One phase of Colombia's sugarcane agroindustrial production consists of burning bagasse to generate biofuels. In the picture, workers arrange sugarcane waste in a field in the municipality of El Cerrito, in the southwestern department of Valle del Cauca. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
BOGOTA, Mar 17 2022 (IPS)

As a visitor drives across the plains of the department of Valle del Cauca in southwestern Colombia, green carpets dominate the view: sugarcane fields that have been here since the area got its name.

The long tentacles of dirt roads draw the visitor into the thicket of golden-crested flowering green plants, which will be cut to ground level in a few months, the start of an industrial process and the restart of an annual agricultural cycle.

But this crop has left a lasting and damaging imprint on the soils, some of the most fertile in this South American nation of 51.7 million people.

Irene Vélez, an academic at the public University del Valle, said legislative changes and the opening of the market to imported sugar have led to the shift from sweetener to fuel.

“One of the consequences of this process is the expansion of the agricultural frontier to other regions of the country, because the land is cheaper and there is a different system of relations between landowners and the agro-industrial sector,” she told IPS from the Portuguese city of Coimbra, where she is doing post-doctoral studies.

Along with sugar and molasses for industrial consumption, sugarcane also provides ethanol or ethyl alcohol, which by law has been blended since 2005 in a volume of 10 percent per liter of gasoline in Colombia.

Proponents argue that this biofuel helps curb dependence on oil, and improves the octane rating of gasoline by oxygenating, which reduces urban pollution.

But in contrast, a vehicle consumes more blended fuel for the same trip due to its lower calorific value than gasoline and, the higher the mix, the higher the emission of the carcinogens formaldehyde and acetaldehyde and ozone, especially in winter, which cause respiratory problems, according to a 2007 study by researchers at Stanford University in the United States.

Colombia is the world’s 15th largest sugarcane producer, supplying 22.87 million tons of milled sugarcane per year, according to data from 2021, when it fell by a slight three percent compared to the previous year, according to data from the Sugarcane Association (Asocaña), which groups sugarcane producers.

In parallel, the country refined 396 million liters of ethanol in 2021, 0.5 percent less than the previous year. But domestic production does not meet demand, so last year it imported an additional 64 million liters, mostly from the United States, a drop of almost 400 percent compared to a year earlier, according to Asocaña.

Colombia is the third largest ethanol producer in the region, after Brazil and Argentina. This South American nation extracts ethanol from sugarcane and biodiesel from palm oil. The industry enjoys tax exemptions and subsidies, thanks to the Sugar Price Stabilization Fund, which has been in operation since 2000.

The expansion of sugarcane cultivation in Colombia has its epicenter in the Cauca River valley, in the southwest of the country, and has left a trail of water exploitation, reduction of biodiversity and pollution from the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, which is not compensated by the use of part of the crop to produce biofuels. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Problematic expansion

The appearance of ethanol on the energy scene extended the sugarcane frontier in Colombia and fortified the vertical integration of the industry.

In the Cauca River valley, where most of the country’s crop is concentrated, sugarcane covers more than 225,000 hectares, which “is close to the total area available for planting sugarcane” in the region, according to Asocaña.

There are 14 sugar mills operating in the area, which directly cultivate 25 percent of the fields, while buying the rest of the cane from some 2,750 producers. The average size of the 3,300 farms that supply the mills is 63 hectares. In addition, they operate 12 energy cogeneration facilities, powered by sugarcane bagasse.

But that expansion has left social, environmental, economic and cultural impacts on local communities, says the report “The Green Monster. Perspectives and Recommendations from the Black Communities of Northern Cauca, Colombia regarding the Sugar Sector in Colombia”, published in June 2021 by the non-governmental organizations Palenke Alto Cauca-PCN and the UK-based Forest Peoples Programme.

The main impacts include the effects on soil, rivers and groundwater due to the use of pesticides such as glyphosate, soil compaction caused by the intensive use of agricultural machinery, soil erosion, polluting emissions due to the practice of burning sugarcane fields before replanting, deforestation arising from the increase in the area planted, and the monopolization of water sources.

The expansion of large-scale sugarcane plantations in Valle del Cauca has resulted in loss of land, damage to water resources, health problems, displacement and violence.

Carlos Molina, director of the El Hatico nature reserve in the municipality of El Cerrito, in the southwestern Colombian department of Valle del Cauca, stands in the middle of a cut sugarcane field on his farm. He advocates the transition from conventional sugarcane to an organic crop that contributes to the use of biofuels for energy decarbonization. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Seeking more sustainable sugarcane production

Carlos Molina, legal representative and one of the owners of the El Hatico company, said it is possible to reverse the damage caused by sugarcane, as he gestured to the surrounding fields.

“If we don’t restore now, we are going to run out of fuel. If they don’t change things, producers are going to go bankrupt. The solution is to show the alternatives and offer incentives for transformation,” he told IPS during a tour of his farm’s sugarcane crop in the municipality of El Cerrito, in Valle del Cauca.

El Hatico is a 285-hectare farm, of which 110 hectares are used for organic sugarcane production and 76 hectares for 245 grazing dairy cows. Thanks to the farm’s sustainability, it has achieved nature reserve status.

Faced with the loss of income due to soil deterioration, in the early 1990s the owners began a shock therapy program to abandon irrigation, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and introduce natural fertilizers and other agroecological practices.

“We made an abrupt transition and that cost us 30 percent of our production, then we recovered. Sustainable management and value-added improve yields,” said Molina, who belongs to the eighth generation of sugarcane growers in his family.

For example, a conventional hectare requires about 180 kilograms of nitrogen and 12 billion cubic meters of water per year, while an organic farm needs much less.

The legal framework for biofuels began in Colombia in 2001 with regulations on their use and the creation of incentives for their production, use, marketing and consumption. In 2004, another regulation expanded the conditions to stimulate the production and marketing of biofuels of plant and animal origin to obtain biodiesel.

Thus, the introduction of the blend began in 2005 with the E10 combination, while the production of biodiesel began in 2008, with the addition of five percent of this fuel.

