Questioning the Social Dimensions of Sustainability: The Biofuel Industry and the Weakening of Traditional Communities in Brazil

Traditional communities in Brazil are represented by indigenous peoples, river and delta dwellers, rubber tappers, grazers, fisher-folk, peasants, and the quilombolas (descendants of runaway slave communities of African origins).  They have been part of a historical process of expropriation and exploitation resulting from the development of the Eurocentric capitalist system, and they are described as ‘traditional’ because of their “cultural resilience and their persistence in maintaining a symbiotic relationship with nature, despite the pressures to change imposed by various modernization projects” (Fernandes et al. 2012:43). Among these projects is the biofuel industry that has been growing in the country since the beginning of 1980’s (Schlesinger 2013; Tamir 2013).

Brazil is among the world leaders in ethanol and biodiesel production, most of it coming from sugarcane and soy plantations. While most of the ethanol is produced in the southeastern region, with Sao Paulo state alone producing more than half (Schlesinger 2013), production is rapidly expanding in the central west region of the Cerrado, an area that the National Energy Agency predicts will contribute to a 200% increase in the nation’s current biofuels production in about 20 years (Automotive Business 2014). The central west is a region already accounting for the largest production of soy in Brazil, 32% (or 9% of the world’s production) coming from only one state - Mato Grosso (Schlesinger 2013). And the preference for this region to be the center of the biofuel industry expansion concerns the substantial availability of ‘idle’ lands (Filho and Horridge 2014), which often involve lands occupied by those who do not have formal title to it. 

Land conflicts have long been a problem in Brazil (Tamir 2013). Concerns have recently risen due to the worldwide ‘land grabbing’ phenomenon. As agribusiness occupies (territorializes) sparsely populated areas with sugarcane or soy, they force out (de-territorialize) traditional peoples who lose autonomy and control over territorial access or uses (Fernanded et al. 2012). According to Tamir (2013), indigenous people and quilombolas represent more than a quarter of all people in Brazil affected by land conflicts. In this way, it makes necessary a “sociological intervention,” as described by Geisler and Makki (2014:28), “to contextualize and concretize this burgeoning alienation of land rights and power contingencies across communities and continents” (p.28).

There is no standard definition of sustainability; it means different things for different people. Due to its fluidity, discourses on sustainability of biofuel systems vary. For example, while agribusiness discourses create a dominant ideology of biofuels as sustainable fuels; monocultures feed biofuel industries with their lack of biodiversity, reliance on non-renewable natural resources, and inefficient employment of rural populations. Meanwhile, those concerned with social justice issues question the centralization of these kinds of systems and their inability to include small farmers and traditional communities in biofuels markets. Contrary, many of these populations might actually be displaced by the expansion of these markets.

Food, energy, and climate issues of our time seem to be following the neoliberal model (McMichael 2014) where the dominant ideology of sustainability brought by the agribusiness world undermines the vision of an alternative, more self-reliant, environmentally friendly, and just, economic system. Many of the environmental negative consequences inherent in biofuel production can be improved by the use of technologies, but sustainability requires more diverse and less concentrated productive systems, one that difficultly will emerge without the inclusion of small farmers, peasants, and traditional communities who are deeply connected to the land and the natural resources surrounding them.

REFERENCES

Automotive Business. 2014. Produção de biocombustível no Brasil crescerá mais de 200%. Retrieved May 2014 http://www.automotivebusiness.com.br/noticia/19220/producao-de-biocombustivel-no-brasil-crescera-mais-de-200.

Filho, Joaquim Bento de Souza Ferreira and Mark Horridge. 2014. Ethanol expansion and indirect land use change in Brazil. Land Use Policy 36 (2014) 595–604.

Geisler Charles and Fouad Makki. 2014. People, Power, and Land: New Enclosures on Global Scale. Rural Sociology, vol. 77, January 2014.

McMichael, Philip. 2014. Rethinking Land Grab Anthology. Rural Sociology, vol. 77, January 2014.

Schlesinger, Sergio. 2013. Two serious cases in Mato Grosso state: Soy in Lucas de Rio Verde and sugarcane in Barra do Bugres.

Tamir, Irit. 2013. Case Study: Sugar Production in Brazil. Oxfam International. October 2013 Report. Retrieved May 15 http://www.oxfamnovib.nl/Redactie/Downloads/Rapporten/cs-sugar-productio....