The Rachel Carson of Brazil

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If today millions of our land's nordestinos [Northeasterners] are forced to migrate to the stinking favelas [slums] of Rio and Sao Paulo, it is because they have been pushed out of their native region by sugar cane monoculture. PROALCOOL threatens to extend this process of displacing people from the land.

DALY: Couldn't alcohol fuel be made by small producers, employing people in the interior, and ultimately substituting a renewable resource for rapidly diminishing petroleum?

LUTZENBERGER: Of course it could! One can imagine a system of small-scale independent distilleries producing fuel for local use and converting the vinhoto, or slop, into a good organic fertilizer. It would then become possible to avoid large-scale monoculture and learn to live within an ecological budget. If our basic goals were the ecologically inspired dreams of the steady—state or homeostatic economy, we could make good use of biomass energy. The success of such a program, however, depends upon scale and rate of development, and—beyond that—upon the structure of power in society.

Unfortunately, in Brazil as in all other countries that I can think of, the official program calls for an ever-expanding economy that rides roughshod over ecological limits and tends to centralize power and promote only those technologies that are themselves centralizing. PROALCOOL, for example, even though it does permit the small distilleries to produce, requires them to sell to a centralized distributing agency.

DALY: What other effects will the PROALCOOL program have?

LUTZENBERGER: The sugar cane monoculture implicit in PROALCOOL is one of the many threats to the Amazon and to the Pantanal, the great swamp in Mato Grosso that is one of the last natural paradises on earth.

Since—alcohol production displaces food crops (Brazil already has to import its national staple, black beans), filling one's stomach will be more expensive than it otherwise would have been . . . while auto fuel may be less expensive than it otherwise would have been. And, of course, the poor spend a large percentage of their income on food and nothing at all on auto fuel. The middle and upper classes, however, spend a smaller percentage on food and a significant amount on auto fuel. So PROALCOOL will effectively harm those who are most in need of help. And because—as I've already said—the government's fuel program will also promote feudal landholding patterns, largescale distilleries, and centralized distribution . . . it's hard to see how the present plan can avoid worsening an already unjust distribution of income and wealth.

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