Felizmente são cada vez mais os artigos de opinião e mesmo reportagens sobre os problemas associados aos agrocombustíveis, que apareceram subitamente e inesperadamente nos últimos meses como a solução miraculosa para o problema de uma sociedade que tem uma doença ou vício que é o consumo excessivo de energia.

Aqui fica um artigo muito interessante do Guardian, sobre quem vai realmente pagar o enchimento dos depósitos nos Estados Unidos e na Europa.

Outlook / Fuelling a revolution / 'Ethanol slaves' are propping up Brazil's renewable energy boom

Tom Phillips reports from Palmares Paulista
Fonte: The Guardian

The heart of Brazil's energy revolution can be found in the stale air of a squalid red-brick tenement building. Inside, dozens of road-weary migrant workers are crammed into minuscule cubicles, filled with rickety bunk beds and unpacked bags, preparing for their first day at work in the sugar plantations of Sao Paulo.

This is Palmares Paulista, a rural town 370km from Sao Paulo and the centre of a South American renewable energy boom that is transforming Brazil into a global reference point on how to cut carbon emissions and oil imports at the same time.

Inside the prison-like construction are the cortadores de cana - sugar cane cutters - part of a destitute internal migrant workforce of about 200,000 men who help prop up the country's ethanol industry.

Biofuels are mega-business in Brazil. Its ethanol programme is so successful that it is attracting attention from around the world. This month the US president, George Bush, arrived in Sao Paulo to announce an "ethanol alliance" with his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva. The bilateral agreement has been touted as the first step towards the creation of an "ethanol Opec".

Sugar and alcohol were Brazil's second-biggest agricultural export products last year, worth an estimated $8bn. Producers expect the country's sugar cane production to jump by 55% in the coming six years, largely because of growing demand from the US and Europe.

But drive to the outskirts of Palmares Paulista and a much bleaker picture emerges of what President Lula has dubbed Brazil's "energy revolution". On one side, thick green plantations of sugar cane stretch out as far as the eye can see; on the other, lopsided red-brick shacks crowd together, home to hundreds of impoverished workers who risk life and limb to provide the local factories with sugar cane.

Economic refugees fleeing the country's impoverished northeast, these men earn as little as $190 a month to provide the raw material that is fuelling this energy revolution.

Palmares Paulista is both a burgeoning agricultural town and a social catastrophe. "They arrive here with nothing," said Valeria Gardiano, who heads the social service department in Palmares, a town of 9,000 whose population swells each year with the influx of between 4,000 and 5,000 migrant workers.

Activists go further. They say the "cortadores" are in effect slaves and complain that Brazil's ethanol industry is a shadowy world of middlemen and human rights abuses. "They come here because they are forced from their homes by the lack of work," said Francisco Alves, a professor from nearby Sao Carlos University who has spent more than 20 years studying Sao Paulo's migrant workforce. "They will do anything to get by."

That includes working 12-hour shifts in scorching heat and earning just over $1 per tonne of sugar cane cut, before returning to squalid, overcrowded "guest houses" rented to them at extortionate prices by unscrupulous landlords, who are often former sugar cutters.

Faced with exhausting work in temperatures of more than 30C, some will die. According to Sister Ines Facioli, from the Pastoral do Migrante, a Catholic support network based in nearby Guariba, 17 workers died between 2004 and 2006 as a result of overwork or exhaustion. But the annual exodus from the northeast continues, and as foreign investment in the ethanol industry increases, numbers are expected to grow.

Among the newest arrivals in Palmares are the Santos family, four brothers aged 19, 22, 24 and 26 who stepped off an illegally chartered bus last week after a 24-hour journey from Bahia state. "We need the work," said Sidney Alves dos Santos, 24, sitting in the stuffy shack that will be his home until the harvest ends in December. "There's no other way."