During the month of June, 2008 I have traveled to several cities in Brazil in order to check on the ground the ‘biofuels boom’ which has recently taken over the country. This was the first field trip related to my PhD Dissertation research, which will approach historically and ethnographically the development of agronomic and industrial technologies for planting and processing sugarcane into sugar and ethanol.
I took part of this summer trip as a member of a larger research team of graduate students and professors, mostly from UC Berkeley’s School of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, also studying biofuels in Brazil. Together with this group, I have been to major sugarcane and ethanol producing areas in the interior of Sao Paulo state (around the cities of Campinas and Piracicaba), as well as to the more recent agricultural frontier opened up by soybean planters in the state of Mato Grosso. In addition to that, I have spent a few days on my own in Brazil’s federal capital, Brasília, exploring the feasibility of my PhD project’s double method: historical and ethnographical. Here I will briefly outline the outcomes of this first foray into my field.
Sao Paulo state has been since the middle 20th century the chief sugarcane producing area in Brazil, accounting today for around 60% of the country’s overall production. But also, and most importantly, it is where most cutting-edge, intensive research, development & innovation is taking place. Major research labs include both public institutions – notably the Campinas Agronomic Institute (IAC) and the Luiz de Queiroz Agriculture School (ESALQ) in Piracicaba – and private companies, some of which are concentrated in technological parks being currently set up in Campinas. I have visited one of these firms, Amyris, based in Campinas’s Technopark; its major banner is the production of diesel from sugarcane through techniques of synthetic biology. The Technopark also houses two major Brazilian players in sugarcane biotechnology, Alellyx and Canavialis, firms sponsored by the Votorantim group. Also, the federal government is currently financing the establishment of a new Center for Bioethanol Science and Technology (CCTB) in Campinas; it will concentrate R&D focused on “second generation” technologies.
Besides Campinas and Piracicaba, we have also visited a large sugarcane plant in the state, Usina Sao Joao. There, I was able to accompany the entire production process from biological control and harvesting to the industrial processing of sugarcane into sugar and ethanol. Finally, we have been to the headquarters of Unica, the powerful association of Sao Paulo sugarcane producers, in Sao Paulo city.
The trip to Mato Grosso related fundamentally to the other major component of the country’s biofuel matrix: biodiesel. It is possible that soy, cotton and other crops planted in the area will become increasingly important as part of the federal government’s recent effort to encourage biodiesel production. We have visited a biodiesel pilot plant in the region using mostly soy as feedstock. A salient feature of Mato Grosso as compared to Sao Paulo is the sharp environmental threat intrinsic to this new agricultural belt, since it borders, and at some points is already encroaching, legally-protected rainforest areas (including the “Legal Amazon”). However, the producers of at least one municipality we have visited, Lucas do Rio Verde, are struggling to comply with environmental regulations, as well as with requirements of “best practices”, in order to aggregate value to its products through green and social seals. Even though my Dissertation will focus more exclusively on sugarcane ethanol, biodiesel is likely to be a relevant touchstone since diesel and gasoline matrixes are necessarily intertwined; also, there are innovation projects for making diesel from sugarcane such as the abovementioned by Amyris.
 |
Panoramic view of Usina Sao Joao, one of the largest sugarcane plantation/mills in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. (06/18/08, by Andy Jones)
|
The second part of my trip involved digging into available literature supportive to my Dissertation. I did this through some preliminary bibliographical and archival research in libraries and university data bases, as well as through networking in Brazilian academia for possible collaborations and dialogues. My participation in two conferences – the 7th Journeys of Latin-American Social Studies of Science and Technology in Rio and the 26th Brazilian Anthropological Meeting in Porto Seguro – provided fruitful opportunities for networking. There seems to be a burgeoning interest in the Brazilian social sciences for biofuels, and I have come across several scholars studying the topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: economics, history, environmental science, sociology, political science, even ethnography. I hope to be able to engage in and sustain dialogue with some of such researchers throughout my own investigation.
In Brasilia, I focused on bibliographical research about sugarcane’s participation in Brazilian history from early colonial times up until the present. I have carried out such exploration mainly at the libraries of the University of Brasilia (Unb) and of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), as well as through contacts with Brazilian scholars and local data bases of dissertations and theses. My first preliminary step will have to be a careful screening of Brazilian literature on the subject, since the corpus of works, especially on the 16th and 17th centuries so-called “civilization of sugar”, is enormous. Also abundant is the academic and policy-related literature on the 1975 Pró-Álcool (National Alcohol Plan) and the set of publications sponsored by the Institute of Alcohol and Sugar (IAA) from the 1930’s on up until 1990, when the Institute was extinguished and the sugar and alcohol sector (setor sucroalcooleiro) was deregulated.
I intend to make two uses of such literature: i) to contextualize sugarcane production in broader economical, sociological and (geo)political terms – this shall comprise most of the literature available, which has a policy & planning perspective; ii) to trace out the unfolding of sugarcane technologies over time, as well as their immediate entanglements with labor, science and the environment – specific literature on technology is more limited, but I did find a few detailed and well-done works on the history of sugarcane techniques.
This historical axis will culminate in the contemporary ‘biofuels boom’ and its subsidiary biotechnologies, among which figure importantly ‘second generation’ innovations. In order to tackle such emerging processes, a second methodological axis will be to approach ethnographically one of such research & development projects. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), which has recently started off projects with genetically modified sugarcane, seems to be a promising site. However, the possibilities and limits of such ethnographical endeavor will only be fully known when I return to Brazil for my definite fieldwork.
In sum, this first field trip fully accomplished its goal, that is, to provide a more grounded overview of my Dissertation’s empirical universe, of the available Brazilian literature and scholarship on the topic, as well as of the possibilities for subsequent ethnographic and historical research.
|
