REPORTER: Ginny Stein
It is midnight in north-east Brazil and workers fire up a crop that will eventually fuel the whole country. After three decades of work, Brazil has succeeded where much of the industrialised world has failed.
It has developed a cost-effective alternative to petroleum and its sweet success comes from this crop, sugar cane, from which ethanol is made.
LUIS CARLOS CORREA CARVALHO, SUGAR CANE FARMER: Well I believe we are having a very good season for sugar cane, we have very beautiful sugar cane, and I think that we will have a very good crop season.
Luis Carlos Correa Carvalho, or Caio as he's known, has been growing sugar cane for more than three decades.
LUIS CARLOS CORREA CARVALHO: Well I think that we are in a very special moment now. I remember the beginning of the ethanol program in 1975, when we had a very good period. But, then, we had a low price of oil and now, with the very high price of oil we have now a good price for sugar and for ethanol, then I think it is a wonderful moment for us.
Rising oil prices and Brazil's acceptance of ethanol, or alcool as its known here, have led to an automotive revolution. Car manufacturers in Brazil have created the flex car - a vehicle that can run on either ethanol or petrol or any combination of the two.
REPORTER: The flex car has now become Brazil's number one selling vehicle. Deciding what fuel to buy when motorists pull up to fill up is now, for many, simply a matter of what's cheapest.
Here at, this fuel station, motorists have choice. There's pure ethanol, petrol containing ethanol, diesel and gas. Today it's cheaper to fill up with ethanol, so much so that the owner of this service station has a special deal on petrol.
For many Brazilians, filling up with ethanol is not just about money but a matter of national pride.
MAN, (Translation): Yes, I use alcohol in my country because, apart from supporting agriculture it provides employment, and my car costs less to run on alcohol.
Energy analyst Plinio Nastari says the evolution of the flex car has taken Brazil by storm.
PLINIO NASTARI, ENERGY ANALYST: There are over 1.3 million cars running in Brazil, flex cars, Just last year, 2005, 866,000 vehicles were sold, which is 53.6% of total sales.
REPORTER: So it seems it's over the mark, now, it's over the half-way mark?
PLINIO NASTARI: It is, it is. And the last month sales were over 74%. And the prospective is that, by 2007, that number will reach 83%. Today 100% of GM and Volkswagen vehicles are sold in the flex fuel configuration.
Fernao da Costa Ciampa is proud to own one of Brazil's 1.3 million flex cars.
REPORTER: So, driving the car, have you noticed any difference between a flex car and a normal car?
FERNAO DA COSTA CIAMPA: No there's no difference at all. You don't realise when you are using petrol or alcool, it is just the same. I don't feel any difference.
Ciampa runs a small business. When he bought a new car, soon after his daughter was born, his main requirement was a flex fuel engine.
FERNAO DA COSTA CIAMPA: It's funny when you buy a flex car you start like playing with it. Like, OK, now I am only going to use petrol and oh, now I am only going to use only alcohol, now I am going to use half and half, now I am going to use just a little bit of gas to see if it is better and you start playing with these proportions of fuel you know.
REPORTER:It's a new toy?
FERNAO DA COSTA CIAMPA: Yeah it's like a new toy. But then after doing all the experiences, I realised it was better just to use alcohol and not mixing with anything as it doesn't make any difference.
Military and civilian leaders laid the groundwork for this industry. Faced with a dramatically escalating fuel bill, during the first oil crisis in the 1970s, Brazil's then military-led government bankrolled the ethanol industry's evolution. First by funding scientific research, next by mandating ethanol use and then by dictating production levels.
Ever since, Brazil's leaders have been determined to kick the country's addiction to oil.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES, AGRICULTURE MINISTER: This is something that, every time when I think about it, I imagine how could human kind become dependent on something that is going to finish some day?
This is stupidity. I can't understand why. How could, in less than 50 years, because it was in the first half of the twentieth century, all of a sudden the whole human kind became dependent on something that's going to be eliminated.
This man was put in charge of leading the scientific quest for an alternative to oil.
PROFESSOR BAUTISTA VIDAL, ETHANOL PIONEER: I am proud yes, but I am proud of the team that I organise. I have more than 1,000 specialists work in this alcohol program. People with large experience, with very clever ideas that could see clear that the future is renewable tropical energy.
Professor Bautista Vidal is Brazil's foremost ethanol pioneer. For him, finding an alternative energy source is not just about providing power but security.
