Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution

By Thomas D. Rogers

Thomas D. Rogers's history of a modernizing Brazil tracks what happened when a key government program,created in the 1970s by the nation's military regime, aspired to harness energy produced by sugarcane agriculture to power the country's economy. The National Alcohol Program, known as Proalcool, was a deliberate economic strategy designed to incentivize ethanol production and reduce gasoline consumption. As Brazil's capacity grew and as international oil shocks continued, the regime's planners doubled down on Proalcool. Drawing financing from international lenders and curiosity from other oil-dependent countries, for a time it was the world's largest oil-substitution and renewable-energy program.

Chronicling how Proalcool experimented with and exemplified the consolidation of government, agribusiness, large planters, agricultural and chemical research companies, and oil producers, this book expands into a rich investigation of the arc of Brazil's Green Revolution. The ethanol boom epitomized the vector of that arc, but Rogers keeps wider development imperatives in view. He dramatizes the choices and trade-offs that ultimately resulted in a losing energy strategy, for Proalcool ended up creating a large contingent of impoverished workers, serious environmental degradation, and persistent hunger. The full consequences of the Green Revolution–fueled consolidation continue to take a toll today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469670461

Thomas D. Rogers

Thomas D. Rogers is Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences and associate professor of Latin American history at Emory University. He is the author of The Deepest Wounds.

Book preview

Agriculture’s Energy

Agriculture’s Energy

The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil’s Green Revolution

Thomas D. Rogers

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Jamison Cockerham

Set in Scala, Officina, Chalet

by codeMantra

Cover illustration: A sugarcane worker in Pernambuco, Brazil.

Photo by Jean-Louis Gonterre. Used by permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Rogers, Thomas D., 1974– author.

Title: Agriculture’s energy : the trouble with ethanol in Brazil’s green revolution / Thomas D. Rogers.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022022509 | ISBN 9781469670447 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469670454 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469670461 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Programa Nacional do Alcool (Brazil)—History—20th century. | Ethanol fuel industry—Brazil—History—20th century. | Agriculture and state—Brazil—History—20th century. | Sugarcane industry—Brazil—History—20th century. | Agriculture and energy—Social aspects—Brazil. | Agriculture and energy—Environmental aspects—Brazil.

Classification: LCCHD9502.5.A433 B657 2022 | DDC 338.4/766260981—dc23/eng/20220701

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022509

To

DINAH

and

JUNO

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Sugarcane and Brazil’s Agricultural Modernization

1

Indigent Pariahs No More: Agriculture in Brazilian Development, 1918–1960

2

Alternative Revolutions: Imposing a Developmental Model, 1960–1975

3

Ordering Proálcool: The Arc of the National Alcohol Program, 1975–1990

Part II: Proálcool’s Consequences

4

How Brazil’s National Alcohol Program Made a Meal of Rural Workers

5

The Unnecessary Destruction of Our Rivers: Water Pollution and the Environmental Politics of Ethanol Production

6

Food and Fuel: Agriculture’s Hunger

Epilogue: Agriculture’s Renewed Energy?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Maps

São Paulo and the northeastern sugarcane region in Brazil

The northeastern sugarcane region

São Paulo sugarcane regions

Figures

USGA ethanol fuel logo

Conference on the sugarcane region in Pernambuco, 1963

Bumper sticker promoting ethanol, ca. 1980

Government pamphlet on intercropping sugarcane and vegetables, 1984

Acknowledgments

As a historian, I have found the greatest intellectual satisfaction through collaboration. This has not come as a surprise. I believe in community and in my own limitations, and I know that we are smarter together. I am lucky to enjoy the freedom to pursue collaborative research, writing, and teaching and have learned not to take these opportunities for granted. This book, nominally my own, is no such thing. I have relied on and benefited from the knowledge, guidance, and support of some people I know well and others I hardly know at all. I thank them all and relieve them of any responsibility for mistakes I have made.

I truly appreciate UNC Press, more for the long list of fantastic books they release than for publishing mine. Elaine Maisner has been wonderful all these years, as has Andreina Fernandez more recently. My sincere thanks to the press’s two anonymous readers of this manuscript for their keen reading and straightforward, sensible advice. And thank you to Laura Dooley for the careful copyediting.