That same year, the National Council for Economic and Social Policy, which brings together seven ministries and the governmental scientific sector, issued guidelines to promote the sustainable production of biofuels in the country, proposing strategies to this end.

As a result, sugarcane refineries for biofuels started up in 2006, six of which operate in Valle del Cauca and one in the central department of Meta.

In 2013, the blend of ethanol per liter of gasoline increased to 10 percent and that of biodiesel to 12 percent.

A sugarcane plantation in the municipality of El Cerrito, in the department of Valle del Cauca, in southwestern Colombia. Cutting, slashing and burning are the three steps of cultivation: cutting the sugarcane, harvesting the crop and setting fire to the residues, a practice that is harmful to the health of the soil and the air. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Pros and cons

The shift of sugarcane towards ethanol production is paradoxical, as the crop causes environmental impacts but the fuel reduces emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas generated by human activities that is responsible for global warming.

Sugarcane ethanol reduces 74 percent of polluting emissions, compared to corn and canola ethanol – 45 percent and 25 percent, respectively – according to the 2012 study “Life Cycle Assessment of the Biofuels Production Chain in Colombia“, sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank and the national Ministry of Mines and Energy.

By law, ethanol emissions have had limits in the country since 2017. Data from the non-governmental Sugarcane Research Center for six mills indicate that the average in 2016 was 551 kilograms of CO2 per cubic meter of fuel and 558 in 2017.

These results were below the regulatory ceiling of 924 kilograms for 2017 and 889 for the following year. In 2021, the ceiling stood at 780 kilograms.

The sugarcane manufacturing process generates the greatest amount of pollution, with 249 kilos of CO2, followed by planting and harvesting (181 kilos), effluent treatment (89) and transportation to blending centers (39).

Biofuels, part of the NDC

In its 2020 Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) update, Colombia pledged to reduce its emissions by 51 percent by 2030, down from 258 million tons of CO2 in 2015, the base year, to 169 million tons, mainly by combating deforestation.

Within this voluntary goal, Colombia pledged that at least 20 percent of its energy mix would be made up of biofuels by that year, subject to financial support from industrialized countries.

The independent Climate Action Tracker calls the NDC “highly insufficient”, as other approaches are needed, especially in energy and transportation. Although transportation accounts for 12 percent of the country’s total emissions, mitigation actions, such as the deployment of electric cars, are insufficient.

The Colombian government projects stable ethanol demand between 2022 and 2025, of about 60,000 barrels per day of the biofuel.

“The agroecological transition could be completed in three years, without any problem,” said Molina.

But Vélez disagreed. “It is associated with an agro-technological package that involves improved seeds that need pesticides, fertilizers and privatized seeds from transnational corporations. There is no point in switching from sugarcane to organic pineapple, for example. If land grabbing continues, we are not generating the necessary transition,” he said.

The biodigester and part of the biogas plant of the Cocal company, surrounded by a sugarcane plantation on all sides, in the municipality of Narandiba, in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, where sugarcane has replaced cattle ranching as the main economic activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
NARANDIBA, Brazil , Dec 20 2021 (IPS)

First came sugar. For four centuries, it was the main sugarcane product in Brazil. But since the 1970s sugarcane has grown and diversified as a source of energy: ethanol, electricity and biogas.

“Sugarcane is the green oil,” said André Alves da Silva, commercial and new products director of Cocal, as the company Comércio Indústria Canaã Açúcar e Álcool Ltda. is better known, which started large-scale production of biomethane, i.e. refined biogas, a renewable and clean equivalent of natural gas.

“We have a biofactory here,” he told IPS in an interview in the Cocal plant in Narandiba, a municipality located in the west of the southern state of São Paulo.

Referring to the plant whose scientific name is Saccharum officinarum as “sugarcane” has become obsolete in this region.

In addition to sugar and ethanol, electricity is generated from sugarcane bagasse, and biogas and other by-products are also created, such as biofertilizers, carbon dioxide gas and dried yeast, leftovers from alcohol fermentation, which, when processed, serve as protein-rich animal feed.

Biomethane in place of gas

The big novelty is biomethane, produced since June, as the starting point of a project that will bring gas to three closely grouped cities: Narandiba, Pirapozinho and Presidente Prudente, with a combined population of 264,000 people.

GasBrasiliano, a company of the state-owned oil conglomerate Petrobras, will be in charge of distribution and is building a 65-kilometer gas pipeline, which is scheduled to be inaugurated in June 2022.

“It is our first biomethane project, the first among many,” Alex Gasparetto, director-president of the distributor that holds the concession for piped gas in the west and north of São Paulo state, an area encompassing 375 municipalities and 9.2 million inhabitants, told IPS.

São Paulo, the richest and most populated state in Brazil, home to 46 million of the 214 million inhabitants of this enormous country, accounts for more than half of the national sugarcane production, in more than 150 agroindustrial sugar or ethanol plants next to sugarcane plantations, most of them in the GasBrasiliano concession area.

Sugarcane is the “green oil”, says André Alves da Silva, commercial and new products director of Cocal, an agroindustrial company located in Narandiba, in southern Brazil, which uses almost everything from sugarcane to produce electricity, biogas, biomethane, biofertilizers, yeast as animal feed and other gases, in addition to sugar and ethanol. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“The potential is huge, sugarcane biomethane can replace all the diesel and liquefied petroleum gas (for cooking) consumed in the state, a privileged situation,” said Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association (ABiogás).

“Cocal is a demonstration project, which goes from sugarcane cultivation to the final consumer with the supply of biomethane for the entire year,” he told IPS by telephone from Londrina, a city in the southern state of Paraná where his technology services company, Geo Biogas & Tech, which promoted biogas in the sugar-energy sector, is headquartered.

Solution for seasonal limitations

Geo’s technological contribution was decisive for the Cocal biomethane project to take off. It has long been known how to make biogas from vinasse, but this liquid residue from the ethanol (or alcohol) distillery can only be used during harvest season, generally from April to November.