PROFESSOR BAUTISTA VIDAL: Energy is a very, very important riches, let us say. And in that sense, Brazil going into the liquid and clean energy, it has the future, because everybody has need of it at the end of the fossil fuel.
Japan, Germany, India, China, United States, everybody needs energy. The world is going to the war because it is seeing that the energy, which is the cover all the needs of the world.
Ethanol can be produced from many crops but, in Brazil, it is made from the most potent and cost effective crop of them all, sugar cane. Brazil is the world's largest exporter of sugar and the biggest producer of ethanol, responsible for 45% of global production.
Joao Macedo is an engineer at Couripe Mill, in the heart of Brazil's sugar cane growing country, this is one of the country's largest and oldest mills.
JOAO MACEDO, ENGINEER, (Translation): There are several stages, it goes from one crusher to another, then on a conveyor belt. That is when the juice is extracted for either sugar or alcohol.
Sugar production here is as old as colonisation. It's been grown here for centuries, it's the conversion to alcohol that's a relatively new phenomenon.
JOAO MACEDO, (Translation): This is the final stage of the alcohol production process, the fermentation is complete. And this is where it is distilled, in these columns here.
When scientists in Brazil went looking for an alternative fuel source, they first looked at what the country had in abundance - land, rain and cheap labour.
In north-east Brazil, much of the harvesting continues to be done by hand. Each man works a 10 hour day, 6 days a week, and cuts 8.5 tons of cane a day.
JOSE (Translation): Yeah it is very hot, we suffer a lot from the heat, people get ill in the cane fields, you have to take breaks or you wont last.
In a country with massive unemployment, the sugar cane harvest provides a basic living for tens of thousands of workers and their families.
Apart from helping to reduce unemployment at home, Brazil says other countries can reap the same reward, and more.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES: First because the tropical countries will be very much able to get that. And that will generate jobs and wealth in this country, reducing the difference and the gap between rich and poor countries. And that is one of the reasons to defend democracy and peace all over the world.
Roberto Rodrigues is a sugar cane grower and Brazil's Agriculture Minister. He's spent the past year trying to convince other nations that ethanol is the answer to their problems.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES: Each country can have its own "oil" deposits. That's what is the magic. We will not be depending on imports or exports in the world. Of course some countries will be much more competitive than other countries. But any country can have its own production of fuel. This is the magician of ethanol or biodiesel. Agro-energy is renewable and every country can do it.
Today, Brazil's President, Luis Inacio Lula Da Silva, is meeting his Argentine counterpart to talk trade. A former factory worker and union leader, President Lula came to power promising to crusade against poverty. He knows that not every country has the resources to produce its own ethanol and sees the chance for Brazil to boost its economy by becoming a major exporter.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES: But, for us to get that future it's important that many other countries also produce ethanol. We cannot imagine that ethanol should be a commodity if just we produce ethanol.
Brazil offers plenty of evidence that switching to ethanol does not have to involve a painful transition. At the Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Sao Paulo, this assembly line produces flex cars 24 hours, seven days a week. And it hasn't required any major changes to engines or assembly lines.
ROGER GONDIM, ENGINEER: We are keeping the same characteristics of the car, so the robustness of the car and of the engine are kept. And with a little bit more power.
According to engineer Roger Gondim, computer sensors adjust to whatever mix is in the tank.
ROGER GONDIM: To recognise and to adapt the engine to work with any kind of mixture, between gasoline and ethanol, you have to a have a special software that comes in here.
One of the main differences between flex cars and petrol-only cars is the addition of a small petrol reservoir under the bonnet, which helps the car to start on cold days There is also the need to provide additional protection to the engine from the fuel itself.
ROGER GONDIM: When you consider the engine itself, it's important to have all the components that has contact to fuel protected against corrosion because we have to remember that alcohol is a corrosive fuel.
But there are also plans to take the flex car engine further afield.
PLINIO NASTARI: There are over five million flex fuel cars already in existence and running in the US and most of their owners don't know they are running on a flex car.
Ford, in Indonesia, this year, will start producing 150,000 flex engines. India has a great potential. And most of the players, the automobile makers here in Brazil, are planning to do the same there. This is becoming a global solution and I think it will go line-in-line, or parallel, with the development of ethanol production in many parts of the globe.