Emory University and UNC Charlotte have been warm and welcome homeplaces. I have also received crucial institutional support from them, including faculty research grants, a Dean’s Completion Leave, and strong leadership from Nancy Guttierez and Michael Elliott, among others. I am appreciative of the subvention Emory provided to support this book’s publication. I also thank the Institute of International Education and the Fulbright program and the American Council of Learned Societies for the Collaborative Research Grant that Jeffrey T. Manuel and I received.

I draw inspiration from Jurgen Buchenau, Jerry Dávila, Lyman Johnson, Akin Ogundiran, Rob Smith, Oscar de la Torre, and other Charlotte colleagues. And here at Emory I have found supportive intersecting networks. In the department, I first thank Becky Herring, Allison Rollins, and Katie Wilson. I have learned in and out of the classroom from Astrid Eckert and Jonathan Prude and appreciate the intellectual comradeship of Patrick Allitt, Danny LaChance, Tehila Sasson, Sharon Strocchia, and Jason Ward. Among many other lessons, Jeff Lesser has taught me the joys of São Paulo. I appreciate Joe Crespino’s friendship and the work he puts into building community. Yanna Yannakakis has offered wisdom in abundance and a model for how to balance everything.

Thank you to the Latinoamericanista community of Adriana Chira, Teresa Davis, Mónica García Blizzard, Phil MacLeod, Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas, Pablo Palomino, Karen Stolley and the Lusophone turminha of Ana Catarina Teixeira, Katherine Ostrom, and Marília Ribeiro. I appreciate sharing the work of worthwhile projects with Ben Reiss and Arri Eisen. The people who have occupied roles as students, colleagues, and friends have brought me continual inspiration through this long process: Stephanie Bryan, Emily Coady, Ioulia Fenton, Glen Goodman, Alejandro Guardado, Audrey Henderson, Hilary King, Xanda Lemos, Leo Marques, Hugh McGlade, Emma Meyer, Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, Ayssa Norek, Angie Picone, Ursula Rall, Shatam Ray, Jennifer Schaefer, Lena Suk, Ariel Svarch, Shari Wejsa, and Sarah Whitaker. Andrew Britt and Jon Coulis have helped in ways they might not know.

I have written many bits and pieces of this book within the slightly larger orbit of GALACSI, our Georgia Latin Americanists and Caribbeanists. Thanks to Julia Gaffield for bringing us together with energy and organizational élan. And there are too many incredible colleagues far and wide to collect into one list, but thanks to Peter Beattie, Jake Blanc, Ben Bryce, Eve Buckley, Ben Cowan, Fred Freitas, Jan French, Mark Healey, Rebecca Herman, Danny James, Gonzalo Lamana, Bryan McCann, Stuart McCook, Jolie Olcott, David Sartorius, John Soluri, Ivonne Wallace Fuentes, and Joel Wolfe. John French’s lessons continue to resonate deeply, pretty much every day.

Back to the brilliant, generous collaborators I have been lucky to work with. First, dating to my beginnings as a historian, I have had the uncommon good fortune to have Christine Rufino Dabat as a mentor and coauthor. I am forever in awe of her expansive intellectual reach and endless energy for her students. I owe Christine and Espedito a significant debt. Gillian McGillivray has been a close intellectual companion for well over a decade. We have written together, and I have enjoyed the ridiculous hospitality that she and James Cypher provide. She has read more of my work than anyone. Jeff Manuel has been a close collaborator for the past several years on a book project that I am excited to put alongside this one. Through research trips to Brazil and Illinois, weekly writing calls, and an ever-expanding Google Drive, we have built a project we can be proud of. I have learned from him about writing better and staying alert to the things that matter.