The vinasse is bulky and smelly, impossible to store for many days in the ponds built to collect it before it is put into the horizontal biodigesters where the organic material is broken down in an anaerobic process that produces biogas.

To ensure a year-round supply, Geo adapted a German technology to incorporate into biodigestion another waste product, cachaça or filter cake, a dark sludge resulting from the processing of sugarcane juice to make sugar. Cachaça, for Brazilians, is the name for sugarcane brandy.

A treatment process that removes impurities and part of the moisture converts this waste, which used to be discarded, into raw material for biogas. It has “10 times more organic matter than vinasse,” which is why it is more productive, Eduardo Baptista, supervisor of industrial production at the Cocal biogas plant, told IPS.

A sea of sugarcane plantations flood Narandiba and its neighboring municipalities in the southern state of São Paulo, where the agroindustrial company Cocal grows it as the raw material for its biofactory for energy, fuels and agricultural inputs. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This innovation made it possible to overcome seasonality, as it is stored in four open-air tanks next to the two vertical biodigesters, specifically for the cachaça. “During the harvest, we use the vinasse and between harvests, the cachaça,” avoiding interruptions in the production of biomethane, explained Alves, the company’s commercial director.

A second factor in favor of the project, he said, was that there is local demand for gas that could not be met by the GasBrasiliano pipeline, whose nearest point is more than 100 km from Presidente Prudente, the main city in the region, with a population of 230,000.

Extending the existing network to this limited market would not be economically viable, but a 65-kilometer gas pipeline from Cocal is, said Gasparetto, GasBrasiliano’s director-president.

The third factor is environmental. With biomethane, Cocal seeks to reduce the greenhouse gases emitted in its ethanol production. Replacing diesel with green gas decarbonizes the activity by 95 percent. Additional reductions can be obtained with the new fuel in trucks and agricultural equipment, an alternative that is currently being tested.

In addition, the waste from which the biogas is extracted is converted into clean biofertilizers, which emit 75 percent less carbon than chemical fertilizers, said Cocal’s commercial director.

Lastly, the decision was also based on the dual use of biogas: electricity or biomethane.

“Having two options reduces the risks,” the proportions can be modified according to demand and prices, Alves said. Currently, 53 percent of the biogas is refined into biomethane and 47 percent is used for electricity generation.

The vinasse pond at the Cocal plant, in the Brazilian municipality of Narandiba, feeds the biodigesters that produce biogas, later purified and refined for use in electricity generation or conversion into biomethane, a renewable and clean fuel equivalent to natural gas. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Cocal has also been generating energy by burning bagasse since 2002. Today it can supply electricity to a city of 730,000 inhabitants, the company reports.

Social contributions

For all this energy production, Cocal has two industrial units, each with its own sugarcane fields around it. The first was installed in 1980 in Paraguaçu Paulista, 135 kilometers from Narandiba.

It employs a total of 5,500 workers in 22 municipalities and has 125,000 hectares planted to sugarcane, mostly on land leased under 20-year contracts, according to Alves. The harvest reached 8.7 million tons of cane last year.

Narandiba currently has about 6500 inhabitants, after 2000 arrived, attracted by the local operation of Cocal, inaugurated in 2008, said the town’s mayor, Itamar dos Santos Silva, who estimated at 600 the direct and indirect employees of the sugar and alcohol plant a year ago – almost 10 percent of the population.

The municipality, which had stagnated when cattle ranching dominated its economy in the last decades of the last century, has prospered again. “Sugarcane totally changed the social and economic situation in the region,” the mayor said in a meeting with IPS in his office.

Deposits of cachaça or filter cake, a residue from sugar production, proved advantageous in the generation of biogas at Cocal’s two plants in western São Paulo state, in southern Brazil. The reason is that the residue contains a lot of organic material and is available when there is a lack of vinasse between sugarcane harvests. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition to offering more jobs, Cocal pays even the lowest-earning employees double what a ranch worker used to earn, he said. With the rise in purchasing power, “every day a new house is built in Narandiba” and commerce and the demand for schools, health services and recreation has grown, Dos Santos Silva said.

Tax revenue also increased, but it lagged behind the immediate demands created by the influx of new residents, lamented the mayor, whose plans include attracting industry and stepping up the training of young people for the new supply of technical jobs in the sugarcane agro-industry.

Environmental sustainability was the main motive for Liane, a company that makes food products such as biscuits and pasta, to sign the first contract for the purchase of biomethane distributed by GasBrasiliano in Presidente Prudente.

Biomethane does not pollute like fossil fuels and probably has lower costs than “the natural gas that comes to us by truck from far away,” Mauricio Calvo, Liane’s industrial director, told IPS by telephone from the company’s headquarters.

Initially, biomethane will go to companies, fuel stations, shopping malls, hotels and large restaurants, i.e. large consumers.

The supply of piped gas to households remains a long-term goal, Gasparetto told IPS by telephone from GasBrasiliano’s headquarters in Araraquara, a town 280 kilometers from São Paulo.

Cane cutter Evaristo Pérez, 22, on the La Isla plantation in the municipality of San Juan Opico in El Salvador. He used to be a child worker in the sugar cane fields in El Salvador, where child labour has been practically eradicated thanks to a policy of “zero tolerance” in the sugar industry. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala and Claudia Ávalos
SAN JUAN OPICO, El Salvador , Apr 6 2015 (IPS)

The participation of children and teenagers in the sugar cane harvest, a dangerous agricultural activity, will soon be a thing of the past in El Salvador, where the practice drew international attention 10 years ago.

“Before, when I was a kid, my brothers would take me along to help them cut sugar cane, it wasn’t a problem. But now things have changed,” Evaristo Pérez, a day labourer, told IPS during a break from his work in the sugar cane field under a blistering sun on the La Isla plantation in San Juan Opico, a municipality in the department of La Libertad in western El Salvador.

“I had to turn 18 before I could start working as a cane cutter,” added 22-year-old Pérez, standing next to a group of two dozen other cane cutters covered in dirt and sweat. He admitted that working in the sugar cane fields as a boy was “really tough.”