But it's not a solution in Australia, where ethanol is yet to find favour. Professor Nastari is bemused by Australia's reluctance to embrace a product that Brazil has proved so effective.
PLINIO NASTARI: There is a lot of controversy in Australia about whether Australian cars can use ethanol blends or not. I don't know if you know but we have this GM model, which here in Brazil is called Omega, it is the best, I think, top model of GM here in Brazil.
Well, it's all Australian made, we import these vehicles from Australia and they are running really well with 25% ethanol here in Brazil.
But the only way to test what the experts claim is to take a flex fuel car for a drive.
REPORTER: Where's the accelerator? Guess I had better take the hand break off first, that'll help. And I think the other key is avoid the horse.
Well it seems to work, it seems like it is a car and there's really not much more that I can say with this sort of a test of it. But it drives quite well.
But it's not just on the roads that ethanol is powering Brazil. The world's first ethanol-fuelled planes are being built.
MAURICIO NOGUEIRA, PILOT (Translation): The plane runs on 100% alcohol, the only fuel it uses is alcohol, hydrated ethanol. No mixtures, no additives, only alcohol.
Pilot Mauricio Nogueira likes the extra power he gets on take-offs and landings.
MAURICIO NOGUEIRA (Translation): When you fly this plane with alcohol for fuel, power increases by around 7%. It is a pleasure to fly an ethanol-fuelled plane. You really feel safe.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES: It is not a big consumption of ethanol in these planes, but it is, it's a model that you can even fly with ethanol. And this is using a figure of rhetoric, if ethanol can fly inside Brazil it can fly outside Brazil.
In Brazil, the price of fuel has helped convert millions to ethanol. But there are also environmental advantages.
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: We collect the exhaust gases and we put it in balloons in sacks. They are then tested, chemically, or with other methods to find out how what kind of impurities we have.
At these government laboratories, flex fuel engines are tested and compared to petrol engines. And according to the environment secretary for the state of Sao Paulo, Professor Jose Goldemberg, the results are good.
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: The flex fuel cars perform the better the higher the content of ethanol. If they have 25% of ethanol, the impurities are at a given level. If we have 50% of ethanol then some of the impurities just drop considerably.
REPORTER: Sao Paulo is Brazil's largest city, about 12 million people, have you any idea how many vehicles are on the road?
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: Yes, five million.
REPORTER: Five million vehicles. And the pollution levels, you say, have decreased?
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: Yes.
REPORTER: By 25%?
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: Exactly.
But not everyone is convinced that ethanol is Brazil's environmental saviour. Burning off sugar cane before the harvest is considered, by many nations, to be bad environmental practise but that's how it's still done here.
And although ethanol may be a renewable fuel, as demand grows both at home and abroad, so does pressure on home soil.
Each year, sugar cane production grows by 10%. There are currently 5.4 million hectares under production and growers believe it can expand almost 20-fold.
MARIO CESAR MANTONVANI, (Translation): Industrial expansion is putting huge pressure on the environment. The fact is that these people have always had the authority to kill or to do whatever they liked.
Mario Cesar Mantonvani is a campaigner for Brazil's peak environmental organisation, the SOS Foundation. He says the sugar industry has a bad track record when it comes to looking after the environment, and forests throughout Brazil are being destroyed by farming.
MARIO CESAR MANTONVANI, (Translation): Here we must be much more careful, because areas like this should be protected by the legislation, but the laws are not being obeyed. The government has no control, it has good intentions, and hell is full of those.
But even Mantovani acknowledges that, with proper planning, ethanol doesn't have to come at a cost to the environment.
MARIO CESAR MANTONVANI, (Translation): The thing with alcohol is that it is a renewable resource, and we have lots of sun, lots of land, lots of space for planting, plus Brazil is in a good position to do this because it has a commitment to agriculture.
Now Brazil needs other nations to produce ethanol. Only then does it have the chance of becoming a globally accepted fuel. But the future for ethanol looks bright. Japan has agreed to increase the level of ethanol it includes in its petrol and so has the United States. Brazil is hoping that Australia will also join its energy revolution.
LUIS CARLOS CORREA CARVALHO: We are waiting for Australia because Australia is an extremely important sugar cane producer, in terms of quality and costs, and we believe it is an extremely important example for the developed country.
Probably in the year 2030, 30% of all the power produced in the world will come from biomass. And there is no doubt that sugar cane will be the number one.
