The Oil Drum

But this is a paper, prepared for the World Wildlife Fund, which should be read for other reasons as well.  First of all it shows that sugar cane cultivation can (but doesn't necessarily have to) impact negatively in ecologically varying areas.  In fact rain forest areas seem only marginally under threat from sugar cane. (We should perhaps spend a little more time considering the impact of mining other low entropy resources, such as old growth woods from North American rain forests.)

One key point made in this paper relates to the impact of subsidized European and U.S. sugar production (mostly from beets) on sugar cane cultivation practices in poor countries.

Of particular value in the paper is the contention that Best Management Practices can mitigate, if not entirely overcome, negative environmental and social impacts of sugar cane cultivation.

This is of course what Milton Maciel has been telling us for years.  

Now, I don't know if Robert was referring to posts I have on occasion made when he wrote:

"One area that did not fare as well as sugarcane ethanol advocates have often advertised is on the issue of soil erosion. I have been told a number of times that there is no erosion from sugarcane production, or that production is managed such that the topsoil actually increases over time."

Milton Maciel has made numerous posts on Yahoo Groups - Energy Resources that organic sugarcane cultivation, and we of course assume best mangagement practices, does improve the topsoil over time.  Is he wrong?

I guess once a European or North American agency verifies the evidence then we will have "precisely the kind of study that has been needed to verify that claims ... are on sound scientific footing".  After all, what the hell is Brazilean research worth anyway?

Net energy analysis in my opinion, will be critical in the coming transition from fossil fuels to renewables (irrespective if there ends up being 10 billion people or 1 billion). But to parse everything into energy terms is not paying attention to systems analysis. We need to consider the impact on land, on labor, on soil, etc as well as energy. We still dont have a mechanism to synthesize and compare all these things. EROI is one measure. Dollars are another. We need something better.

Sure.  And to get a fair comparison let's calculate the energy burned by the advertising agency staff for the heavy machinery for the oil and gas service industry trade show.  And for that matter, their babysitters, so that the ad agents can work overtime.  Yeah, and the energy burned by the mother's of the pimply faced servers at the fast food joints, who send up sandwiches to the security staff so that the ad agents babysitters can babysit without risk of kidnappers.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuckerrohr#Geschichte

The last paragraph says:

"Today sugar cane is grown worldwide and produces 55 per cent of all sugar. Main production nations are India, Australia, Thailand, South Africa, the Caribbean and of course Brazil.
Working conditions on the fields are partially catastrophic. Often children and women are employed as laborers, poor payment is widespread in sugar cane cultivation anyway.
Brazilian plantage laborers earn some 2 Reais (appr. 70 Euro-Cents, as of aug 2006) for a ton of chopped cane.

Daily performance of good workers is 8 to 10 tons. That's why cane sugar can be sold so inexpensive, however it is not  competitive in the EU against beet sugar due to heavy duties."

This aspect is not mentioned on the english wikipedia site about sugar cane. The harvester is described there.

I may apologize when some expressions appear to be rude (maybe "performance" while speaking of human labor isn't nice) - I don't mean to insult anyone. This was a quick translation of the german text, and I am no native speaker.