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A. LE FLOCH
This paper provides a contemporary and critical assessment of the development being fostered in the Brazilian sugarcane industry
It looks in particular at the effects that the rapid expansion, modernisation and consolidation of the industry have had on labour and peasants in the country – groups of people often overlooked in a debate marked more by global environmental and food security concerns – and offers three key insights.
First, it maps out the markets into which sugarcane has been sold, and through this shows how the discourse of environmentalism and food security have fed into state rhetoric on the industry and in doing so deflected attention away from the employment and self-sufficiency of the rural poor.
Second, it illustrates the active role that state elites played in facilitating the growth of the industry and suggests how corporate concentration and ‘knowledge-driven productivity’ have accelerated during the succeeding gold rush of domestic and foreign investment.
Third, it reveals how this particular confluence of factors has created a kind of ‘development dualism’, whereby the fractions of relatively skilled labour are benefiting but many others, including peasants, have lost out.
It notes, also, how this dualism has had a regional manifestation as the expansion of sugarcane and potential next generation biofuels risks reinforcing the disparities between the country’s prosperous Centre-South and the stagnant and technologically less developed Northeast.
In sum, we show why the Brazilian sugarcane industry should thus be considered an exclusive engine of growth.
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