

That move would reduce Brazil's carbon dioxide emissions by six million tons annually — equivalent to the greenhouse gases produced by 2.2 million vehicles.

For the last nine years Brazil has led the world in recycling aluminium cans, of which it reuses 96.5 percent, and it now has a strong chance of reaching the 100 percent mark.

This is the assessment of Henio de Nicola, recycling coordinator for the Brazilian Aluminium Association (ABAL).

That success is due to a “fantastic team of people, who have thought about the recycling process ever since the cans first arrived in Brazil in 1989,” de Nicola said.

In an analogy with football, the expert described how first of all the defence was set up, in the shape of a well-structured processing chain, independent of any government subsidy, where all the participants are rewarded by the added value of the aluminium itself.

Secondly, there is a mid-field of social programmes for environmental education, aimed at the general public. And lastly, the strikers: more than 180,000 Brazilians who collect cans daily all over the country.

Josias, a good attacker on this team, is one of the collectors who works in the centre of Rio de Janeiro.

He plunges his hands into every garbage container on his daily round, stoops to pick up empty cans from the street, and knows reliable bartenders and restaurant owners who save their empties for him.

“The cans are my daily bread, they pay my bills and support my family,” Josias told IPS. He collects 15 kilograms of aluminium cans a day, and sells them to the collection centre downtown for about 30 reals (17 dollars).

Thanks to workers like Josias, 96.5 percent of aluminium cans are recycled in Brazil. The rest, according to de Nicola, are not accounted for “because there are a few places where we can’t measure the recycling rate.”

More than 14 billion cans were recycled last year, equivalent to four ships the size of the Titanic.

The recycled cans provide a livelihood for more than 180,000 families, as well as business for the owners of the collecting and storage centres.

Every day, over 300 people come to Armando da Costa’s storage warehouse in central Rio de Janeiro, to deliver about 500 kilos of aluminium containers, especially beverage cans.

“My warehouse business has helped me raise my kids and support them through university,” da Costa told IPS. This is made possible by the healthy added value on recycled aluminium, which makes all parts of the process profitable.

From the storage facilities, the cans are transported by truck to large industrial complexes, creating jobs and incomes for drivers.

For instance, a truck driver from Foz de Iguaçu on the border with Argentina and Paraguay may take 14 tonnes of cans 1,200 kilometres by road to Pindamonhangaba, a town in the state of São Paulo and the location of a major recycling centre, contributing to the 250 tonnes a day that are melted and recycled at an industrial plant.

Recycled aluminium has three major factors in its favour, according to purchaser Osmar Marchioni, who works for another company in Pindamonhangaba.

“If I use virgin aluminium, I have to add on extra costs, such as 95 percent more for electricity, and the cost of mining bauxite, the mineral that contains aluminium. Furthermore, the recycled aluminium economy benefits all the people involved,” he told IPS.

After burning, melting and recycling, aluminium conserves 95 percent of its original chemical characteristics.

“Due to these factors, cans are an excellent example, not only in the aluminium chain, but also as a benchmark for developing the recycling chain for other materials,” de Nicola said.

Brazil has few policies for recycling waste, he said. Early this year in Rio de Janeiro, the build-up of garbage was one of the main causes of flooding in the city, he pointed out.

The statistics paint a clear picture. Second to aluminium cans is paper, 79.6 percent of which is recycled, and far behind in third place is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used to make plastic bottles for soft drinks and water. Only half of all used PET bottles are recycled.

PET can be reused not only to produce new bottles, but also to make carpets for cars, and swimming pools. Fibres made from the reclaimed material are also used in the textile industry to make garments, including the Brazilian football team’s jerseys.

In 2006, aluminium can recycling reached a level of 91.7 percent in Japan and 52 percent in the United States and the European Union.