Child labour in activities described by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as dangerous or unhealthy has long been rife in El Salvador. That includes cutting sugar cane, hazardous because of the sharp machetes used, as well as the practice of burning sugar cane ahead of the harvest to facilitate the work, which produces ashes to which the cutters are exposed.

The severe poverty suffered by many rural families kept child labour alive, despite the risky work and heavy, long workdays.

A sugar cane cutter earns around 200 dollars a month, said workers interviewed by IPS.

“At the bottom of this cultural and economic phenomenon lie poverty and the lack of opportunities in the countryside,” said Julio César Arroyo, executive director of the El Salvador sugar industry association (AAES), which groups the six privately owned sugar mills that process the country’s sugar cane.

In this Central American country of 6.3 million people, 38 percent of the population lives in rural areas, where 36 percent of the households are poor, above the national average of 29.6 percent, according to official statistics from 2013.

The problem of child labour in the sugar cane harvest in El Salvador was thrust to the forefront in June 2004 when the Washington-based Human Rights Watch published the report “Turning a Blind Eye: Hazardous Child Labor in El Salvador’s Sugarcane Cultivation”.

The report triggered a strong reaction by human rights groups as well as international buyers of El Salvador’s sugar. Canada, the second-biggest market after the United States, threatened to stop buying sugar from this country.

The position taken by Canada “was worrisome because it could have caused a domino effect,” leaving thousands of rural workers without an income, Arroyo told IPS.

Due to the Human Rights Watch report on child labour and the resulting pressure, sugar cane producers, sugar mills and the government, grouped together in the Salvadoran Sugar Industry Council (CoNSaa), jointly adopted a code of conduct in 2006.

They stepped up the process a year later with the inclusion of a clause declaring “zero tolerance” of child labour.

They also implemented measures to oversee compliance with the clause, by means of ongoing monitoring by the Labour Ministry, inspectors on plantations and a special external auditor.

A significant improvement was seen. According to the AAES, the number of children working on sugar cane plantations fell from 12,000 in 2004 to 3,470 in 2009, a 72 percent drop. During the 2013-2014 harvest, only 700 children under 18 were reported – a 92 percent drop in 10 years.

“We’ll be satisfied once the problem has been fully eradicated, but great progress has definitely been made,” Arroyo said.

Another positive factor has been that poor rural families have gradually understood that it is important to keep children and teenagers out of the sugar cane fields.

Pablo Antonio Merino, the foreman at the La Isla plantation, told IPS that he knows very well that he can’t hire minors to cut sugar cane, even if they ask him for work.

“They’re not going to find a single minor among my workers,” said the 63-year-old Merino. “Sometimes kids come to my house to ask me to do them a favour and hire them, but when I see how young they are, I tell them no, that I don’t want trouble.”

But there is still resistance to the change.

Another worker, David Flores, 53, told IPS that the ban on child labour in the industry causes problems by leaving adolescents with nothing to do, which leads them down “the wrong path” – a reference to the youth gangs that are rife in this country.

El Salvador is caught up in a wave of violent crime. In 2014 the homicide rate was 63 per 100,000 population, compared to a global average homicide rate of 6.2 per 100,000 population in 2012, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Many of the murders are committed by gangs.

“It has hurt the country to take work away from young people, because they end up as vagrants,” Flores argued.

But Ludin Chávez, the director in El Salvador of the international organisation Save the Children, told IPS that child labour must be eradicated because children grow up in an environment where exploitative conditions are seen as normal.

“They see it as natural that other people exploit them, and that they can never defend their rights; we see this as a dangerous vicious circle,” she said.

Other forms of hazardous child labour are shellfish harvesting in the mangroves, the production of fire crackers in sweatshops, and domestic service, she added.

The 2013 household survey found that 144,168 children and adolescents between the ages of five and 17 were involved in child labour – a nearly 12 percent reduction from 2012.

Since 2009, when the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) came to power, the government outlined a plan to eradicate the worst forms of child labour this year, with a goal to totally eliminate it by 2020, in a joint effort with a wide range of economic and social sectors.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The 5 de Septiembre sugar mill in the Cuban province of Cienfuegos. A subsidiary of the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht is taking part in upgrading the plant, which will include construction of a bioenergy plant run on sugarcane bagasse. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Sep 26 2014 (IPS)

Cuba’s sugar industry hopes to become the main source of clean energy in the country as part of a programme to develop renewable sources aimed at reducing dependence on imported fossil fuels and protecting the environment.

The project forms part of the plans for upgrading and modernising sugar mills that have been opened up to foreign investment by Azcuba, the government business group that replaced the Sugar Ministry in 2011. Traditionally, sugar mills have generated electricity for their own consumption, using bagasse, the fibrous matter that remains after sugarcane stalks are crushed to extract their juice.

In a conversation with Tierramérica, Azcuba spokesman Liobel Pérez defended the production of energy using bagasse as a cheap, environmentally friendly alternative. “The CO2 [carbon dioxide] produced in the generation of electricity is the same amount that the sugar cane absorbs when it grows, which means there is an environmental balance.”

For now, the production of ethanol as a by-product of sugarcane is not being considered in Cuba, although some experts argue that the biofuel could reduce consumption of gasoline by farm machinery and transportation and thus limit atmospheric emissions.

“That is one of the issues being discussed and analysed by the government commission created to study the development of renewable energies,” said Manuel Díaz, director of the Cuban Institute of Research on Sugar Cane Derivatives. The official did not, however, rule out the possibility in the future.

“Even if it is not the definitive long-term solution to the consumption of automotive fuel, ethanol is an important factor and contributes to reducing fossil fuel use, and if it does not run counter to the use of land for food, it could be, it seems to me, an alternative that each country should analyse depending on its specific characteristics,” Díaz said.

A worker at the Jesús Rabí sugar mill in the Cuban province of Matanzas. The plant’s biomass will help increase electricity production from clean sources of energy in Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The sugar industry currently accounts for 3.5 percent of electricity generation in this Caribbean island nation. A target of the plan to boost energy efficiency is for around 20 sugar mills to generate a surplus of 755 MW by 2030, to go into the national power grid.

