Ojala Que Le Sirva

agroEnErgy and altErnativEs

The ethanol academic road-show is in town
Brazil’s Ethanol Academic Road Show is travelling the world to encourage you to believe in myths about Brazil’s ethanol for export being clean, sustainable energy for the rich world’s cars, reports Padre TIAGO THORLBY , who works in a sugar cane zone. But don’t expect them to tell you the truth when they have never beennear a canefield or talked with any of the hundreds of thousands of families evicted from the land. Don’t expect the academics to tell you the Brazilian model used to produce ethanol from sugar cane is environmentally devastating, culturally genocidal, socially exclusive, politically retrograde and economically unviable.
I come from Europe, a continent where all children born after 1945 should havebeen given a tag on their wrists with the inscription: “and no-one spoke against it.” Time after time, they would learn the significance of the words and how a nation was almost exterminated by the Holocaust. Since then, there have been more holocausts, which might not have happened if the tag bearers had acted on the significance of the attachment on their wrists. Holocausts are ‘OK’ – so long asthey don’t involve me, or I can push the blame onto someone else … or I can distance myself from them. I can handle that type of Holocaust. Cars causing a holocaust What happens when the cause of the Holocaust is right between your legs, the most intimate part of the body? I am, of course, talking about that extended member of the body: the gas tank of the motor vehicle. What happens when I hearmy car is causing a Holocaust? No problem: I believe in anything told-sold to the car-user about the energy used to power the vehicle. That is why the Brazilian ‘Ethanol Academic Road-Show’ is in town. It’s here to give you a feel-good factor about ethanol produced by the Brazilian latifundiary model. The academic road-show is geared to make you believe. The propaganda is very convincing. Goebbelswould be proud. Thus: I believe my vehicle, using bio-energy, is using ‘clean fuel’, ‘sustainable energy’. Pure myth and lies! The Brazilian model used to produce ethanol from sugar cane is environmentally devastating, culturally genocidal, socially exclusive, politically retrograde, economically unviable. To fuel the myth and cater for the lies, Biodiversity – the insects, fishes, streams, thewoods, the animals, the skies … the sounds and perfumes of nature are devastated. The people who live and work on the land: devastated. Goodbye to all that and to all expectations of Land Reform in Brasil. Goodbye to the fertile fields for Food Sovereignty, fields inundated by the advance of the green ocean of sugar cane. Pacha-Mama … devastated. Mother Earth does she never tire at the prospect ofendlessly sustaining the whimsical needs of her mindless children? I belong to an ecumenical Church organization called Comissão Pastoral da Terra, CPT (The Land Pastoral Commission). People ask: what is the posi-

The Sugar cane holocauST

To say the energy produced by this model is ‘clean, sustainable’ is an attack on nature and a crime against those who are expelled from the land to makeway for this green desert
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[Photo: flickr/lynac]
Pacific Ecologist  Summer 2009

agroEnErgy and altErnativEs
tion of the CPT on the bio-combustible question? The answer: the CPT is in favour of bio-energy. Peasants have been using it from time immemorial to keep themselves warm, to cook their foods and to sit around at night to brighten the conversations. For the CPT, this is the realbio-energy, the sustainable bio-fuel, the clean bio- combustible energy. This is Life – bio (greek).

rocinha, the biggest favela (shanty-town) in South america, with about 200,000 inhabitants. [Photo: flickr/andreasnilsson1976]

Agro-energy not bio-energy Why then, the person asks, is the CPT so against ethanol? Firstly, the CPT is against the latifundiary-for-export model that produces...