Few history books address today's policy debates over energy, farming, malnutrition, labor conditions, and the environment as fully as Thomas Rogers's detailed examination of Brazil's ethanol program (known as Proácool) between 1975 and 1990. His well-researched study adds to a growing body of literature that posits a “‘long Green Revolution history”’ and places Brazil's within its twentieth century arc of modernization (12); it also starts where the author's previous award-winning book left off (The Deepest Wounds, 2010).
Rogers provides a rich, multi-vocal account of Brazil's agribusiness industry in the mid-to-late twentieth century. His first two chapters cover well-trotted ground regarding Brazil's pursuit of economic development based on an ISI model of industrialization. For many between the 1930s and 1950s, the farming sector was backward, and its primary function was to feed the nation's industrial workers. Others, though, believed Brazilian agriculture was destined for greatness. Although the nation's developmental ethos after World War II continued to emphasize modernization and industrialization, political leaders in the 1950s and 1960s began to change Brazil's agricultural policies as the Green Revolution brought high-yield seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, mechanized farming equipment, and foreign experts (primarily agronomists and economists) to the country. Central planning of agriculture soon became a prominent part of government policy as farming's rapid modernization significantly increased crop yields. In the 1960s, agriculture became central to Brazil's growing GDP as well as its national strength and security according to Rogers.
The military leaders who seized power after overthrowing President João Goulart launched Proácool (the National Alcohol Program) in 1975 to incentivize the production of ethanol derived from sugarcane as a fuel alternative. Brasilia saw Proácool first as a nationalistic energy policy designed to offset the soaring price of imported oil, and second as an agricultural one that would modernize farming. Cooperation between agribusiness, the federal government, and the state governments of São Paulo and Pernambuco enabled Proácool within five years to become the “largest oil-substitution and renewable energy program in the world” (3).
Rogers rightly notes that Proácool was just one part of the country's large-scale economic development policies that combined state and private interests. He does an excellent job explaining the consolidation of Brazil's agribusiness industry, especially its sugarcane sector, and the complex yet synergistic relationships it had with the nation's alcohol producers, chemical companies, oil firms, car manufacturers, and federal and state governments, as well as international lenders. Also, by covering the decades-long careers of two prominent sugarcane policymakers, Rogers's narrative refreshingly avoids a mundane history of faceless bureaucrats. By the 1990s, three-quarters of all cars on Brazilian roads ran on ethanol and 90 percent of new cars sold had alcohol engines. Despite these successes, Proácool had a devastating impact on Brazil's working-class as well as its environment, which Rogers documents fully in the book's second half.
As with other Latin American countries that embarked on the Green Revolution, Brazil's shift from food to commodity (that is, cash) crops exacerbated the nation's pre-existing socioeconomic problems, including land concentration, rural worker displacement, migratory labor exploitation, limited credit for small farmers, regional inequality, rapid and unregulated urbanization, falling production of staple products, high food prices, growing levels of poverty and hunger, and worsening levels of rural pollution, especially from wastewater. By the late 1970s, rural workers and their unions, academics, and environmentalists began criticizing Proácool and the dictatorship's implementation of agricultural policies without public debate.
In the 1980s, labor strikes produced modest gains for rural migratory workers, Brazil's growing environmental movement precipitated state and federal reforms, and intercropping sugarcane and vegetables addressed growing rates of malnutrition and hunger. Rogers rightly concludes that these changes did not go far enough. Understanding what went wrong during Brazil's first ethanol boom is critical because the country is currently in the midst of another, even as it models itself as a global leader in fighting climate change by producing renewable energy through low-carbon agriculture. Let's hope that this important book is read widely beyond academia.
