Brazil Workers See Ethanol's Dark Side

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/5178708.html

By STAN LEHMAN Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

BATATAIS, Brazil — As dawn cracks over seemingly endless fields of sugarcane, a ragged army of men and women sharpen their machetes to harvest the raw material for Brazil's "white gold."

With machinelike precision, the cane cutters gather five 8-feet tall stalks in the crook of one arm, bend over and cut them down with three swift machete whacks _ a process they will repeat over and over again for as long as 12-hours a day.

"By the end of the day your entire body hurts so much you think you are going to die" says cane cutter Raimundo Gomes da Silva. "But it is all we know how to do, so we will continue doing the same thing, day after day, until we drop dead."

Brazil's pioneering use of sugarcane-based ethanol, which fuels about 30 percent of the country's automobiles, has made Latin America's largest country a global leader alternative energy.

Getting less attention is the squalid labor conditions of nearly half a million people who toil in the fields six days a week to supply the cane to the nation and a growing export market.

Brazil is already the world's No. 1 exporter of ethanol, shipping 900 million gallons of the fuel additive abroad in 2006 _ up from 690 million gallons in 2005 _ and generating revenues of $1.6 billion. Exports have risen due mostly to increased demand from European countries that find it cheaper to import the product from Brazil than to make it from wheat and sugar beets.

FULL story at link.

[lynnertic]

1. Interesting attempt to demonize ethanol

and meanwhile, there's a glut of ethanol stateside which is depressing prices... all those farmers who bought seeds at a premium made more corn for fuel than processing plants can keep up with. The cost of corn as food, on the other hand, has never been higher.

But squalid workers harvesting sugarcane by hand is nothing new.