Agriculture’s Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil’s Green Revolution. By Thomas D. Rogers

Abstract

Today, policymakers celebrate Brazilian sugar-based ethanol as a possible alternative energy source to address our climate crisis. Thomas Rogers brings a unique approach to the history of Brazilian sugar ethanol’s development in his new book, Agriculture’s Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil’s Green Revolution. In 1975, Brazil famously transformed ethanol into a major domestic fuel source during the global oil crisis with the creation of the National Alcohol (Ethanol) Program, or Proálcool. As a historian of Brazilian agriculture, Rogers uses the sugar ethanol program to examine the costs of Brazil’s broader twentieth century agro-industrial development strategy. Rogers argues that the Green Revolution’s promise of development using fertilizers and adapted seeds to power large-scale agricultural production underwrote the program’s logic and created adverse consequences that are emblematic of bigger global development problems to this day (4, 8). Divided into two major parts, Rogers meticulously connects the origins of Brazil’s ethanol industry to a particular agricultural development model that evolved over the first half of the twentieth century. Sugar has long been a major agricultural product of Brazil. However, Chapter 1 examines how policymakers focused on “modernizing” the sugar sector with “research, modern techniques, and planning” to shake its backward image, particularly in the drought riddled Northeast, during the first half of the twentieth century (36). Chapter 2 examines how government officials and policymakers institutionalized the use of high-yield seeds and chemical fertilizers in line with Green Revolution logic through various policies and programs to intensify industrial sugar production in the 1960s and early 1970s (66-67). Chapter 3 then succinctly connects these big agriculture policies to Proálcool and its brief tenure as a major fuel alternative until 1990. Large-scale sugar ethanol production, mandated and incentivized by the military government, came to embody the “vision of agriculture-fueled development” that policymakers had built over the previous decades (81).