In Brazil, I have been met with carinho and made to feel at home in Recife and São Paulo for many years now. Thank you first to José Marcelo Marques Ferreira Filho, who taught me when I was supposed to be teaching him. Thank you, Dária Jaremtchuk and Luís Ferla. Ferla’s work in organizing Paulicéia 2.0, tying together a large, shared project, is astonishing and a model of collaboration. Thank you to Marcília Gama, Socorro Abreu, Fernando Teixeira da Silva, Alexandre Fortes, Paulo Fontes, Larissa Corrêa, Carlos Vian, Marc Hoffnagel (in memoriam), Renata Borba Cahú Siqueira, and Arthur Victor Gomes de Barros. Thank you to everyone at Hímaco and at UFPE, and to the scores of archivists and librarians who have guided me in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília.

For making me feel at home in the world, thank you, Gist Croft, Todd Poret, Dan and Megan Golonka, Dan Polsby, Tom Hatley, Mike Keim, Ron Chowdhury, John Ochsendorf, Mike Doig, Mike and Andrea Klauss, Georg and Serie Couture, Steve and Nicki Salcedo, Dan Amsterdam and Kate Christman, Desiree Cabrices, Margaret and Viraj Master, and ENCers.

Last, my closest collaborators of all. Much love to Hugh and Ruth Blackwell Rogers, Elen Knott, Ian, Melissa, and Jamie Rogers-Sites, Gabriel, Bryce, and Arion Rogers Koukopoulos, Sara, Bucky, Daisy, and Ella Nichols. And most of all, Hannah, Dinah, and Juno.

Agriculture’s Energy

São Paulo and the northeastern sugarcane region in Brazil. (Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Alex Cors, Elizabeth Sajewski, Wenhao Wang, Randy Mesa.)

The northeastern sugarcane region. Note the lightershaded areas that came under cultivation after Proálcool was promulgated. (Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Alex Cors, Elizabeth Sajewski, Wenhao Wang, Randy Mesa.)

São Paulo sugarcane regions. Note the lightershaded areas that came under cultivation after Proálcool was promulgated. (Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Alex Cors, Elizabeth Sajewski, Wenhao Wang, Randy Mesa.)

Introduction

Brazilian history provokes startling reckonings with scale. It is a big country, the fifth largest in the world with the fifth-largest population, and home to the world’s largest river and largest rain forest. A range of Brazilian leaders across the twentieth century launched projects designed on an outsized scale to match the needs of their enormous country. They also saw the country’s so-called continental size as a key aspect of its destiny. The national anthem, written in 1909, expresses this view in unabashedly nationalist terms: Giant by your very nature, you are beautiful, you are strong, an intrepid colossus, and your future mirrors that greatness. Leaders sought to realize these grandiose dreams. The military regime that governed from 1964 to 1985 built the world’s largest dam in the south and one of the longest highways in the north. Programs and solutions operating at a massive scale became a principle of governance for military planners and legislators.

From 1900 to 2000, in the midst of dramatic population growth, Brazil experienced a neat demographic inversion. At the same time that it grew by a factor of ten, from 17 million to 174 million, the country’s population moved from 85 percent rural to 85 percent urban. Now one of the most urbanized populations in the world, Brazilians have swelled cities from the far south all the way to the Amazon. Manaus, 1,200 kilometers from the Amazon River’s mouth at the Atlantic, is home to 2 million people. Brazil’s urbanization was a function of multiple forces, but agricultural modernization was perhaps the most decisive. Cities around the globe have grown for similar reasons, as mechanization and increased concentration of production have shrunk the number of small farmers and eroded their margins. The process has blurred boundaries between the urban and rural, as large contingencies of city dwellers try to earn their living as agricultural laborers. Brazil has exemplified these global trends at each stage, from the agricultural transformation to its consequences.