It is midnight in north-east Brazil and workers fire up a crop that will eventually fuel the whole country. After three decades of work, Brazil has succeeded where much of the industrialised world has failed.
It has developed a cost-effective alternative to petroleum and its sweet success comes from this crop, sugar cane, from which ethanol is made.
LUIS CARLOS CORREA CARVALHO, SUGAR CANE FARMER: Well I believe we are having a very good season for sugar cane, we have very beautiful sugar cane, and I think that we will have a very good crop season.
Luis Carlos Correa Carvalho, or Caio as he's known, has been growing sugar cane for more than three decades.
LUIS CARLOS CORREA CARVALHO: Well I think that we are in a very special moment now. I remember the beginning of the ethanol program in 1975, when we had a very good period. But, then, we had a low price of oil and now, with the very high price of oil we have now a good price for sugar and for ethanol, then I think it is a wonderful moment for us.
Rising oil prices and Brazil's acceptance of ethanol, or alcool as its known here, have led to an automotive revolution. Car manufacturers in Brazil have created the flex car - a vehicle that can run on either ethanol or petrol or any combination of the two.
REPORTER: The flex car has now become Brazil's number one selling vehicle. Deciding what fuel to buy when motorists pull up to fill up is now, for many, simply a matter of what's cheapest.
Here at, this fuel station, motorists have choice. There's pure ethanol, petrol containing ethanol, diesel and gas. Today it's cheaper to fill up with ethanol, so much so that the owner of this service station has a special deal on petrol.
For many Brazilians, filling up with ethanol is not just about money but a matter of national pride.
MAN, (Translation): Yes, I use alcohol in my country because, apart from supporting agriculture it provides employment, and my car costs less to run on alcohol.
Energy analyst Plinio Nastari says the evolution of the flex car has taken Brazil by storm.
PLINIO NASTARI, ENERGY ANALYST: There are over 1.3 million cars running in Brazil, flex cars, Just last year, 2005, 866,000 vehicles were sold, which is 53.6% of total sales.
REPORTER: So it seems it's over the mark, now, it's over the half-way mark?
PLINIO NASTARI: It is, it is. And the last month sales were over 74%. And the prospective is that, by 2007, that number will reach 83%. Today 100% of GM and Volkswagen vehicles are sold in the flex fuel configuration.
Fernao da Costa Ciampa is proud to own one of Brazil's 1.3 million flex cars.
REPORTER: So, driving the car, have you noticed any difference between a flex car and a normal car?
FERNAO DA COSTA CIAMPA: No there's no difference at all. You don't realise when you are using petrol or alcool, it is just the same. I don't feel any difference.
Ciampa runs a small business. When he bought a new car, soon after his daughter was born, his main requirement was a flex fuel engine.
FERNAO DA COSTA CIAMPA: It's funny when you buy a flex car you start like playing with it. Like, OK, now I am only going to use petrol and oh, now I am only going to use only alcohol, now I am going to use half and half, now I am going to use just a little bit of gas to see if it is better and you start playing with these proportions of fuel you know.
REPORTER:It's a new toy?
FERNAO DA COSTA CIAMPA: Yeah it's like a new toy. But then after doing all the experiences, I realised it was better just to use alcohol and not mixing with anything as it doesn't make any difference.
Military and civilian leaders laid the groundwork for this industry. Faced with a dramatically escalating fuel bill, during the first oil crisis in the 1970s, Brazil's then military-led government bankrolled the ethanol industry's evolution. First by funding scientific research, next by mandating ethanol use and then by dictating production levels.
Ever since, Brazil's leaders have been determined to kick the country's addiction to oil.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES, AGRICULTURE MINISTER: This is something that, every time when I think about it, I imagine how could human kind become dependent on something that is going to finish some day?
This is stupidity. I can't understand why. How could, in less than 50 years, because it was in the first half of the twentieth century, all of a sudden the whole human kind became dependent on something that's going to be eliminated.
This man was put in charge of leading the scientific quest for an alternative to oil.
PROFESSOR BAUTISTA VIDAL, ETHANOL PIONEER: I am proud yes, but I am proud of the team that I organise. I have more than 1,000 specialists work in this alcohol program. People with large experience, with very clever ideas that could see clear that the future is renewable tropical energy.
Professor Bautista Vidal is Brazil's foremost ethanol pioneer. For him, finding an alternative energy source is not just about providing power but security.
