brazil backs biofuel
31 July 2008

It is located in Candeias, a town 55 kilometres from the northern city of Salvador de Bahia, and has a capacity of 57-million litres per year.   "Brazil must not be afraid of this international biofuel debate. We want this discussion, and we are not going to flee from it," said Lula.  The Brazilian president has frequently and fiercely rejected claims that his country is contributing to the current crisis caused by high food prices by encouraging biofuel crop cultivation on arable land.

Brazil is the second-biggest producer of biofuel in the world, after the United States, and the biggest exporter. It currently makes 15-billion liters of ethanol from sugarcane per year, and exports nearly a third of that.  It stands behind biofuel as a means to reduce the dependency on oil, and to combat global warming by cutting greenhouse gases generated by fossil fuels.
Brazil already uses biodiesel as a three-percent additive to its standard petro-based diesel. The government's plan to increase that mix to five percent in 2010 may be advanced by the push to embrace biofuel.

According to the ministry for agricultural development, the country already makes enough biodiesel for its current needs, 840-million litres produced from vegetable-oil generating crops grown by 40 000 farmers.  Petrobras's biofuels division intends to increase overall biofuel production over the next four years by acquiring factories and forming strategic alliances with companies.
Lula said Brazil would tackle the controversy surrounding the production in November, when an international conference would be hosted to allow dialog "without tempers, but with scientific bases, on the supposed competition between biofuels and food."

He said the meeting would look at the "real" reasons for carbon-dioxide production and the rise in food prices.  Petrobras president Jose Sergio Gabrielli acknowledged that Brazil's biofuels strategy was under attack, but affirmed that the critics "attribute to our program problems that don't come from it."  He also said the foundation of the biodiesel production would be "the promotion of family farming."  Lula's cabinet chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, rounded out the defense by stressing that Brazil's biofuels offered "a solution to the problems caused by fossil fuels, and at the same time is a tool in the fight against hunger through the support of family farming."

AFP,  www.iafrica.com