That would raise the proportion of electricity produced by sugarcane biomass to 14 percent by 2030. The overall aim is for 24 percent of energy to come from renewable sources, including wind power (six percent), solar (three percent), and hydropower (one percent).

Currently, renewable energy sources only represent 4.6 percent of electricity generation; the rest comes from fossil fuels.

The gradual installation in the sugar mills of modern bioelectric plants needed to achieve that goal requires an estimated investment of 1.29 billion dollars, which Azcuba hopes to obtain from government loans or foreign investment.

“If we don’t find a loan we will get foreign investment,” said Jorge Lodos, business director for Zerus SA, a subsidiary of Azcuba. The executive told Tierramérica that the first two companies to enter into partnership with Cuba in the sector included the bioelectric plants in their plans, to boost energy efficiency.

The first of the plants that run on sugarcane biomass will begin to produce energy in 2016, Lodos said. It is to be built near the Ciro Redondo sugar mill in the province of Ciego de Ávila, 423 km from Havana, by Biopower, a joint venture established in 2012 by Cuba’s state-run Zerus and the British firm Havana Energy Ltd.

During the December to May harvest season, the plant will use sugarcane bagasse from the nearby sugar mill. The rest of the year it will use stored sugarcane waste and marabú (Dichrostachys cinérea), a woody shrub that has invaded vast areas of farmland in Cuba. The projected investment ranges between 45 and 55 million dollars.

Meanwhile, the Compañía de Obras e Infraestructura (COI), a subsidiary of Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, reached an agreement with the Empresa Azucarera Cienfuegos, another Azcuba subsidiary, to jointly administer the 5 de Septiembre sugar mill in the province of Cienfuegos, 256 km from the capital, for 13 years.

In this case, the commitment is to bring the productive capacity of the sugar mill back up to 90,000 tons of sugar per harvest, or even higher.
Lodos said investment in the project would surpass 100 million dollars, and would also include the construction of a bioenergy plant.

These two sugar mills and the Jesús Rabí mill in the province of Matanzas, 98 km from Havana, will generate the first 140 MW of electricity in the medium term.

Havana Energy and COI opened the door to foreign capital in Cuba’s sugar industry, just as investment has already been welcomed in other sectors of this country’s centralised economy. “Foreign investment requires mutual trust,” Lodos said.

The socialist government of Raúl Castro estimates that the country needs between two and 2.5 billion dollars a year in foreign capital in order to grow and develop.

Of Cuba’s 56 sugar mills, six of which are now inactive, Azcuba has opened up 20 to foreign investment. The initial priorities are the eight built after the 1959 revolution.

Although ethanol production is not among the plans to be offered to foreign investors, many experts believe prospects for selling the fuel are good.

“It is not expected to be included in the programme,” Lodos said. “None of the minimum conditions required to introduce foreign investment are in place. It would not involve large amounts of capital or technology contribution, and it would not be for export or to replace imports. Today it isn’t on the business menu. But it might be tomorrow.”

Cuba produces alcohol in 11 distilleries, which are also to be upgraded, for pharmaceutical use and the industry that produces rum and other alcohol.

Cuba’s once-powerful sugar industry, which produced harvests of up to eight million tons, hit bottom in the 2009-2010 season when output plunged to 1.1 million tones – the lowest level in 105 years.

The industry currently represents around five percent of the country’s inflow of foreign exchange.

The hope is that the modernisation of factories, machinery, transport equipment and other resources will boost yields and bolster production, along with the increase in the planting of sugarcane. Last year 400,000 hectares were planted and production in the 2013-2014 harvest amounted to over 1.6 million tons.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Sen Dabydoyal, a farmer and leader of the Médine Cooperative Society, shows a pack of special sugar produced by sugarcane farmers from Mauritius. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

By Nasseem Ackbarally
PORT LOUIS, Jun 10 2014 (IPS)

While Mauritius has been forced to transform its sugar industry because of low prices for the commodity, the country’s small-scale sugarcane farmers who contribute to it say they are barely earning a living.

Previously, Mauritius produced only raw sugar from the cane plant. Now it produces value-added refined and special sugar, electricity from bagasse, ethanol and will soon produce bio-plastics.

“We are paid for the amount of sugar produced from our canes and some peanuts for the bagasse they use to produce electricity and nothing for the electricity which they sell to the national grid, or for our molasses or for the ethanol,” Jugessur Guirdharry, a farmer for the Union Park Cooperative Society, in the south of the island, told IPS. Farmer Salil Roy believes sugar cane is a victim of its own success “in the sense that it helped farmers support their children’s higher education, locally and abroad.”

With the end of the Sugar Protocol in 2009, an agreement between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific states since 1970 wherein the latter supplied sugar to the EU at a much higher price than was available on the world market, meant that this Indian island nation stopped receiving high prices for its sugar. Instead, Mauritius was producing sugar at 500 dollars a tonne but selling it at 433 dollars a tonne.

To keep the industry alive, the government implemented drastic reforms. It centralised private sugar production factories and from the original 17 there are now four flexi-factories that crush cane, produce special and refined sugars, molasses, ethanol and renewable energy from bagasse — the fibrous pulp left over after cane is squeezed for its juice. Soon they will also produce bio-plastic.

This island nation now produces 400,000 tonnes of special and refined sugars that are sold on markets in Europe from where they are sold directly to big EU firms.

About 75 percent of the sugar produced in Mauritius is value-added refined and special sugar that is sold mainly in Italy, Spain, Greece, United Kingdom and Belgium while the rest is sold to a hundred clients in niche-markets in the United States and China.

However, the 17,000 small-scale farmers contribute to about 28 percent of the national sugar production are not happy. They say it is very difficult to make a living out of cane cultivation only.

Farmers complain of high production costs and costs of inputs like fertilisers, herbicides and manpower and transport.

“If a farmer does not do part of the work in the fields himself, he’ll not be able to make his ends meet,” Guirdharry added.

