The case of the mostly widely applauded biofuel scheme to date, that of sugar­cane ethanol in Brazil, also has major doubts from the environmental perspective, although the first decade (1976-1985) of the program probably achieved a reason­able soil balance by recycling fermentor stillage as fertilizer, a valuable source of minerals, particularly potassium.20 36 With the great expansion of the industry sub­sequently, however, significant pollution problems have emerged. The volume of stillage that can be applied varies from location to location, and in regions with near-surface groundwater, much less stillage can be applied without contaminat­ing the water supply.36 In the case of the Ipojuca river in northeast Brazil, sugar cultivation and adjacent ethanol production plants use stillage extensively for both fertilization and irrigation, and this has led to water heating, acidification, increased turbidity, O2 imbalance, and increased coliform bacteria levels.98 The authors of this joint German-Brazilian study urged that a critical evaluation be made of the pres­ent environmental status of the sugar alcohol industry, focusing on developing more environmentally friendly cultivation methods, waste-reducing technologies, and water recycling to protect the region’s water resources.

The preservation of surface and groundwater in Brazil in general as a con­sequence of the sugar alcohol industry’s activities and development was ranked “uncertain, but probably possible” (table 5.17).99 Sugarcane plantations have been found to rank well for soil erosion and runoff criteria in some locations in Sao Paolo state, although the experimental results date from the 1950s (table 5.18). A much more recent study included in the second, Dutch-Brazilian report showed much poorer results for sugarcane in comparison with other monoculture crops (fig­ure 5.9). Nevertheless, although Brazilian sugarcane alcohol (viewed as an indus­trial process) makes massive demands on the water supply (21 m3/tonne of cane input), much of this water can (in principle) be recycled; in addition, Brazil enjoys such a large natural supply of freshwater from its eight major water basins (covering an area of 8.5 million km2) that the ratio of water extracted to supply is, on a global basis, exceedingly small: approximately 1%/annum, equivalent to 30-fold less than comparable data for Europe. Local seasonal shortages may, however, occur, and two of the four main sugar production regions have relatively low rainfalls (figure 5.10). Although sugar cultivation has mainly been rain-fed, irrigation is becoming more common.

Annual Soil Losses by Erosion and Runoff in Experimental Stations in Brazil

North and
northeast (sugar)

1.0 1.5

Rainfall (mm/km2/year)

FIGURE 5.10 Annual rainfall in main sugar-producing and other regions of Brazil. (Data from Smeets et al.99)

the enormous consumption levels of the Global North will not lead the Brazilian countryside out of poverty or help attain food sovereignty for its citizens.”100 On the other hand, to achieve poverty alleviation and the eradication of social exclusion and with support from environmentalists, Brazil proposed the Brazilian Energy Initiative at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg, South Africa) aiming at the establishment of global targets and timeframes of min­imum shares of energy from renewable sources.101 Headline figures for the global numbers of malnourished people known to international agencies are another datum point with a large uncertainty: from below 1 billion to 3.7 billion.3895 As an economist from the Earth Policy Institute was quoted as saying: “The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists to maintain their mobility and its two billion poorest people who are simply trying to stay alive is emerging as an epic issue.”102

Brazil became the global leader in ethanol exports in 2006, exporting 19% (3 bil­lion liters) of its production — 1.7 billion liters of which were imported by the United States — and plans to export 200 billion liters annually by 2025, increasing sugar­cane planting to cover 30 million hectares.100 Sugar for ethanol will increasingly be viewed by nations without a strong industrial base but with suitable climatic condi­tions for sugarcane growth as a cash crop, in exactly the manner that Brazil regards coffee or soybeans; the example provided by Brazil in creating rural employment at low cost, reducing the economic burden of oil imports, and developing national industrial infrastructure will be one difficult to resist, especially if major sugar pro­ducers, including Brazil, India, Cuba, Thailand, South Africa, and Australia, unite to create an expanding alternative fuel market with sugar-derived ethanol.36 South Africa, for example, has a great and acknowledged need to improve its sugarcane

economy, where 97% of its sugarcane growers are small scale, achieving only a quarter of the productivity realized by commercial operators; sugar is produced in a surplus, most of which is exported, but a national plan to encourage biofuels usage is in place, and a first ethanol plant is planned for construction by a South African sugar producer[54] in neighboring Mozambique.103

Academic economists and agronomists are calling (and will continue to call) for an informed debate about land use in the context of increasingly large areas of highly fertile or marginal land being reallocated for energy crops.104 Although there is good evidence that sugarcane-derived ethanol in Brazil shows the highest agri­cultural land efficiency in both replacing fossil energy for transportation and avoid­ing greenhouse gas emissions (figure 5.11), impacts on acidification and human and ecological toxicity and deleterious environmental effects occurring mostly during the growing and processing of biomass are more often ranked as unfavorable than favorable in surveys.105

The principal economic drivers toward greater biofuel production in develop­ing economies are, however (and paradoxically), those widely accepted programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase energy security, and move to a scientifi­cally biobased economy by promoting the use of biofuels (table 5.19). If a new orga­nization of ethanol exporting countries, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, arises to make up any shortfall in the production of endogenous biofuels in major OECD economies, only a sustained effort to require and enforce agronomically sound and environmentally safe practices on the part of those net importers will provide

200

5.12 The impact of fuel economy on projected demand for ethanol in various gasoline blends. (Data from Morrow et al.76)

Selected Policies on Light-Duty Vehicle Fuel Economy

• Shifting our reliance on petroleum products to biobased products that gen­erally have fewer harmful environmental effects

When another principle is added — strengthening rural economies and increasing demand for agricultural commodities — the main issues of the political agenda that has emerged post-2000 in both the United States and OECD economies in general are clear. There is one final argument, however, and one that commenced in the 1950s, that, instead of rendering the question of economic price of biofuels irrel­evant, reformulates the question to ask: how will biofuels affect the cost of living and personal disposable income in the twenty-first century?