7 Forces Driving More
where I walked up and down with shovel in hand, adjusting its flow,
clearing away obstacles. Most of the time I was by myself, except for the
occasional truck and driver or rider on horseback traveling along the
canal’s access road, waving or shouting words of encouragement.
As we walked, I explained how water had made the land more pro-
ductive, which in turn fed more people but also attracted newcomers to
the valley. Their interest in the land was not to provide food, but rather
a home. The water they needed came from a tap.
As we walked slowly while talking, runners and bicyclists detoured
around us. The path they were on wound through different subdivisions.
Any connection to the big canal and how it brought life to the valley had
disappeared. Its water was out of sight and out of mind.
vThe waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.
— Thomas Love Peacock
Appearances can be deceiving. Size-wise, Brazil is larger than the con-
tinental United States. The fact that it looks smaller on some maps is
due to early cartographers who scaled the world to favor the northern
hemisphere, the hot market for selling maps.
In Brazil sugarcane is king.^ In the 970 s, when global oil prices qua-
drupled, Brazil adopted a strategy of phasing out dependence on crude
oil by producing biofuel from sugarcane. Over time, its vast quantities of
land and ideal growing climate made Brazil the world’s largest sugarcane
producer. I and others from IICA had been invited to see how sugarcane
becomes biofuel.
Though forewarned of unending landscapes of sugarcane, we found
ourselves staring at mile after mile of towering green stalks on both
sides of the road, with nothing but more fields all the way to the hori-
zon. After two hours of traveling past the same vistas, we arrived at a
field being harvested. The latest technology was everywhere. Caravans
of combine harvesters painted the familiar tractor-green were zipping
along rows, cutting the plants near the base, stripping away the leaves,
chopping the cane into sections, and hurling the cut sections into trailers
pulled by tractors, all in perfect choreography.