Without the contribution of farmers like him, this industry would not have survived, Issah Korreembux, a small-scale sugarcane farmer, told IPS. Indeed, the Mauritius Cane Industry Authority (MCIA) says that many smallholder farmers have abandoned between 5,000 to 6,000 hectares of land that had previously been sugar plantations.

“If they are not given their due, more will do so because of lack of manpower, high costs of inputs and an ageing population among the farmers with the youth staying away from agriculture,” Sen Dabydoyal, a farmer and leader of the Médine Cooperative Society, in eastern Mauritius, told IPS.

Guirdharry pointed out that by producing bagasse, small farmers contribute to the production of clean energy.

“If we use coal only, the impact on the environment would be devastating. We are thus preventing the import of about 250,000 tonnes of coal annually,” he explained.

Small-scale farmers like Dabydoyal are looking for other means to increase their income. About 5,000 of them have joined the fair-trade movement. They produced 21,000 tonnes of sugar under this label in 2013, which brought them an additional income of 60 dollars per tonne above the normal price of 530 dollars.

Under this certification by an international firm FLO-CERT, the small-scale producers develop good agricultural practices, make good use of the soil, use less chemical products and follow an integrated management plan for pests and diseases to improve the crop.

“This is a very good thing for small-scale farmers and we are encouraging all of them to join the movement,” Sooradehoo Punchu, president of the Mauritius Fair-trade Federation Cooperative Ltd, told IPS.

Farmer Salil Roy believes sugar cane is a victim of its own success “in the sense that it helped farmers support their children’s higher education, locally and abroad.”

“Today, these children have grown up and become professionals but have turned their back to the plantations,” Roy told IPS. Small and medium farmers have launched an Alliance of Sugar Cane Planters Association (ASPA) to defend their rights.

Its leader Trilock Ujoodha says a revision of the distribution of cane revenue will solve many problems faced by small and medium producers, which includes among them the issue of abandoned land.

Other farmers recalled that their income from sugar that represented 95 percent of their total revenue in the past stands today at 94 percent, despite the slump in local sugar prices.

“It should have decreased more,” observed farmer Jugdish Rampertab. However, Roy believes small farmers are faring well but “they could do much better with a fair distribution of sugar revenue.”

Mauritius has transformed its main product that is sugar cane into several valued added products. It’s not the end of the road yet, as this industry prepares to face another big challenge in two years’ time with the end of the sugar quota system in the EU scheduled for 2017.

This will again lead to volatile prices of this commodity. “How far can we diversify our cane industry?” Dabydoyal asks.

Sugarcane harvesters have become a fixture in the Brazilian landscape. Credit: Mario Osava /IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 15 2013 (IPS)

Following a promising start, Brazil’s dream of positioning ethanol in the global market on an equal standing with petroleum-based fuels is hindered by new and old challenges.

Brazil’s goal of expanding ethanol sales across the world will only be attained when there are “more countries in a position to buy and supply,” noted Eduardo Leão de Sousa, director of the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Union (UNICA), an organisation that represents the country’s top sugar and ethanol producers.

Brazil and the United States produce close to 85 percent of the world’s ethanol, according to information from the International Energy Agency. Since it is produced almost exclusively for domestic consumption, international sales are still marginal.

De Sousa told IPS that the critical level of demand necessary to stimulate ethanol production is not something that emerges spontaneously and must be driven by public policies, such as regulations that require a certain volume of renewable fuel to be blended into petroleum-based transport fuels.

Growing demand is led by the United States, spurred by the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) programme that set increasing annual quotas for ethanol production through 2022, and the European Union (EU), which aims to bring the percentage of renewable fuels in transport vehicle engines up to 10 percent by 2020.

The RFS programme, created under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and further expanded in 2007, with the aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, established a limit of 56.78 billion litres for annual consumption of conventional ethanol fuels, which are those produced from food crops such as corn.

As U.S. consumption is nearing that limit, the bulk of the increase towards the 2022 target of 132.5 billion will have to come from cellulosic ethanol – a biofuel from wood, grasses or the inedible parts of plants, which is new and still too costly to produce- and from “advanced” biofuels.

“Advanced” or “second generation” biofuels are those produced by sustainable feedstock, which are defined by availability of the feedstock, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels and biodiversity and land use impact.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency designated sugarcane ethanol as an advanced biofuel because it lowers GHG emissions by more than 50 percent as compared to gasoline, taking into account the full lifecycle of production and consumption, including the use of land to grow the crop.

This development will boost demand for ethanol produced by Brazil and other sugarcane growing countries, bringing it up to 15.14 million litres by 2022.

As for the EU, based on a directive to promote the use of energy from renewable sources (Directive 2009/28/EC) that requires that 10 percent of the energy used in transport be sourced from renewable fuels by 2020, ethanol consumption for that year is projected at 15 to 16 billion litres, half of which could be supplied from outside the bloc, according to de Sousa.

EU and U.S. imports combined, then, will equal Brazil’s current domestic market, developed over the course of almost four decades, de Sousa estimated.

But that demand is not a sure thing. The EU’s executive body, the European Commission, is considering revising its transport fuel target to impose a limit on crop-based biofuels in an effort to prevent negative impacts on food supply, while in the United States the powerful oil and corn lobbies are pressuring against the RFS, the UNICA director said.

Out to conquer emerging markets

Another huge potential market is China, but only if it adopts an ambitious programme once “a supply of diverse and permanent sources is guaranteed,” de Sousa forecasted.

Many countries introduced the use of ethanol as a fuel additive in the 1990s. But there are numerous cases in which national programmes for the adoption of this biofuel were postponed or implemented on a trial basis. For example, after establishing a voluntary three percent biofuel blend in 2003, Japan is still reluctant to make it mandatory.

On the supply side, efforts are also “timid,” although sugarcane ethanol is being produced in other South American countries and in Central America and Africa, as well as in Southeast Asia, where UNICA sees “great potential.”

Mexico has extensive agricultural land but fragmented into tiny private plots that hinder large-scale production. Something similar occurs in India, which already has a large cane production to supply sugar for its 1.2 billion people, de Sousa said.

