Re:Sugar cane not corn (Score 1)

At first, ethanol in Brazilian fuel is nothing more than a subside for northeastern Brazilian farmers, just like it is a subside for US corn farmers. It's not economically friendly. It's a more like a farming sweat shop.

The Brazilian government program for alcohol production (Pró-Álcool) is a long term strategy for minimizing the dependency of oil derived fuels.

I won't pretend I understand all economic forces driving this effort, but I don't see how this can happen without considerable economic subvention. This is also true in the southeast part of the country (where I live), where are most of the sugar cane crops nowadays.

Northeastern Brazil is, by far, the country more backwards place. Workers live in substandard conditions and slavery is not really uncommon in poorest places.

Despite I sadly agree, surely you don't blame sugar cane production as the direct cause of this absurd situation, do you?

I mean, everything else being equal, the replacement of ethanol production with any other economic activity in that region won't improve the conditions of the people, they will only be equally oppressed through other means.

At second, it's not environmentally friendly. Sugar cane is burned before being harvest. Particulates and smoke are really bad for neighbor population. Lack of crop rotation impoverishes the soil.

Yeah, burning is a technique for easing the manual harvest of the plant, and has bad environmental consequences as you mentioned. With the gradual increase in mechanical harvest methods, here the government is making pressure in prohibiting sugar cane burnings. However this is still a hot discussion topic - sorry for the pun :-)

Moreover I see news on increasing sugar cane productivity by the soil, as well as heavy research on production of cellulose ethanol - which will someday increase the ethanol production efficiency by the use of other parts of the plant (instead of only its juice).