The decades-long population surge into cities paralleled Brazil’s solidification as an agricultural juggernaut; the two processes interacted with and informed each other. Brazil produces greater quantities of agricultural commodities than all but a handful of other countries. It boasts the largest coffee, sugarcane, and orange harvests in the world, the second-largest yields of soy and beef, and a huge proportion of the world’s cotton and other products. Across generations many Brazilians have seen their nation’s size and wealth of natural resources as signs of an agricultural vocation. The anthem gestures toward this role, and the recent decades have appeared to confirm it.¹ But the raw numbers speak to a history, rather than an inevitability. Geography is not destiny, and agricultural abundance has a clear if intricate history, one that helps explain other aspects of the country’s past.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, Brazilian presidents aggressively pursued economic development, conceiving of it primarily as a process of industrialization. Their approach broadly followed modernization theory, as articulated most clearly by people like Walter Rostow. This line of thinking positioned agriculture as structurally, not just circumstantially, backward. Developing economies were to move away from agrarian patterns to diversify economically and expand their industrial sectors.² The role of agriculture from a development perspective was to feed the industrial masses, not absorb their time or resources. The Brazilian state’s focus on import substitutions, a response to the Depression that mirrored many of its neighbors’, turned many policy makers’ attention away from agriculture. When, in the 1950s and 1960s, foreign experts arrived to supply technical know-how, they remarked on the primitive techniques they found.³ Brazilian leaders took a new approach in the 1960s, especially after the military toppled a civilian government in 1964. Holding power until 1985, military leaders magnified the role of agriculture in economic growth. Brazil reached high levels of industrial and agricultural productivity by the end of the twentieth century, drawing on the modernizing strategies then spreading globally.

In several important respects, the Brazilian experience cleaved to a pattern with variants around the world. In the middle of the century, central planning acquired more prominence, and that trend gained momentum alongside the growing importance of economists in policy making. These changes accompanied a new understanding of national economies as self-contained wholes that could be measured and managed.⁴ Shortly thereafter, economists began dividing economies into discrete units such as the agriculture sector.⁵ International aid, especially from the United States, grew across the 1960s and 1970s, reinforcing these categories. The wave of development support coincided with and propelled a period of rapid agricultural modernization that produced an explosion in crop yields subsequently celebrated as the Green Revolution. Partly as a result of that new capacity, Brazil’s dictatorship repositioned agriculture in development planning. When General Ernesto Geisel came to power in 1974, he released the Segundo Plano Nacional de Desenvolvimento (II PND, Second National Development Plan) in which agriculture . . . is called to play a new role in Brazilian development, with a much more significant contribution to GDP growth. Geisel’s planners declared that Brazil would show itself capable of realizing its vocation as a global provider of food and agricultural raw materials.⁶ The regime’s ideology of national strength and security here met longer-term discourses of national destiny.

I analyze this self-conscious turn toward agriculture as a driver of economic development and unearth its roots in the decades before the dictatorship. To expose the consequences of this transition, I focus on a large federal program promulgated in 1975. The National Alcohol Program, known as Proálcool, incentivized the production of fuel ethanol from sugarcane to mix with gasoline and sell as an alternative fuel. Expanded in 1979, Proálcool was the single largest oil-substitution and renewable energy program in the world, drawing attention from international lending institutions and curiosity and envy from other oil-dependent countries. The program officially ended in 1990, though Brazil began another ethanol boom in the early 2000s and continues to produce more of the fuel than any country but the United States. Proálcool was large and consequential, but the military also established regional development bureaucracies, built a nuclear energy program, and pursued a range of other projects aligned with their development vision. The stories of those efforts resonate with the history I tell here.⁷

I do not argue that Proálcool was unique; it was emblematic of larger patterns. And although I tell the story of Proálcool, that is not the only history in this book. My aim is to show the larger context the program fit within and how it represented that larger whole. Proálcool represented an approach to big issues and problems that had been forged across decades. It was not an external idea or imposition but simultaneously owed its shape to decades of foreign influences. It was not a single decisive policy innovation but the product of years of federal planning for agriculture and tight public-private collaboration. Proálcool epitomized the Brazilian military’s imagination of development with its large scale, its mix of state and private power, and its focus on agriculture. In so neatly capturing that vision, it serves as an excellent vehicle for capturing the vision’s consequences.

That sugarcane helped drive agricultural and industrial modernization in 1970s Brazil is simultaneously intuitive and ironic. Sugarcane has played a prominent role in the country’s history. The first crop the Portuguese cultivated to produce an export commodity during their colonial exploitation of Brazil, sugarcane has roots in the country reaching back to the sixteenth century. For a century and a half, the crop held pride of place as a high-volume and lucrative tropical commodity, reaching European consumers through a process Sidney Mintz famously identified as an early form of industrial production.⁸ But sugarcane’s lengthy history in Brazil and its close association with slavery and other forms of labor exploitation, as well as with stark patterns of land ownership concentration, meant that its twentieth-century reputation was hardly that of a modern crop. Brazil’s Northeast, the original site of large-scale sugar production, held (and holds) powerful associations with backwardness and failure. Using sugarcane to turn agricultural abundance into energy independence produced contradictory resonances.

