Abstract
Traditional manual sugarcane harvesting requires the pre-harvest burning practice which should be gradually banned by 2021 for most of São Paulo State, Brazil, on cultivated sugarcane land (terrain slope ≤12%) according to State Law number 11241. To forward the end of this practice to 2014, a “Green Ethanol” Protocol was established in 2007. The present work aims at analyzing five years of continuous sugarcane harvest monitoring, based on remote sensing images, to evaluate the effectiveness of the Protocol, thus helping decision makers to establish public policies to meet the Protocol’s expected goals. During the last five crop years, sugarcane acreage expanded by 1.5 million ha, which was compensated by a correspondent increase in the green harvested land. However, no significant reduction was observed in the amount of pre-harvest burned land over the same period. Based on the current trend, this goal is likely to be achieved one or two years later (2015–2016), which will be five or six years ahead of 2021 as the goal in the State Law number 11241 states. We thus conclude that the“Green Ethanol” Protocol has been effective with a positive impact on the increase of GH, especially on recently expanded sugarcane fields.
Highlights
In Brazil, the traditional process of sugarcane harvesting is manually performed using the practice of pre-harvest burning [1]
In all five crop years it was possible to acquire sufficient images to perform the visual interpretation (Table 1). Both CTC and SMA have their own methods to evaluate the yearly sugarcane green harvest (GH) progress in terms of the “Green Ethanol” Protocol, but at the end of each season both agreed on the results presented in this work, they were all quite similar
The remote sensing monitoring of the sugarcane harvest in São Paulo State, Brazil, is paramount to evaluate the effectiveness of the “Green Ethanol” Protocol in terms of its goals to gradually reduce pre-harvest sugarcane burning
Summary
In Brazil, the traditional process of sugarcane harvesting is manually performed using the practice of pre-harvest burning [1]. In order to bring the end of pre-harvest burnings forward to 2014 the São Paulo State Secretary of Environment (SMA), the Sugarcane Industry Union (UNICA), and the supplier associations signed in June 2007 the “Green. Ethanol” Protocol to promote sustainable production practices for sugarcane in São Paulo State [7]. The “Green Ethanol” Protocol anticipates the end of the pre-harvest burnings established by State Law number 11241, but it aims to reduce the amount of water used in the industrial sugarcane crushing process, and to recover the riparian forests within sugarcane production regions [7]. Under the Protocol’s rules, suppliers are small producers responsible for up to 12,000 tons of sugarcane in each crop year from sugarcane fields of up to 150 ha They represent 92% of the state’s producers, but only 10% of the sugarcane production. It is necessary to distinguish between types of producers to make sure that small suppliers are not excluded from the productive process and have enough time to comply with the Protocol’s goals
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