Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol by Jennifer Eaglin, and: Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution by Thomas D. Rogers (review)

Reviewed by: Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol by Jennifer Eaglin, and: Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution by Thomas D. Rogers Christian Brannstrom Jennifer Eaglin Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. x + 268 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $48.99 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-197-51068-1); $48.99 e-book (ISBN: 978-0-197-51070-4). Thomas D. Rogers Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xiii + 287 pp. Photographs, maps, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $99 hardcover (ISBN 978-1-469-67044-7); $29.95 paperback (ISBN 978-1-4696-7045-4); $22.99 e-book (ISBN 978-1-469-67046-1). Brazil's national alcohol (ethanol) Program, known as Proálcool, enacted by the military regime in 1975 and expanded in 1979, was one of the most significant public policies affecting the country's agricultural and industrial sectors. Proálcool initially aimed to supplement gasoline with sugarcane-based ethanol (anhydrous alcohol) through subsidized loans and fuel blend guarantees, then eventually to replace gasoline entirely. More than 95 percent of all new cars in Brazil in 1985 burned ethanol exclusively. The program was disbanded in 1990 due to unsustainable costs associated with supply problems and the decline in oil prices. Proálcool created deep and lasting impacts on Brazilian geography, altering land use, reducing water quality, creating a vast workforce, empowering agro-industrial elites, and forcing changes in the automotive sector. Two recent books by environment-focused historians finally offer English-language analyses that complement a deep and multidisciplinary Brazilian literature on the origins and legacies of Proálcool. Thomas Rogers, in Agriculture's Energy, interprets Proálcool "as the product of models [End Page 203] of development economics and policy that became normative in postwar Brazil" (p. 8). Rogers argues that Proálcool "embodied" a model of "agriculture-fueled development" (p. 81) that had been in creation between the 1930s and 1950s. Proálcool is a highly visible policy feature of a development strategy aimed at transforming the agricultural sector—"one episode in the consolidation of a mode of development that crystallized out of the domestic and international programs that had supported and nurtured agricultural transformation over the preceding decades" (p. 108). Making innovative use of reports from intelligence operatives who collected data on Proálcool's critiques and perceived impacts, Rogers avoids the claims that oil price shocks of the 1970s (e.g., the gasoline alternative hypothesis), sugar prices (e.g., offering sugarcane growers an alternative to crystallized sugar), or business interests (e.g., supporting industrialists seeking profits in refineries) were a significant factor in the development of ethanol. The "green revolution" represented by ethanol, according to Rogers, is the argument that agriculture should be mechanized and export-oriented to serve the overall economy. This ideology, under construction for decades before Proálcool, found its full expression in the set of policies that dramatically increased sugarcane-fueled vehicles, but created an enormous class of itinerant and temporary sugarcane workers and polluted rivers with a toxic byproduct. Jennifer Eaglin, in Sweet Fuel, emphasizes the role of the private sector in the Ribeirão Preto region of São Paulo state, focusing on elites who supported and later obtained Proálcool's subsidies for boosting ethanol production. Based partly on archives in Ribeirão Preto, she leverages the story of the Biagi family and their company, Usina Santa Elisa, to tell the story of ethanol's expansion in Brazil. Eaglin writes that "private sugar interests, rather than government officials, strategically positioned ethanol to become a future large-scale energy option" in the 1960s and early 1970s (p. 46). Eaglin draws our attention to how the Biagi family showed interest in sugarcane intensification, industrialization, and ethanol distillation in the 1940s, taking advantage of proximity to agricultural research institutions and supplier networks. Entrepreneurs, especially the Biagi family, supported the military regime installed in 1964 and "were rewarded handsomely for their fidelity" (p. 51) through Proálcool subsidies. Biagi and other entrepreneurs near Ribeirão...