Sugarcane was positioned to support the ambitions of Proálcool by the Green Revolution, which transformed Brazilian agriculture from the 1960s onward. In Brazil as elsewhere, much of the attention during this era of innovation went to commodity crops rather than food crops. Soy offers perhaps the paradigmatic case. Brazilian production of soybeans grew by a factor of nearly thirteen between 1970 and 1980. Along the way, the country passed China to become the world’s largest producer after the United States.⁹ As with sugarcane, concerted state and business efforts in support of soy helped spur mechanization, the introduction of hybridized varieties, and vastly increased chemical inputs. The soy boom grew directly from the establishment of the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (EMBRAPA, Brazilian Enterprise for Agricultural and Livestock Research). This federally funded agency accelerated agricultural development throughout the country. It produced the soil treatment protocols and hybrid crop varieties that allowed Brazilian farmers to turn the central Brazilian ecosystem called the cerrado, once seen as too dry and soil deficient to be of agricultural worth, into one of the world’s most productive zones for soy and cotton.¹⁰

Coffee serves as another example of swift crop modernization. It had generated export earnings and helped foot the bill for Brazilian industrialization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it sprawled across much of the country’s Southeast. In the 1960s and 1970s, it underwent a modernization process that entailed a sharp geographical shift of its heartland to Minas Gerais.¹¹ As coffee left the fields of São Paulo, which had been the crop’s top producer, sugarcane flowed into them. With its generous state sponsorship and rapidly increasing research and development support, São Paulo vaulted over the Northeast in sugarcane production. By 1976, cane was planted on 17 percent of São Paulo’s farmland and even exceeded coffee in gross income. By 1990, sugarcane occupied a third of São Paulo’s cultivated land.¹²

The political rhetoric attendant upon the Green Revolution emphasized a technological triumph over population growth and the successful production of food crops. Another outcome of the research that produced such gaudy production numbers was the consolidation of agribusiness—a complex set of interrelationships between large agricultural research companies, governments, chemical companies, oil producers, and more. This model’s growth had important outcomes, among them increased concentration of land ownership, the displacement of significant numbers of rural workers to cities, increased agricultural pollution, and exacerbated regional inequality.¹³

Placing Proálcool in an explicitly agricultural context misses some of its significance. Its framers within the government arguably conceived of it as an energy policy first and an agricultural endeavor second. The program had its roots in discussions about saving foreign exchange dollars from being directed to oil imports. A president who had directed the state-run oil company Petrobrás enlisted as his point person for the initiative another Petrobrás manager whom he had named as his minister of mines and energy. The two also relied on counsel from engineers and scientists absorbed with the challenges of manufacturing cars to run on alcohol. Participation from the Ministry of Agriculture came later, along with objections; indeed, the agricultural side of the project seemed almost an afterthought.

From the sugar industry’s perspective, alcohol had long been an afterthought. A by-product of the sugar production process, mill owners saw alcohol distilling as a hedge against overproducing sugar when the world price fell. Proálcool’s timing highlights the players’ differing perspectives. The sugar industry was watching the decline of several years’ of all-time-high sugar prices, as the world market experienced a severe shortage between 1972 and 1974. The abrupt price drop sent producers scrambling. At the same time, the world fell headlong into an oil crisis, as war in the Middle East provoked soaring fuel prices. So technocrats, engineers, and energy scientists desperately pursuing cheaper energy found unlikely allies in an agribusiness sector that may have had little interest in energy policy but a distinct need for something to do with thousands of hectares of sugarcane they had planted to take advantage of illusory high prices.