PROFESSOR BAUTISTA VIDAL: Energy is a very, very important riches, let us say. And in that sense, Brazil going into the liquid and clean energy, it has the future, because everybody has need of it at the end of the fossil fuel.
Japan, Germany, India, China, United States, everybody needs energy. The world is going to the war because it is seeing that the energy, which is the cover all the needs of the world.
Ethanol can be produced from many crops but, in Brazil, it is made from the most potent and cost effective crop of them all, sugar cane. Brazil is the world's largest exporter of sugar and the biggest producer of ethanol, responsible for 45% of global production.
Joao Macedo is an engineer at Couripe Mill, in the heart of Brazil's sugar cane growing country, this is one of the country's largest and oldest mills.
JOAO MACEDO, ENGINEER, (Translation): There are several stages, it goes from one crusher to another, then on a conveyor belt. That is when the juice is extracted for either sugar or alcohol.
Sugar production here is as old as colonisation. It's been grown here for centuries, it's the conversion to alcohol that's a relatively new phenomenon.
JOAO MACEDO, (Translation): This is the final stage of the alcohol production process, the fermentation is complete. And this is where it is distilled, in these columns here.
When scientists in Brazil went looking for an alternative fuel source, they first looked at what the country had in abundance - land, rain and cheap labour.
In north-east Brazil, much of the harvesting continues to be done by hand. Each man works a 10 hour day, 6 days a week, and cuts 8.5 tons of cane a day.
JOSE (Translation): Yeah it is very hot, we suffer a lot from the heat, people get ill in the cane fields, you have to take breaks or you wont last.
In a country with massive unemployment, the sugar cane harvest provides a basic living for tens of thousands of workers and their families.
Apart from helping to reduce unemployment at home, Brazil says other countries can reap the same reward, and more.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES: First because the tropical countries will be very much able to get that. And that will generate jobs and wealth in this country, reducing the difference and the gap between rich and poor countries. And that is one of the reasons to defend democracy and peace all over the world.
Roberto Rodrigues is a sugar cane grower and Brazil's Agriculture Minister. He's spent the past year trying to convince other nations that ethanol is the answer to their problems.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES: Each country can have its own "oil" deposits. That's what is the magic. We will not be depending on imports or exports in the world. Of course some countries will be much more competitive than other countries. But any country can have its own production of fuel. This is the magician of ethanol or biodiesel. Agro-energy is renewable and every country can do it.
Today, Brazil's President, Luis Inacio Lula Da Silva, is meeting his Argentine counterpart to talk trade. A former factory worker and union leader, President Lula came to power promising to crusade against poverty. He knows that not every country has the resources to produce its own ethanol and sees the chance for Brazil to boost its economy by becoming a major exporter.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES: But, for us to get that future it's important that many other countries also produce ethanol. We cannot imagine that ethanol should be a commodity if just we produce ethanol.
Brazil offers plenty of evidence that switching to ethanol does not have to involve a painful transition. At the Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Sao Paulo, this assembly line produces flex cars 24 hours, seven days a week. And it hasn't required any major changes to engines or assembly lines.
ROGER GONDIM, ENGINEER: We are keeping the same characteristics of the car, so the robustness of the car and of the engine are kept. And with a little bit more power.
According to engineer Roger Gondim, computer sensors adjust to whatever mix is in the tank.
ROGER GONDIM: To recognise and to adapt the engine to work with any kind of mixture, between gasoline and ethanol, you have to a have a special software that comes in here.
One of the main differences between flex cars and petrol-only cars is the addition of a small petrol reservoir under the bonnet, which helps the car to start on cold days There is also the need to provide additional protection to the engine from the fuel itself.
ROGER GONDIM: When you consider the engine itself, it's important to have all the components that has contact to fuel protected against corrosion because we have to remember that alcohol is a corrosive fuel.
But there are also plans to take the flex car engine further afield.
PLINIO NASTARI: There are over five million flex fuel cars already in existence and running in the US and most of their owners don't know they are running on a flex car.
Ford, in Indonesia, this year, will start producing 150,000 flex engines. India has a great potential. And most of the players, the automobile makers here in Brazil, are planning to do the same there. This is becoming a global solution and I think it will go line-in-line, or parallel, with the development of ethanol production in many parts of the globe.
But it's not a solution in Australia, where ethanol is yet to find favour. Professor Nastari is bemused by Australia's reluctance to embrace a product that Brazil has proved so effective.
