Sugar production, Brazil

Sugar production in Brazil dramatically increased after 1980 when the National Program of Alcohol was initiated to reduce dependence on petroleum imports. Over the past 20 years, sugarcane hectarage has doubled, yields have increased 50%, and ethyl alcohol production has tripled to more than 14 billion liters. A portion of these dramatic increases in Brazil is attributed to chemical weed control, which enabled better yield expression of new cultivars and improved use efficiencies in water and fertilizer. 

A different approach is provided by the utilization of carbon sources that have a considerable market value and do not constitute waste materials, but are produced in a process integrating the fabrication of the carbon substrate and PHA. This has been implemented on a pilot scale by the company PHB Industrial in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Starting from sugar cane, the company produces saccharose and ethanol. The waste streams from the sugar production (bagasse) and the bioethanol production (fusel alcohols) are used for running the PHA production and making it economically competitive. 

Cane sugar production currently amounts to approximately 65 percent of the total world sugar production. The largest seven producers are EC-12, India, the former Soviet Union, Cuba, Brazil, China, and the United States, in that order. ... 

Leao, F. M. D. Production of Amorphous Refined Sugar in Brazil, XVI Congress of International Society of Sugar Cane Technologists, pp. 2797-2809, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1978. 

The other alternative is to remove water from ethanol obtained by fermentation of fermentable sugar. Fermentation is a well-known technology that has been used for a long time. The interest to replace fossil fuel (gasoline) in cars with renewable fuel has increased the interest in bioethanol tremendously. The main sources are sugar from sugar cane (Brazil) or starch from corn (USA) or wheat (Europe). The production has increased steeply in the last 10-15 years [17] (see Figure 6.2). 

Both in the USA and the EU, the introduction of renewable fuels standards is likely to increase considerably the consumption of bioethanol. Lignocelluloses from agricultural and forest industry residues and/or the carbohydrate fraction of municipal solid waste (MSW) will be the future source of biomass, but starch-rich sources such as corn grain (the major raw material for ethanol in USA) and sugar cane (in Brazil) are currently used. Although land devoted to fuel could reduce land available for food production, this is at present not a serious problem, but could become progressively more important with increasing use of bioethanol. For this reason, it is important to utilize other crops that could be cultivated in unused land (an important social factor to preserve rural populations) and, especially, start to use cellulose-based feedstocks and waste materials as raw material. 

The example of a total extract composition of a tropical soil from the Amazon, Brazil, shows mycose as the major compound, numerous other monosaccharides, lipid components such as fatty acids and fatty alcohols, and natural product biomarkers (Fig. 9a). The mycose and elevated levels of the other saccharides reflect the efficient fungal/microbial degradation of plant detritus in the tropics. This can be compared to the saccharides in the soil from an almond orchard in California, where glucose and mycose are the main sugars with lipids, sterols and triterpenoids (Fig. 9b, ). 

Cachaqa and aguardente de cana are the most consumed distilled spirits in Brazil exclusively made from cane-sugar juice. Sugar and caramel maybe added for colour adjustment. The total content of congeners is between 200 and 650 mg 0.1 L p.e. Like other spirits, the flavour of cacha a is mainly characterised by the presence of fermentation by-products such as higher alcohols, esters, carboxylic acids, and carbonyl compounds [41-43]. 

Production and consumption statistics for sucrose are shown in Table 1. World production of sucrose during 1993—1994 was 110 million metric tons, of which 64% was derived from sugarcane. The largest producer is the European Union (EU), followed closely by India and Brazil. In 1993-1994, the United States ranked fourth in production. World raw sugar prices from 1990—1995 ranged from 20.20—32. 10/kg (10). 

Brazil s Alcohol Program. In Brazil, the enactment of legislation in 1931 made ethanol addition to gasoline compulsory at a level of 5% (86). Excess molasses and sugar were converted to alcohol in distilleries attached to sugar mills as a means to stabilize sugar prices. Production of fuel ethanol in the 1990s is mosdy from biomass. 

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