In 1975, President Geisel launched Proálcool and set a target of blending 20 percent ethanol into every liter of gasoline. Four years later, facing another oil shock, planners expanded the program’s production targets and partnered with auto manufacturers to generate a market for cars running on pure alcohol. In the early 1980s, almost 90 percent of new cars sold in Brazil had alcohol engines. Eventually, three-quarters of all cars on Brazilian roads ran on ethanol as the country produced more than 12 billion liters of the fuel per year.¹⁴ The transformation from a fleet powered completely by gasoline in 1975 to one running largely on alcohol appeared to take place in the blink of an eye.

A full-spread advertisement in a September 1980 issue of Brazil’s major weekly news magazine Veja pictures a Ford Corcel II Alcohol model sitting in a field of sugarcane. Soft sunlight shines through the cane leaves to create a Brazilian green-and-gold setting for the silver car. The ad presents the lush, productive field, as well as the car, as The New Landscape of the Brazilian Economy.¹⁵ Ford had manufactured its new ethanol-fueled sedan as part of Proálcool’s transition to producing pure alcohol fuel. With its verdant image and its assurance that alcohol is good for Brazil, [and] it could be better still for whoever has a Corcel II Alcohol, Ford’s ad mixed potent themes from the dictatorship period: nationalism, developmentalism, and the celebration of symbols of modernity. It also gestured toward the crucial role of agriculture to the country’s economy as Ford invited consumers to leave the oil-black for the cane-green.¹⁶ A Volkswagen ad similarly demonstrated the company’s explicit participation in Proálcool. Many people who didn’t believe in Proálcool 7 years ago, the ad reads, now drive an alcohol car.¹⁷ The synergy between auto manufacturers and cane and alcohol producers was on display in yet another ad bought by the large São Paulo agricultural cooperative Copersucar. The piece proclaims, Whoever has an alcohol car doesn’t go backward.¹⁸ Together, the advertising signaled that national development was big business. The government poured resources into its development projects, which corporations eagerly turned toward profit.

The automotive industry and agribusiness triumphalism surrounding Proálcool did have a counterpoint. When the dictatorship raised its production targets in 1979, opposition began to grow among rural workers and their unions as well as from environmentalists and academics. These groups critiqued the increased concentration of agricultural wealth, the exploitation of labor, and the rising environmental toll of modern farming. The president of the Association of São Paulo Agronomists, Walter Lazzarini Filho, spoke out at a 1979 conference to criticize the growth of agribusiness, the increased concentration of landholding, and the scarcity of rural credit for smaller producers. He faulted the industries that produced equipment and such inputs as pesticides and fertilizers for driving the process. Three-quarters of rural credit, he pointed out, went to just 2 percent of rural producers, responsible for half of overall production. The rise of big agricultural interests, he explained, also accounted for a troubling rise in food prices. He singled out soy and sugarcane for their rampant displacement of food crops.¹⁹

Three months later, workers, academics, and activists convened to discuss Proálcool in a Forum of the Non-Consulted, held at São Paulo’s State University of Campinas. Organizers circulated questions for discussion, one of which asked whether the country faced an energy crisis or a crisis in its model of development. At the meeting itself, some participants confirmed that Proálcool’s scale made it the largest development project afoot today in Brazil. Yet state planners had shaped and launched it without the benefit of broad public debate. Participants at the meeting claimed to represent the non-consulted, and they argued that increased participation from more social sectors could help to build the new society we all hope for. They warned that without modification the alcohol program would increase inequalities in the use and ownership of land, in the distribution of wealth, and in the distribution of the benefits of progress.

The editors of the journal Reforma Agrária, which printed the full texts of the scheduled speakers’ remarks, emphasized the scale of Proálcool’s impending impact. The program might increase the country’s cultivated land by half, they estimated, and could result in the construction of 2,400 new alcohol distilleries. Such a massive program demanded more public input, and they presented the forum as a creative intervention by those with a vested interest and expertise. Even beyond the bounds of such a far-reaching policy, they hoped that their example would inspire other democratic exercises around additional programs and perhaps shift the culture of public debate.²⁰

