By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2     

As global prices of food rise sharply, it is worth remembering that the "new" debate over ethanol versus food is actually a very "old" debate about sugar cane versus subsistence crops. And this is a polemic with a very long provenance in Brazil.

The question was always in the back of the mind of Brazil's colonial governors. For them it was a question linked to the risk of social upheaval.
Prosperity in the export sectors often led to dearth and high food prices in the domestic market, especially for urban consumers. Based on experience, the governors feared famine and disorder.

The matter became acute in the final decade of the colonial regime. In the 1790s a great slave uprising had taken place in the French Caribbean colony then know as Saint Domingue, now known as Haiti. French colonial sugar production which had dominated world markets was destroyed. As a consequence Brazilian sugar was again in high demand overseas.

The sugar cane planters of Bahia benefited from this surge of prices and international demand.  Bishop Azeredo Coutinho, a former planter turned ecclesiastic and economist, argued in his 1791 "Observations on the price of sugar" that full advantage be taken of the "providential revolution" in the French colony. He recommended that all constraints on sugar production be removed.

The "constraints" the Bishop deplored were colonial laws which obliged the planters to grow subsistence crops such as manioc. Without these legal constraints they exploited all their available land for cane in order to take advantage of the rise in the price of sugar. This in fact is what they were doing in the 1790s. As a result the price of manioc trebled in four years.

The professor of Greek in Salvador, Luís dos Santos Vilhena, condemned the Bishop for his "European" ideas which he claimed failed to take into account local conditions in colonial Brazil where food supplies were inelastic. But the planters were having none of this. Manuel Ferreira da Câmara wrote that the measures to protect subsistence production were due to a "zeal and devotion more religious than political."

An old argument, therefore, but with a peculiar Brazilian twist: in late colonial Brazil it was the bishop who defended the planters and the unfettered market, while it was the professor of Greek who argued for Christian charity and the poor.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper