Book review: Rogers, Thomas D.. Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution - by Timothy Lorek

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Lorek on Rogers, 'Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution'

Rogers, Thomas D..  Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Illustrations, maps. 306 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781469670447.$29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781469670454.$22.99 (e-book), ISBN 9781469670461. 

Reviewed by Timothy Lorek (College of St. Scholastica)
Published on H-LatAm (November, 2024)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60115

One of the most intriguing aspects of the recent boom in historical studies of the mid-twentieth-century process remembered as the Green Revolution is the new light cast on the emergence of crops destined not for human food consumption but for industrial purposes, fuel, and animal feed. As Thomas D. Rogers adroitly demonstrates in Agriculture’s Energy, a case study of Brazilian sugarcane ethanol production, investments in agriculture too often lead to food insecurity. Whether Brazilian sugarcane, Iowa corn, Argentine soybeans, or Indonesian oil palm, the consolidation of agribusiness through machinery, fertilizer, and pesticide markets, not to mention state subsidies and development plans, has contributed to a wide range of social challenges, for example, increased land concentration, urbanization, malnutrition, and water pollution. While anthropologists, development economists, and historians focused on the United States and Europe have long recognized the Green Revolution’s complex and intensely debated results, the recent scholarly ascendance of historians focused on new archives and actors in what was once known as the Third World has produced an array of studies that carefully unpack the Green Revolution’s impact in more localized contexts. The growing spotlight on these place-specific impacts significantly includes the ways state planning, international science, and Cold War development benefited incipient industries like Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol sector.

Agriculture’s Energy is not the only recent monograph to tackle Brazil’s ethanol industry, including the state program advanced during the military dictatorship known as Proálcool (National Alcohol Program, 1975-90). Rogers’s study is in good company with another prominent English-language text, Jennifer Eaglin’s excellent Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol, also published in 2022. Where Eaglin focuses on specific conditions in Ribeirão Preto (São Paulo) and emphasizes the broader context of energy transitions, Rogers highlights international development and the above described irony linking intensified agricultural production and hunger. Rogers also provides a broad national focus to Brazil’s ethanol history, including a sustained and intriguing geographic comparison between the country’s Northeast and Center-South.

Agriculture’s Energy is divided into two parts. In part 1, “Sugarcane and Brazil’s Agricultural Modernization,” Rogers examines the policy and development contexts of ethanol production in historical sequence. Chapter 1 begins in 1918 when the country’s largest sugar mill owner publicly advocated for federal government support for agricultural research and production. Two competing assumptions lay behind this and other calls for government support. First, Brazilian agriculture was seen by many as backward and in need of modernization. Second, Brazilian agriculture, despite its backwardness, was critical to the country’s identity and future prosperity. Rogers goes on to tell the story of Brazilian agricultural modernization vis-à-vis sugarcane through the careers of northeastern sugarcane producer and politician Alexandre José Barbosa Lima Sobrinho and center-southern agronomist Ruy Miller Paiva. Juxtaposing the impact of Barbosa Lima and Paiva emphasizes the regional rivalry between the Northeast and São Paulo, as the latter shifted from a dependence on coffee to a research-oriented resurgence of sugarcane. It also highlights the centralization of Brazilian domestic politics during the Getúlio Vargas era, seen through the emphasis on national planning for agricultural production, as well as the emerging embrace of international development funding and expertise.

The next two chapters unpack the contexts of sugarcane ethanol production in the second half of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 places ethanol against the backdrop of the global Green Revolution in agricultural technologies. In this context, the Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool (Sugar and Alcohol Institute, IAA) released a new long-range growth plan that increased production and spurred the establishment of dozens of new sugarcane mills. São Paulo producers likewise established new research centers and dramatically expanded their use of fertilizer. Meanwhile, the federal government harnessed international aid to pump into higher education programs such as development economics. By the 1970s, the Green Revolution’s broad impact led to increased industrialization and the ascendency of an agricultural product destined for industrial rather than food usage.

Chapter 3 then examines policy debates swirling around Proálcool. The unequal development of the country during the “Brazilian Miracle” was reflected in Proálcool, a program dominated by energy and industry representatives rather than agriculturalists and one that contributed to the specific growth of private companies and large producers, especially in São Paulo (more than 60 percent of national production in 1980), who partnered with the federal government. The program was canceled amid corruption scandals and a shift from state-led growth models to privatization and neoliberal deregulation. As Rogers concludes, Proálcool should not be evaluated as primarily an agricultural or energy policy, nor as a bailout to the sugarcane industry. Instead, it was a development program. “Proálcool’s establishment was one episode in the consolidation of a mode of development that crystallized out of the domestic and international programs that had supported and nurtured agricultural transformation over the preceding decades. Development in this guise had produced the linked processes we know as agribusiness” (p. 108).

Part 2, “Proálcool’s Consequences,” includes three chapters that examine labor, environmental issues, and the gross inequality that “directed agriculture’s prodigious energy into the transportation system rather than the food system” (p. 170). As in his first book, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (2010), Rogers excels at weaving analyses of labor relations, class, and environmental conditions. In these sections, Rogers offers rich details about physical work, pollution, and policy debates, as well as thoughtful conclusions about symbolic representation and relationships. Chapter 4 focuses on the mobility of a new type of industrial worker: poor, vulnerable, urban, and increasingly female sugarcane workers often precariously employed via third-party labor contracts (the “flexibilization of the labor force” [p. 120]). Union mobilization on behalf of these bóia-fria workers (the derogatory term “cold lunch”) in the 1980s contested their marginality and cheapness.

Similarly, in chapter 5, Rogers examines another challenge to Proálcool: growing concern about the program’s environmental record. Enormous quantities of waste were produced, particularly a byproduct of the ethanol industry often termed vinhaça or vinhoto. As waste lagoons that held this sludge became increasingly common with growing sugarcane ethanol production under Proálcool, public debate over the environmental issue proliferated in the 1970s. As with union mobilization on behalf of workers, public pressure and scientific alarm forced the hand of the Brazilian government to enact broad environmental legislation in the early 1980s.

Finally, chapter 6 examines how Proálcool reflected an industrial development model that exacerbated inequality by providing incentives to shift significant land and labor toward the production of ethanol rather than food. Research produced growing evidence in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Brazil’s policies led to significant increases in industrial and export crop production at the expense of food production, which actually dropped more than 25 percent per capita between 1976 and 1980 (p. 189). All of this points to some overarching conclusions evaluated in the epilogue: for example, “what is agriculture for?” (p. 199). Rogers suggests that the development model embodied by Proálcool advanced the cause of private sector industrial growth by shifting rural populations toward precarious wage work made possible by cheap energy and cheap food, both of which were produced at considerable cost to the environment. Rogers’s analysis of the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol boom thus helps reveal the consolidation of a particular agribusiness model that depends on, even naturalizes, inequality. Seen this way, the history of Proálcool is instructive as we contend with a new era of agribusiness-led growth models and carbon markets.

Agriculture’s Energy is an important addition to a growing scholarly literature on late twentieth-century industrial agriculture. Rogers’s use of labor journals, newspaper editorials, and court documents in part 2 makes an invaluable contribution to Green Revolution scholarship and Brazilian studies. Beyond the Green Revolution and Brazil, scholars investigating energy histories, public-private partnerships, and the roots of twenty-first-century climate change debates and proposed policies will find the book helpful for its details as well the author’s ability to weave multiple themes.

Citation: Timothy Lorek. Review of Rogers, Thomas D.. Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60115

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