I argue that Proálcool is best understood as the product of models of development economics and policy that became normative in postwar Brazil. Those involved in the business and policy of agriculture—from economists to agronomists, public officials to farmers—learned to speak in the language of development as they discussed changes in their field. Workers’ organizations also grasped this framing, though they did not always use it straightforwardly. Indeed, in the late 1970s, the São Paulo rural workers’ federation parodied the language and directly challenged it. But even their barbed humor demonstrated the pervasiveness of the framework for planning and discussing agriculture. They opposed the program not because it produced abundant fuel but because that production came with steep costs. Planters pushed workers into migratory paths through vast commodity farms. Alcohol distilling pumped enormous quantities of waste into waterways. And the sprawling monoculture exacerbated chronic problems of food scarcity. I examine each of these issues in turn, parsing Proálcool’s consequences and how they were contested.

As the participants at the Forum of the Non-Consulted made clear, Brazil’s agricultural development approach was not inevitable. Some turning points stand out more clearly than others, such as the period of rural worker and peasant mobilization in the late 1950s and early 1960s that preceded the consolidation of the development model. The prominent public intellectual and politician Josué de Castro proposed land reform legislation in 1959 while the peasant leader Francisco Julião demanded agrarian reform for the thousands of people he represented. Partially in response, the last civilian president promised reform in 1963, only to be toppled by the military regime. The military itself implemented reform with the Land Law of 1964, but the measure’s opponents effectively nullified it. Instead of a careful redistribution of land, large owners increased their influence and the orthodox version of development was pursued instead. The model embraced the basic elements that defined modern agriculture: producing at a large scale, prioritizing commodities, and adopting packages of new seeds and fertilizers. By describing the arc of Brazil’s modernization process, I show how these characteristics came to define agricultural modernity. This provides crucial context for understanding why Proálcool made sense to government planners and private business in 1975 and why it had the consequences that it did.

Finding the contingencies in the process of agricultural modernization is one major reason to revisit these decades of change. The turning points, fleeting opportunities, and manufactured path dependencies can offer lessons for future experiences in agriculture. The uncertain future is an argument for scrutinizing Proálcool specifically. We find ourselves in the midst of a global energy transition, haltingly weaning ourselves from fossil fuels and turning toward alternative sources. Contemporary ethanol producers suggest that one of those sources should be the fuel they distill from crops. Brazilian planters argue that they decarbonize the production process, using agriculture both to capture carbon and to produce fuel. I return to this ongoing debate in the seventh chapter. In between, my careful review of Brazil’s first ethanol boom offers valuable perspective for understanding the stakes.²¹

Many historians responded to Brazil’s dramatic twentieth-century demographic pattern in predictable and reasonable ways; they followed the people. Histories of the period tended to focus more on urban themes than rural. In the 1980s, some researchers investigating agricultural history remarked forlornly on the scarcity of scholarship in their field.²² There were always exceptions, though, and Brazil’s strong tradition of rural sociology and anthropology stands as perhaps the clearest. Particularly important work for those interested in sugarcane agriculture in the 1970s came from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Nacional program. A team of their anthropologists arrived in Pernambuco in the 1970s, pursuing a shared project to understand rural productive relations in the sugarcane region.²³ Thirty years later, more historians have joined the debates. Prompted by curiosity about the upheavals of the completed twentieth century, and by pressing concerns with climate change and land-use impacts, more scholars are looking to the countryside. We have valuable recent work on a range of rural questions, from drought mitigation, state conservation, and dams’ impacts to the soybean explosion, cattle-raising technology, and the expanding agricultural frontier in the west.²⁴ Proálcool itself received substantial scholarly attention in the 1980s but much less afterward.²⁵ The program may have appeared irrelevant after its closure.

