Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution

Agriculture's Energy is Thomas Rogers's deeply researched and pathbreaking follow-up to his earlier book The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeastern Brazil (2009). Like The Deepest Wounds, Agriculture's Energy centers around labor and environment, but this book adds a new region (São Paulo) and a new set of protagonists to the northeastern landowners, agronomists, and workers featured in The Deepest Wounds. In Agriculture's Energy, we meet the policymakers and agribusiness(men), intellectuals, labor leaders, and environmentalists who advocated for, or fought against, the expansion of sugarcane plantings and ethanol production in Brazil from the end of World War I to the present. The book places into comparative international context Brazil's embrace of agricultural modernization and grounds Brazil's version of the Green Revolution in local, historical detail, complimenting wonderfully Jennifer Eaglin's new Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (2022). While in other parts of the world, seed selection, fertilizers, and irrigation techniques ostensibly aimed to feed more people with corn, wheat, and rice, in the Brazilian case, proponents of the Green Revolution aimed to expand the production of a fuel—ethanol—derived from sugarcane.The first three narrative chapters demonstrate that as the Brazilian state became more robust—first, through the Great Depression and “New State” (1937–45) years, and then during the military dictatorships of 1964 to 1985—agricultural projects became increasingly ambitious, profoundly impacting Brazilian society and the environment. The last three chapters are organized thematically, highlighting the consequences that the Green Revolution's technological and chemical “package” had on labor relations, the environment, and hunger (73).Agriculture's Energy builds a series of counterpoints. The first contrasts those who celebrated agriculture as Brazil's calling with those who promoted industry as the key to development. The second contrasts the labor mobilizations of the early 1960s with the elite and military reaction of the 1960s–80s. The third contrasts the arguments of the people who defended the 1975–90 Próalcool ethanol program as “nationalist, import-saving, and visionary” with those who saw it as “a profligate giveaway to entrenched interests that exacerbated rural and regional inequalities” (12). Rogers remains as neutral as possible, noting Brazil's impressive agro-industrial achievements in expanding fuel and export production while underscoring the environmental degradation, land concentration, extreme inequalities, and “widespread patterns of malnutrition” that accompanied this expansion (207).Rogers draws on judicial archives, union publications, newspaper and magazine articles, and contemporary work by social scientists such as Verena Stolcke and Lygia Sigaud to demonstrate that labor mobilizations succeeded in creating formal rights for rural workers through the Rural Workers' Statute in 1963. But this created a paradoxical effect. Landowners and industrialists pushed workers from sharecropping relationships and housing in factory towns to evade responsibility, expanding reliance on a contract labor system. Looking back on the impact of the statute a decade after its passing, a São Paulo worker described it as the “law about people no longer living on the plantations” (118). By 1979 as much as one-third of Brazil's population was “flying” and “clandestine,” struggling to secure rights as they worked for subcontractors and faced life and death conditions getting to and from the fields. Here, as elsewhere, comparative context is provided as we learn about similar developments in 1970s Latin America, including in Chile and Guatemala.Rogers elegantly details the human impact of Brazil's development model. Chapter 4, “How Brazil's National Alcohol Program Made a Meal of Rural Workers,” shows that workers had to bring their children to complete their daily “tasks” after a group of São Paulo producers, seeking to save on labor and fuel costs, insisted that workers cut more rows of cane and move the cane by hand to a more distant centralized pickup spot for mechanized cane collectors. São Paulo workers eventually won a return to the original row number through an extensive strike in 1985, but they were less successful at winning land access for subsistence crops, payment for the time it took to get to fields, or access to safe transportation. Chapter 5 introduces victims of sugarcane's environmental impacts, from northeasterners complaining of fish dying and stinking water in 1884 to residents from Rio de Janeiro suffering from major floods and typhus almost a century later. The wastewater from washing cane for ethanol multiplied rapidly even as mercury-based pesticides became omnipresent, prompting Brazilian agronomists to call for a move toward agrarian reform and the democratization of agricultural policy in 1986. The “Green” model, they noted, was good for “large landowners and industries, especially multinational producers of agricultural inputs,” but the social outcome was disastrous, “increasing the concentration of landholding, rural violence, and the poisoning of rural workers” (166).The last section of Agriculture's Energy provides an important lesson on the “food versus fuel” debate that applies equally well to ethanol from Brazilian cane or US corn today. Sugarcane literally took the place of beans and other subsistence foods in many fields. But the problem was less spatial and more economic: the development model concentrated wealth for agribusinesses and created an army of exploited workers who simply could not afford to feed themselves and their families.

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