Okay Okay so I love sweets… is it a crime? Hell No! Haha! Now, I just heard this stuff about Brazilian Sugar and i am intrugued on how it taste. Of course, I have to wait for days before I can order some of those sugar from Brazil so I guess I’ll have to discover its taste by knowing how it is produced. I encourage my readers to join me figure out how the Brazilian Sugar is produced.. Yum Yum!
Brazil is the world’s largest producer of sugarcane, sugar, and fuel alcohol and one of the most cost efficient producers of sugar. It is also the leading exporter of sugar. Sugar accounts for about 2 percent of the country’s gross national product, 17 percent of the country’s agricultural product, and employs over one million people. Sugar is the eleventh leading export item following generic categories such as vehicles, aircraft, machinery, iron and steel.
Brazil’s sugar industry is closely interconnected to the to the fuel alcohol industry. During the last few years about 50 percent of the sugarcane output was used to produce fuel alcohol and the remaining 50 percent was used to produce sugar. The large area devoted to sugarcane production is due to several factors such as; its favorable returns relative to competing crops, the availability of under-used land that may be planted to cane, expansion programs by mills to increase output, elimination of export taxes, low land prices, and partial harvesting mechanization. Sugarcane has replaced citrus and pasture areas in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s leading sugarcane producing state. According to Agricampus, a Brazilian Research Company, the investment to plant one hectare of sugarcane ($855) is approximately 73 and 36 percent lower than investments required to plant one hectare of citrus ($2,789) and pasture ($1,172), respectively. In addition, sugarcane profit margins assessed through historical prices are 7.31 percent compared to 6.01 percent for citrus and 3.27 percent for pasture.
How then is it produced?
Sugarcane production began to increase during the late 1970’s in response to the artificially created demand for alcohol. The demand for alcohol is the result of several aspects of the government’s ethanol program. A central part of the ethanol policy is the mandatory blending of ethanol with gasoline. The government sets the blending rate, bans the use of diesel powered personal vehicles, requires government agencies to buy 100 percent ethanol powered vehicles, offers storage credits to millers, maintains a differential tax break favoring ethanol over gasoline, and finally ensures that imports do not disrupt the domestic program by maintaining a 21.5 percent duty on imports which may only enter under license. At the inception of the ethanol program the government fixed the price f gasoline so that it was higher than the price for ethanol. Although this program no longer exists it helped build ethanol demand.
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