In Africa, the lack of infrastructure and labour trained for ethanol production are an obstacle to this activity. In Angola and Mozambique, where Brazilian companies are implementing sugar projects, landholding is also an issue, but for a different reason. As all land is state-owned, producers cannot purchase land and must depend on government concessions.

This eliminates land purchase costs but drives away investors who see property as a guarantee.

“The key is having clear rules and streamlining implementation,” said Felipe Cruz, investment director at Angola’s Capanda Agroindustrial Pole, an initiative of the Brazilian company Odebrecht, which is building the Angolan Bioenergy Company (Biocom) set to begin production this year.

“The focus is on sugar,” António Carlos de Carvalho, Biocom manager and financial director, said. Angola, which was self-sufficient in that food crop prior to independence in 1975, lost its entire sugarcane industry during its 27-year-long civil war. Now it is trying to rebuild it with projects across the country.

In addition to 260,000 tons of sugar, Biocom plans to produce 30 million litres of ethanol, which will be used to replace petroleum-based additives.

Blazing a winding trail

As a pioneer in the use of ethanol fuel and a major sugarcane producer, Brazil has developed technology and companies in the field that have made it possible for the country to pursue ethanol projects in every continent.

This strategy was launched as a response to rising international oil prices in the mid 1970s, when Brazil imported 80 percent of the fuel it consumed.

A decade later, almost all new vehicles manufactured in Brazil were running exclusively on ethanol, while the rest of the country’s vehicle fleet had switched to gasoline blended with an increasing percentage of biofuel. Today, vehicles run on a blend that ranges from 18 to 25 percent.

This initial success was followed by a crisis produced by a drop in oil prices. But in the 1990s, amid growing environmental concerns, Brazilian ethanol emerged as a effective way of reducing pollution.

Also at this time, the U.S. began producing and using flexible-fuel vehicles (or flex vehicles), which run on any blend of up to 85 percent ethanol. In Brazil, an improved version of flex vehicles with no limit to the percentage of ethanol triggered a new biofuel boom in 2003.

But without the expected climate agreements and with environmental concerns clouded by the more pressing economic crisis, global interest in ethanol has waned. Brazilian efforts to create an international market for this product, led by one of ethanol’s champions, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), are not yielding the expected results.

While the strong support from the U.S. -the world’s largest producer of ethanol since 2006-means that Brazil is no longer alone in its efforts, it has exacerbated critics who argue that diverting huge volumes of corn to ethanol production will raise food prices.

Another cause for concern is the potential development of electric and hydrogen vehicles.

De Sousa is confident that “cellulosic ethanol will alter this equation,” expanding biofuel production and increasing its sustainability, while all the other alternatives will only be competitive in the long term.

However, no alternative should be ruled out. “Every region will find the solution that is most suitable” for its conditions, he concluded.

The Cuban sugar industry seems to be experiencing a rebirth thanks to an economic modernisation programme that has allowed for an injection of foreign capital as part of a strategy to strengthen and diversify this key sector.

“There is a recovery, an awakening in the production of sugar cane, sugar and sugar derivatives,” said specialist Liobel Pérez from the state-owned business group Azcuba, created just over a year ago to replace the once powerful Ministry of Sugar. Azcuba’s effectiveness will be put to the test in 2013 as it implements new forms of management in the sector.

Foreign investment in the sugar industry was formerly limited to a handful of sugar derivative enterprises. Its extension to sugar production was one of the innovations introduced by Azcuba in 2012. “There are two major investments which complement the measures that have contributed to sustained growth in production,” Pérez told IPS.

Pérez was referring to two agreements signed at the latest Havana International Trade Fair, held in November 2012: one with Brazil’s Companhia de Obras e Infraestrutura (COI) – a subsidiary of the powerful Odebrecht group, which has investments in other sectors of the Cuban economy – and the other with the British company Havana Energy.

The contract between COI and Empresa Azucarera Cienfuegos, an Azcuba subsidiary, is for joint management over the next 13 years of the 5 de Septiembre sugar mill, located in the province of Cienfuegos, 232 km southeast of Havana.

The Brazilian company will invest in agricultural mechanisation to raise crop yields and in industrial processing technology.

It is hoped that this injection of capital will “optimise human and industrial resources” and thus help the Cienfuegos mill to raise production to the 90,000 tons per harvest for which it was designed, from the 25,000 to 30,000 tons it has produced in recent years.

As for Havana Energy, it is entering into a joint venture with Azcuba subsidiary Zerus SA to build a biomass power plant near the Ciro Redondo sugar mill in the province of Ciego de Ávila, in central Cuba.

The plant will be built with an investment of between 45 million and 55 million dollars, and is scheduled to begin generating electricity in 2015. During the harvest, it will be powered with the sugar cane bagasse left over after sugar processing. The rest of the year, it will run on marabu weed, which has taken over large areas of idle farmland in the country.

A number of other foreign investment projects are being studied, involving joint management, which seems to be Cuba’s preferred strategy for sugar mills.

However, other potential joint venture initiatives are also being considered, “primarily in the energy and sugar derivatives sectors,” said Pérez.

Sugar cane is a source of a wide array of derivatives used in the food, chemical, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The long list of by-products includes animal feed, resins, preservatives, plastics and raw materials for paper and furniture production.

“Cuba has over 400 years of experience in sugar cane cultivation, as well as trained human resources, facilities, land, scientific research centres, infrastructure and organisation. What it lacks is technology and, above all, the money to buy it,” explained Pérez.

He believes that what is most important is the “new vision” of how the recovery of the sector can be achieved, which makes it possible to speak of sustained growth in sugar production, he said.

Pérez preferred not to hazard an estimate for the 2012-2013 harvest, which began in November of last year with the so-called “small harvest” and will continue until May, with the participation of 50 sugar mills. He did however indicate that production is expected to be 20 percent greater than last year’s.

Other sources close to the sugar sector said that the current harvest should yield enough cane to produce 1.8 million tonnes, although the plan is to produce just over 1.6 million. Sugar continues to be the leading product but not the only one produced by this industry which was the mainstay of the centralised Cuban economy until the late 20th century.

