Sugarcane ethanol: Contributions to climate change - BAFF

Foreword
�e use of biofuels as a substitute for gasoline has been recently criticized mainly for:
• sparking a competition between the use of land for fuel ‘versus’ land for food which is
causing famine in the world and
•
leading to deforestation in the Amazonia.
�e importance of these concerns was greatly exaggerated and is, generally speaking,
unwarranted.
�e recent rise in prices of agricultural products – a�er several decades of declining real
prices – has given rise to the politically laden controversy of fuel ‘versus’ food. �is problem
has been extensively analyzed in many reports, particularly the World Bank (World Bank,
2008), which pointed out that grain prices have risen due to a number of individual factors,
whose combined e�ect has led to an upward price spiral namely: high energy and fertilizer
prices, the continuing depreciation of the US dollar, drought in Australia, growing global
demand for grains (particularly in China), changes in import-export policies of some
countries and speculative activity on future commodities trading and regional problems
driven by policies subsidizing production of biofuels in the US and Europe (from maize,
sugar beets and wheat). �e expansion of biofuels production particularly from maize
over areas covered by soybeans in the US contributed to price increases but was not the
dominant factor. �e production of ethanol from sugarcane in Brazil has not in�uenced
the prize of sugar.
Despite that, the point has been made that other countries had to expand soybean production
to compensate for reductions in the US production possibly in the Amazonia, increasing thus
deforestation. Such speculative ‘domino e�ect’ is not borne out by the facts: the area used
for soybeans in Brazil (mainly in the Amazonia) has not increased since 2004 (Goldemberg
and Guardabassi, in press). �e reality is that deforestation in the Amazonia has been going
on for a long time at a rate of approximately 1 million hectares per year and recent increases
are not due to soybean expansion but to cattle.
Emissions from land use changes resulting from massive deforestation would of course
release large amounts of CO 2 but the expansion of the sugarcane plantations in Brazil is
taking place over degraded pastures very far from the Amazonia. Emissions from such land
use change have been shown to be small (Cerri et al., 2007).
�e present area used of sugarcane for ethanol production in Brazil today is approximately
4 million hectares out of 20 million hectares used in the world by sugarcane in almost
100 countries. Increasing the areas used for of sugarcane for ethanol production in these
countries by 10 million hectares would result in enough ethanol to replace 10% of the
gasoline in the world leading to a reduction of approximately 50 million tons of carbon
per year. �is would help signi�cantly many OECD countries to meet the policy mandates
adopted for the use of biofuels.
12 Sugarcane ethanol