PLINIO NASTARI: There is a lot of controversy in Australia about whether Australian cars can use ethanol blends or not. I don't know if you know but we have this GM model, which here in Brazil is called Omega, it is the best, I think, top model of GM here in Brazil.
Well, it's all Australian made, we import these vehicles from Australia and they are running really well with 25% ethanol here in Brazil.
But the only way to test what the experts claim is to take a flex fuel car for a drive.
REPORTER: Where's the accelerator? Guess I had better take the hand break off first, that'll help. And I think the other key is avoid the horse.
Well it seems to work, it seems like it is a car and there's really not much more that I can say with this sort of a test of it. But it drives quite well.
But it's not just on the roads that ethanol is powering Brazil. The world's first ethanol-fuelled planes are being built.
MAURICIO NOGUEIRA, PILOT (Translation): The plane runs on 100% alcohol, the only fuel it uses is alcohol, hydrated ethanol. No mixtures, no additives, only alcohol.
Pilot Mauricio Nogueira likes the extra power he gets on take-offs and landings.
MAURICIO NOGUEIRA (Translation): When you fly this plane with alcohol for fuel, power increases by around 7%. It is a pleasure to fly an ethanol-fuelled plane. You really feel safe.
ROBERTO RODRIGUES: It is not a big consumption of ethanol in these planes, but it is, it's a model that you can even fly with ethanol. And this is using a figure of rhetoric, if ethanol can fly inside Brazil it can fly outside Brazil.
In Brazil, the price of fuel has helped convert millions to ethanol. But there are also environmental advantages.
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: We collect the exhaust gases and we put it in balloons in sacks. They are then tested, chemically, or with other methods to find out how what kind of impurities we have.
At these government laboratories, flex fuel engines are tested and compared to petrol engines. And according to the environment secretary for the state of Sao Paulo, Professor Jose Goldemberg, the results are good.
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: The flex fuel cars perform the better the higher the content of ethanol. If they have 25% of ethanol, the impurities are at a given level. If we have 50% of ethanol then some of the impurities just drop considerably.
REPORTER: Sao Paulo is Brazil's largest city, about 12 million people, have you any idea how many vehicles are on the road?
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: Yes, five million.
REPORTER: Five million vehicles. And the pollution levels, you say, have decreased?
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: Yes.
REPORTER: By 25%?
PROFESSOR JOSE GOLDEMBERG: Exactly.
But not everyone is convinced that ethanol is Brazil's environmental saviour. Burning off sugar cane before the harvest is considered, by many nations, to be bad environmental practise but that's how it's still done here.
And although ethanol may be a renewable fuel, as demand grows both at home and abroad, so does pressure on home soil.
Each year, sugar cane production grows by 10%. There are currently 5.4 million hectares under production and growers believe it can expand almost 20-fold.
MARIO CESAR MANTONVANI, (Translation): Industrial expansion is putting huge pressure on the environment. The fact is that these people have always had the authority to kill or to do whatever they liked.
Mario Cesar Mantonvani is a campaigner for Brazil's peak environmental organisation, the SOS Foundation. He says the sugar industry has a bad track record when it comes to looking after the environment, and forests throughout Brazil are being destroyed by farming.
MARIO CESAR MANTONVANI, (Translation): Here we must be much more careful, because areas like this should be protected by the legislation, but the laws are not being obeyed. The government has no control, it has good intentions, and hell is full of those.
But even Mantovani acknowledges that, with proper planning, ethanol doesn't have to come at a cost to the environment.
MARIO CESAR MANTONVANI, (Translation): The thing with alcohol is that it is a renewable resource, and we have lots of sun, lots of land, lots of space for planting, plus Brazil is in a good position to do this because it has a commitment to agriculture.
Now Brazil needs other nations to produce ethanol. Only then does it have the chance of becoming a globally accepted fuel. But the future for ethanol looks bright. Japan has agreed to increase the level of ethanol it includes in its petrol and so has the United States. Brazil is hoping that Australia will also join its energy revolution.
LUIS CARLOS CORREA CARVALHO: We are waiting for Australia because Australia is an extremely important sugar cane producer, in terms of quality and costs, and we believe it is an extremely important example for the developed country.
Probably in the year 2030, 30% of all the power produced in the world will come from biomass. And there is no doubt that sugar cane will be the number one.