Social Impacts with the end of the Manual Sugarcane Harvest: A Case Study in Brazil

For almost two decades Brazil has become an important producer and consumer of biofuels as an energy alternative. The need to replace fossil fuels with clean fuels has given Brazilian ethanol an outstanding position. With the market promising, Brazil has been the scene of a growth of the cultivation of sugarcane monocultures to supply the sugarcane industry in the production of ethanol, sugar and energy. Data from FAO [1] indicate that Brazil ranks first in sugarcane (ha) with more than 10 million hectares of production, followed by India (5 million hectares) and China (1,700 million hectares). Currently in Brazil, the main sugarcane producing region is the Southeast, which in 2015 produced about 55% of the national production, with the state of São Paulo being the largest producer, followed by Goiás and Minas Gerais, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics [2]. The mesoregion of the Triângulo Mineiro and Alto Paranaíba, where the microregion of Ituiutaba is located (Figure 1), has become in the last decades a favorable territory for the growth of the sector in function of the following factors considered primordial and strategic: physical (climate, soil, and water resources), location, logistics, government incentives and environmental legislation with few restrictions (Figure 1).