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Biofuels

SAO PAULO (Dow Jones)--The growing global output of biofuels can help, rather than hurt, the 1 billion people who live in poverty around the world, said Brazilian vice president Jose Alencar on Monday.

However, rich countries must agree to open up their agricultural markets to less developed countries for the biofuels revolution to succeed, he added.

The vice president, speaking at the opening of a Sao Paulo ethanol conference, quoted an essay written by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and published in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian last Friday.

"Ethanol use does not threaten the environment," wrote Lula, as the president is popularly known, in the essay. "Neither does sugar cane harm rainforests, for it grows poorly in Amazonian soils."

The problem of world poverty is "the lack of income that keeps a billion men and women from eating adequately - not sugar-cane plantations," Lula continued.

Alencar added that Brazil was already set to offer its advanced sugar and ethanol technology to regions including sub-Saharan Africa, in order to help generate jobs and incomes locally via biofuels cultivation.

Mozambique, for example, is already launching a biofuel program with Brazilian help, he added.

Brazil, the world's leading ethanol exporter, is also the world's No. 2 ethanol producer after the U.S.

Global interest in biofuels has skyrocketed in the past year and a half due to towering world oil prices and climate-change concerns among other matters.

However, criticism from environmentalists and scientists has also heated up in recent months, as global corn and vegetable oil prices have soared to decade-long highs with growing biofuel use.

In the past few months, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro - despite their own national programs to jumpstart local ethanol production - have also leapt onto the anti-biofuels bandwagon, warning that diverting food crops to energy could adversely affect the world's poor.

Alencar rebuted that idea.

Brazil's biodiesel program, for example, is geared to helping small regional farmers in the country's poor north and northeast region, and therefore could help in the redistribution of social weath, said Alencar.

Biofuels can be both environmentally and economically sustainable as long as local programs allow for more social inclusion, he added.

"By making access to energy more democratic, biofuels offer hope to poor countries seeking to ally economic growth with social inclusion and environmental protection," he said, quoting Lula.

However, "this revolution will only occur if rich countries agree to open up their agricultural markets to enterprising farmers in developing countries."

Source:
Grace Fan, Dow Jones Newswires; 55-11-8473-5059; brazil@dowjones.com