To the Editor:
Re “Bring On the Right Biofuels,” by Roger Cohen (column, The New York Times on the Web, April 24):
Biofuels contribute to deforestation and global warming regardless of which plant matter is used to make the fuel.
Even if ethanol is made from sugar cane and that sugar cane is grown miles away from the Amazon rain forest, the resulting shifts in where other crops are grown will lead to deforestation.
Furthermore, when previously uncultivated land, including tropical forests, is brought into cultivation, large amounts of carbon are released from the soil, worsening the carbon dioxide balance.
Municipal solid waste is about the only biofuel source that does not exhibit this problem. Other than municipal waste, biofuels are an environmental disaster.
John K. Horowitz
College Park, Md., April 24, 2008
The writer is an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland.
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To the Editor:
Roger Cohen notes correctly that sugar cane is not grown in the Amazon. But we disagree with his assertion that “Brazilian sugar-based ethanol” is “environmentally friendly.”
Recent studies have confirmed intuition: If you shift a plot of farmland from food production to fuel production, the market will grow the food somewhere else. Increasingly, the required “make up” food is grown on what used to be grazing land, and ranchers, in turn, are clearing tropical forests to make room for their livestock.
The process has dire consequences for climate, because forests like the Amazon serve as essential carbon sinks as long as they are left intact.
Energy-crop farmers in Brazil are displacing other farmers from conventional farmland, and some of that displaced agriculture is winding up in the Amazon.
Moreover, because the food market is highly globalized, tropical forests and climate stability are similarly threatened when farmers in the United States and Europe divert their harvests from the food market to the fuel market.
Lester Brown
Jonathan Lewis
Washington, April 24, 2008
The writers are, respectively, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington and staff attorney and climate program coordinator of the Clean Air Task Force in Boston.
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To the Editor:
When discussing biofuels and the production of sugar cane in Brazil, there is a human cost to consider.
While most Brazilian employers respect workers’ rights, Brazil is a very large country. In some of the more distant corners, pressure to maximize profits has sometimes led to situations of degrading and slave labor.
Sugar cane has not been immune: of the 5,877 workers freed in 2007 from conditions analogous to slave labor in Brazil, 2,947 had been sugar-cane cutters.
The connection between slave or degrading labor and increased ethanol-linked demand for sugar cane has not gone unnoticed by Brazilian watchdog agencies. The Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo reported in 2007 that São Paulo sugar-cane cutters had slightly longer productive work lives in the decade before Brazil’s 1888 abolition of slavery than do modern sugar-cane cutters.
Sugar cane has a long and often cruel history in Brazil.
Richard Hoffman
Recife, Brazil, April 26, 2008
The writer is Brazil country representative, Catholic Relief Services.