For historians, Proálcool was just one among other potential targets of research for the rapid period of Brazilian development and of the Green Revolution more broadly. Deborah Fitzgerald noted in 1994 that historians have in large part refrained from entering agricultural development territory, leaving it to economists and policymakers whose sense of historical context is often somewhat undeveloped. She criticized the poor historical treatment of the Green Revolution because of the distortions that had been introduced and allowed to persist—the focus on Asia, for instance, and the lack of discussion of where appropriate or inappropriate technologies emerged. More recent studies include similar observations about the shortcomings of historical scholarship on the Green Revolution, including the scant synthetic accounts of the rapid modernization of the postwar decades.²⁶

However, we have good studies on the politics of aid, the distribution of expertise, and the experiences of rural communities in transition. And while a great deal remains to be explored, promising newer projects have pushed the subject in new directions. Some seek to decenter the U.S. and European role, studying South-South exchanges, socialist experiments with Green Revolution technologies, and national innovation in developing countries. Some have expanded the timeline by looking to continuities from earlier research. And others have established new focuses, such as fertilizer industries and innovative water management.²⁷ This book contributes to this important literature. In placing a major agriculture and energy program in the context of Brazil’s dramatic agricultural revolution, I reveal enduring achievements, costs, and contradictions.

Researching this story demanded that I explore a wide variety of sources. Among the more intuitive places I have visited are archives for the state Secretariats of Agriculture and federal Ministry of Agriculture (held in Brazil’s National Archive). I used state archives in Pernambuco and São Paulo, the National Archive, and university-based repositories. Labor court records helped expose the experiences of rural workers and environmental agencies’ libraries helped me track pollution trends. Interviews with union leaders, scientists, bureaucrats, and businesspeople also gave me valuable insights into the lived experience of modernization. The collection of the federal Secretariat of Planning proved particularly helpful, given its synoptic role during the dictatorship. An agency with a different but equally synoptic role was the Serviço Nacional de Informações (SNI, State Intelligence Service); it proved a less intuitive site to glean abundant insight into Proálcool. As President Geisel noted retrospectively, the SNI took on the de facto status of a ministry during the military regime.²⁸ Researching a book centered in this period means taking seriously the military regime’s relationship with bureaucracy and wading deeply into the tides of paperwork it generated.

Structure of the Book

I have divided the book into two parts, the first organized by chronology and the second by theme. In Part I, Sugarcane and Brazil’s Agricultural Modernization, I examine Brazil’s history of agricultural modernization, from early in the twentieth century through the National Alcohol Program, which ended in 1990. These chapters’ ties to chronology are revealed by the date spans in their titles. In Part II, Proálcool’s Consequences, I address three key problems associated with modern agriculture that had dramatic histories before and during Proálcool: rural labor, water pollution, and hunger. These chapters necessarily repeat some of the chronology covered in the first part, an approach taken in the service of examining distinct facets of modern agricultural history. For each theme, I seek to demonstrate both longer-term processes and the acute impacts of the phase of development epitomized by Proálcool. The Alcohol Program transformed agrarian geographies across the country and participated in regional inequalities and rivalries. My scale is therefore national, though I focus more on some regions than others. I have kept in my sights the northeastern producing region, especially Pernambuco, and the heartland of ethanol production in São Paulo. These places’ contrasting experiences reveal modernization’s uneven trajectories and impacts. I track the national thrust of modernization by monitoring both federal-level policy and state-based initiatives.

In the first chapter, I trace the sugarcane sector across the first half of the twentieth century and situate it in the context of Brazilian agriculture generally. This includes registering outside influences, particularly from the United States. I argue that many farmers, observers, and policy makers shared two somewhat contradictory views of Brazilian agriculture. The conviction of an agrarian destiny was as widespread as the fear of agricultural backwardness. These two discourses shaped debates across the twentieth century and found their way into intense struggles over how the country should develop economically and what balance it should strike between agriculture and industry. As with other crops, sugarcane’s fate was debated along these lines. The discourses also set the terms of discussion about regional differences, competition, and inequality.

I use two individuals’ careers to tell the story of twentieth-century modernization: the Pernambuco-born Alexandre José Barbosa Lima Sobrinho and the São Paulo–born Ruy Miller Paiva. Barbosa Lima came from a prominent Pernambuco family and rose to leadership of the Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool (IAA, Sugar and Alcohol Institute) in the 1930s and 1940s. Paiva left the São Paulo interior to forge an innovative career as an agricultural economist. Working mostly for state and federal agencies, he established himself as a respected voice in agricultural debates a generation after Barbosa Lima’s time at the IAA. Barbosa Lima’s career offers insights