("Will It Work"? This 1979 edition of Brazil's Veja Magazine reveals the hopes and doubts surrounding the introduction of ethanol in the country)Veja Magazine has been the main Brazilian news weekly since 1968, a kind of Time Magazine and Newsweek rolled into one. It is printed on glossy paper with easy-to-digest information, presented in articles that span from one to four pages.
Veja does a good job of capturing the Brazilian zeitgeist. So I decided to go back and check issues from the 1970s, when the Brazilian National Ethanol program, Proalcool, was being instituted.
What did Brazilians think of the program back then? What was the government’s strategy to introduce a novel fuel to the world’s tenth-largest economy, a country with a population of 120 million at the time? What were the roadblocks and pitfalls?
Below is the first installment of a series of translations of Veja articles from that time. It makes for a fascinating read, as we encounter the exact same doubts, gripes, and motivations, both declared and undeclared, that we are witnessing today on a global level.
Petroleum from Sugarcane
After years of hesitation, the Brazilian government has decided to make up for lost time and institute ethanol as the best alternative for the future.
June 13, 1979
It would be, in the opinion of its enthusiastic defenders, a sure passport to a problem-free energy future. And with formidable powers to single-handedly solve a good chunk of the country's problems, doing away, in one fell swoop, with the dark clouds that hover over the automobile industry, the balance of trade, the unemployment rate and inflation. But, in spite of all these qualities, the National Ethanol Program (Proalcool) will remain a vague promise, far from an effective path to rid Brazil of the petroleum nightmare.
Born in 1975, Proalcool ended up having to wait for an unfettered, disorderly break-out of petroleum prices that threatens to shake the Brazilian trade balance, this year with a likely shortfall of approximately USD 7 billion – about 50% of imports – to receive hope from the government. Such was the winning intention at last Wednesday’s meeting of the Council for Economic Development (CDE) in Brasilia, when new, ambitious goals and resources were added to the plan.
GLOBAL CONCERN – “This time, we won: the CDE has cinched the deal and there is no turning back now from Proalcool”, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Joao Camilo Pena, said to a friend, as he left the meeting in a state of euphoria. In fact, the CDE decided to invest USD 5 billion in Proalcool, until the end of the Figueiredo administration (1979-1985), in order to reach an equally-ambitious number: 10 billion liters (2.64 billion gallons) of ethanol per year. With such a volume, the government expects to meet, over the following six years, additional demand for gasoline, while fully supplying 475,000 vehicles with adapted engines and 1.225 million others with a factory-made ethanol-powered engine.
Cautious, many technical personnel believe that it would be more realistic to cut the approved goals by half. Likewise, among economists, businessmen, and consumers, there is no lack of people who are relatively cool to the measure. And such an attitude is hardly surprising. After all, this is not the first time that, after a CDE meeting, ministers of state proclaim the beginning of a new energy phase in Brazil. In January 1977, for example, then-president Ernesto Geisel, at a meeting of the same Council, supposedly assigned absolute priority to Proalcool – “with unlimited funds”. However, three years after its creation, weak statistics flow from Brazil’s distilleries. Doses that are, without a doubt, below the national thirst for fuel in a country that consumes 1 million barrels of oil per day, 85% of which is imported. For this year’s harvest, for example, billions of liters of ethanol for blending are expected to be produced. They will be added, at a 20% grade, to the 15 billion liters of gasoline consumed by the 7 million vehicles in the Brazilian fleet. And, even if the goals set by the CDE materialize in 1985, the situation would not change things substantially, pessimists contend.
(to be continued)
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