This is why projections include increased production of derivatives, such as electricity from sugar cane bagasse, alcohols and animal feed. Pérez believes that the success of measures such as better organisation of production and growing financial autonomy is now clearly visible.

He also pointed to the importance of the timely arrival of inputs, from fertilisers and pesticides to industrial equipment and replacement parts.

The transformation of the entity responsible for the sugar sector from a ministry to a business group has enabled a new degree of autonomy that leads to better decision making, he said.

Azcuba is one of the state entities that will be run under new forms of business management as of this month – initially on an experimental basis – with the goal of economic self-sufficiency, without the need for capital injections from the state.

The authorities believe that Azcuba will serve as a perfect test case for more effective functioning of the production chain, since it encompasses every stage of the chain, from the production of raw material to export.

“The revitalisation of this sector is good news for our country, because sugar continues to serve as a guarantee for international credits and foreign sales are a secure source of income,” a specialised economist told IPS.

Of its total annual production, Cuba should export 400,000 tonnes of sugar to China, while supplying between 550,000 and 700,000 tonnes for domestic consumption.

* 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.

Bolivian sugar cane cutters at work. Credit: Gastón Brito/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Nov 13 2012 (IPS)

Bolivia’s sugar mills are once again operating at full capacity, with producers flooding the domestic market and desperate to obtain permits to export a surplus of 138,000 tons to Chile, Colombia, Peru and the United States.

The low point for sugar producers, marked by scarcity, speculation and smuggling, was in 2010, and remains a bad memory for this newly blossoming agroindustrial sector in the eastern department of Santa Cruz, home to four of the country’s five sugar mills: Guabirá, La Bélgica, San Aurelio and Unión Agroindustrial de Cañeros (Unagro).

The fifth, Industrias Agrícolas Bermejo Sociedad Anónima, is located in the region of Bermejo, in the southern department of Tarija.

This year, sugar production in Santa Cruz is expected to total 11 million quintals (506,000 tons). In Bolivia, the quintal, equivalent to 46 kg, is the unit of weight used for products like sugar.

Once domestic demand is met, a surplus of approximately three million quintals (138,000 tons) will remain. But according to the general manager of Unagro, Marcelo Fraija, “only one million can be exported with the government’s authorisation.”

A study conducted in 2010 found that investment in the sector in land, crops, industrial facilities, farming machinery and infrastructure totaled some 500 million dollars, said Andreas Noack, the manager of Social Responsibility at the Bolivian Foreign Trade Institute (IBCE).

That same year, the sugar mills in Santa Cruz produced 395,000 tons, while the one in Bermejo produced 42,366 tons.

Abrupt changes in weather patterns in the nine provinces of Santa Cruz, where 131,600 hectares of sugar cane are grown, led to a drop in production, and the government was forced to intervene in the market.

Domestic consumption that year was estimated at 345,000 tons, but the authorities deemed it necessary to impose price controls. The prices set for the Bolivian market were lower than those being charged in neighbouring Peru, and large quantities of sugar ended up being smuggled across the border.

With the domestic supply running out, the government prohibited exports and began to import sugar from Colombia. But the situation was finally resolved when the government backtracked and set a wholesale price closer to what the market-driven price would have been, and conditions returned to normal.

“We will never see a repeat of this period,” when imports were agreed upon by the government and producers as a means of “protecting food security,” Fraija told Tierrámerica*.

But the regulation of exports remains intact, for the purpose of guaranteeing the domestic supply, and sugar producers are calling on the Ministry of Rural and Agricultural Development to lift these restrictions.

In 2009, Bolivia’s sugar exports totaled 75 million dollars, although sales had reached over 100 million dollars in previous harvests. During the first nine months of this year, sugar exports totaled less than 17,000 dollars and account for a mere 0.19 percent of the country’s total exports.

“We are happy with the 2012 harvest,” which benefited from good weather conditions and loans granted by the government to sugar producers with terms of up to four years and guarantees from companies and unions, said Hugo Gutiérrez, former president of the Union of Sugar Cane Producers of Santa Cruz.

The harvest began in May, and attracted around 2,000 cane cutters and their families from the cold high plains of the Andes in western Bolivia to the sugar cane plantations of the eastern region, divided among roughly 3,500 landowners.

This year these seasonal workers were paid between 4.3 and 4.6 dollars for every ton of sugar cane cut. But when labour is scarce, plantation owners have been forced to pay up to five dollars and use machinery, Gutiérrez told Tierramérica.

Some plantations are up 500 hectares in size, but small producers grow sugar cane on parcels of between 20 and 300 hectares. The harvest is moving ahead full steam and will continue until late November, when the rains interrupt work in the cane fields.

“The government was right to be concerned over the amount of sugar leaving the country when prices were low,” Mariano Aguilera, the former president of the region’s largest sugar mill, Guabirá, told Tierramérica. But “today is different and clear trade policies are needed,” he said.

Producers have made sacrifices to transform their crops and adapt them to capricious climate conditions, said Gutiérrez. “On the one hand, the government helps us out with financial support, but on the other, it closes the doors to exports.”

Sugar producers are now facing an even bigger problem: international sugar prices are dropping. The world market price has fallen from 800 dollars a ton at the beginning of the year to 500 dollars, stressed Fraija.

In Bermejo, 1,165 km south of La Paz, despair is growing among producers due to the small amount of sugar sold on the domestic market and the lack of demand for the growing stored reserves.

Given this situation, a bill signed into law on Nov. 10 to create a tax to finance scientific research on sugar cane has met with fierce opposition.

The Sugar Cane Producers Union of Guabirá set up roadblocks on highways in Santa Cruz to protest the proposed tax on producers of 0.007 Bolivian pesos per liter of alcohol and 20 cents per quintal of sugar.

Producers see the measure as a duplication of efforts. A Centre for Research on Sugar Cane Technology Transfer has already been operating at the Guabirá Sugar Mill for a number of years.

* 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.

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