02/01/2010 17h29

Sugarcane mechanized harvest to cover 60% of all São Paulo crops

Valor Econômico

More intensely, the process began in the 2006/07 harvest. Until that time, 34% of the 3.2 million hectares of sugar cane in the State of São Paulo were already harvested by machines. The concern was with the efficiency that was expressed in the gains of scale and in cost saving. But when the environmental component appeared on the stage, the dimension changed. The silent movement that was only visible in lands of São Paulo gained national proportion and started involving the whole sugar and alcohol chain.

In fact, the environmental appeal has created the need of the national sugar and alcohol segment to do more within a shorter time than foresees the law. Since then, the plants have invested R$ 1.2 billion (US$ 638.3 million) only in São Paulo to increase the mechanization by more than 20 percentage points and reach 53.4% in the harvest that has just come to an end (2009/10). Another R$ 300 million (US$ 159.6 million) are being invested in order to meet the goal of ending 2010/11 with 60% of the 4.3 million hectares harvested by machines.

Throughout the process, there was an anticipation of the legal requirements. This way, while the law determines the end of the burn in areas where mechanization is possible (down slope of up to 12%) by 2021, the plants have shortened this goal to 2014. Likewise, the legal demand of putting an end to the burn in 100% of the areas until 2031 has been anticipated to up to 2017. Both the anticipations have become official through the Agro-environmental Protocol, a commitment executed between the plants and the Government of São Paulo in 2007.

Despite the international pressure for a sustainable production, such effort has many economic reasons. The alcohol and sugar segment has two thirds of its production of sugar sold in the international market, which is more and more concerned with the sustainability of the activity. Besides, even though the volumes of ethanol shipped abroad have not reached this ratio yet, it is on the external market that a large part of the future expansion for the biofuel is based.

Other factors also weigh in the economic bias. The cost of production of a plant that harvests the sugar cane manually is 20% to 25% higher. One harvester replaces the arms of 80 to 100 employees. The Executive Director of Union of the Sugarcane Industry (Unica), Eduardo Leão de Sousa, recalls the carbon footprint of the initiative. "As it stops burning the sugarcane straw and uses it in the cogeneration of energy along with bagasse, the sector will prevent the emission of 60 million tons of CO2 equivalent between 2007 and the end of the burn in 2017", says Leão. With that there are economic gains to the extent that more energy will be produced by the plants to be sold in the market, using raw material that was previously rejected, the straw.