The High Price of Clean, Cheap Ethanol

Brazil hopes to supply drivers worldwide with the fuel of the future — cheap ethanol derived from sugarcane. It is considered an effective antidote to climate change, but hundreds of thousands of Brazilian plantation workers harvest the cane at slave wages.

In the middle of the night, the plantations around Aracoiaba in Brazil’s ethanol zone are on fire. The area looks like a war zone during the sugarcane harvest, as the burning fields light up the sky and the wind carries clouds of smoke across the countryside.


The fires chase away snakes, kill tarantulas and burn away the sharp leaves of the cane plants. In the morning, when only embers remain, tens of thousands of workers with machetes head into the fields throughout this region in northeastern Brazil. They harvest the cane, which survives the fire and which is used to distill ethanol, the gasoline of the future.

Hours earlier, Antonio da Silva attempts to get up from his plank bed. He doesn’t need an alarm clock, even at two in the morning. The pain wakes him up. He looks at the other two beds in the room, where his children sleep — four young girls and two boys. Once outside, in front of the hut, he says he may not be able to feed them for much longer.

Spiegel