Marcio da Silva on Eaglin, 'Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol'
Jennifer Eaglin. Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. x + 268 pp. $38.62 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-751068-1. 
Reviewed by Claiton Marcio da Silva (Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul) Published on H-LatAm (April, 2023) Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=58186
"Neither Green Nor Socially Equitable": A History of the Brazilian Ethanol Industry
We live in an age of knowledge diffusion, with literature in the humanities and social sciences produced globally. Despite contradictions that naturally arise through this process, it is encouraging to observe the increase in the number of articles and books recently produced linking current hot topics with historical research, as is the case with Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol, by Jennifer Eaglin. Eaglin's book puts us in touch with the history of biofuels, specifically ethanol, a fundamental discussion for our century, which connects us to past global historical contexts such as colonialism, the expansion of plantations, and the westernization of science and technology in regions considered remote. In contrast to the unparalleled advance of articles and books in the humanities without an attendant expansion of archival or field research—an expansion that sometimes reminds me of the criticism leveled by pre-WWII "field" anthropologists at their colleagues who wrote great dissertations without leaving their offices—Sweet Fuel is the result of broad and deep archival research on the subject. It deserves to be read and disseminated by scholars interested in political and environmental history, as well as those interested in diverse topics such as science and technology, the Brazilian economy, pollution, and the degradation of social working conditions.
The book addresses the political and environmental history of the ethanol industry, demonstrating the "organic" relations--here in a metaphorical sense--between state and businesses in the face of agrarian, ecological, economic, and political challenges. At its core is the central contradiction of Brazil's ethanol programs: "one of the world's most advanced alternative energy initiatives while at the same time ... contribut[ing] to environmental degradation and exploited rural populations" (pp. 1-2). In dynamic and concise prose, the book demonstrates the drama involved in establishing alternatives to fossil fuel-powered vehicles experienced by countries like Brazil. Divided into six chapters, the book addresses in a nationally and internationally interconnected way the history of biofuel production from the beginning of the Vargas era, moving through Proálcool in the 1970-80s, and finally becoming an independent industry in the twenty-first century. The book deals with sensitive or contradictory matters, both for the contemporary world and for historiographical praxis. First, at a time when the planet's climate transformation and the post-Bolsonaro period—or "Bolso Nero," in a pun intended to relate his government to the increase of rainforest fires—directs the gaze of international actors towards the Amazon, Eaglin draws attention precisely to the history of the interior of the state of São Paulo, the Ribeirão Preto region, which came to rival the centuries-old sugarcane plantations of the Northeast region between the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.
Through these issues, Sweet Fuel tacitly reinforces how the "interior," the "remote," the "distant" usually conceived by Brazilian historians as "regional" history and, for this reason, inferior or less important than "national" history, is the result of intense disputes between private businesses and politicians in search of scientific or technological innovations that promote changes on a global scale—albeit these changes are slow and sometimes fragmented. In ecological terms, Eaglin demonstrates how sugarcane adapted with some ease to a transitional region between the Atlantic forest and the Brazilian Cerradoth—the Ribeirão Preto region is home to 30 percent of the Cerrado grasslands in the state of São Paulo. These soils were historically devastated by the agricultural practices promoted by large-scale coffee farmers, and sugarcane planting was consolidated as an alternative for the soils to avoid having to be revitalized. These actors and their economic success drove the advance of railroads and the attraction of migrants as a replacement for enslaved labor after abolition, presenting an alternative for the national industrialization process or the previous norm of advancing over the forest, promoting its felling and the planting of new coffee plantations rather than replenishing the nutrients of the soils, now adaptable to sugar cane.
In this new equation that was formed with the wave of immigration promoted by the Brazilian state between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, Eaglin discusses how some of these European immigrants and their descendants, such as Pedro Biagi, were responsible for technical innovation in mills, slowly moving from local sugar to ethanol production. In the 1930s, already under the centralized political orientation of Vargas, "the creation of an ethanol industry in the 1930s fulfilled both political and strategic development interests" (p. 9). On the one hand, the growing power of the national state imposed itself as an organizer of society—and its economy—intervening systematically for the consolidation of a biofuels policy; and on the other hand, the growing group of sugarcane farmers demanded policies for this segment, at the same time that they found in the national state a fundamental interlocutor for the continuity of ethanol production ideals, even in times of crisis. In the following decades, Eaglin argues, the consolidation of the Ribeirão Preto region and of a group of entrepreneurs in the ethanol industry imposed new dynamics not only in the economic sphere but also with regard to the environment and labor. With Brazil's embrace of an automobile industry model that became synonymous with progress in the 1950s, sugarcane plantations conquered new rural territories, producing sugar for the foreign market or supplying the growing biofuels industry in Brazil, where a small percentage of alcohol has been mixed into gasoline, ranging from 1.1 to 25 percent depending on the historical moment, for decades.
The National Alcohol Program, created in 1975 by the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85) represented a turning point for ethanol production, deepening its dramatic consequences. In the late 1980s, Sweet Fueldemonstrates, Brazilian scientists linked ethanol to declining levels of carbon-emitting car pollution. Eaglin shows, however, that the triumphant narrative of biofuels erases the role of this "green" bio-industry in the pollution of rivers, the continued use of fossil fuels in the ethanol production process, and the dehumanizing working conditions of the "bóias-fria"—a legion of seasonal workers hired for very low wages to plant or harvest sugarcane. In my memory, the images of these workers in national news reports in the late 1980s symbolized the brutality of the sugar production system and its derivatives, portraying unimaginable levels of social degradation. At this point, the second part of the book more strongly connects the political-economic, social, and environmental history of ethanol production: methodologically, Eaglin's book adopts a dynamic narrative in which social and environmental themes emerge as they interconnect with government programs, focusing on the dramas that result from these choices made by the state and economic elites. This does not mean that environmental and social history has taken a back seat in the early part of the book; rather, Sweet Fuel's narrative adds a device that triggers the increasing drama of environmental change, labor exploitation, and workers' resistance to changing historical contexts as these historical contexts change.
By offering a "cautionary tale about a twenty-first-century alternative fuel industry's development" (p. 11), Eaglin demonstrates how ethanol supported the creation of an alternative fuel industry for a country without substantial oil reserves for the better part of the twentieth century, but exploited water and workers extensively in the process (p. 18). In summary, it was neither green nor socially equitable. By exploring little-used archives and primary sources for the global historiographical debate, Jennifer Eaglin has produced a reference work for studies of the contradictions of green industries both past and present.
Citation: Claiton Marcio da Silva. Review of Eaglin, Jennifer, Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. April, 2023. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58186
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.