Cartão Postal de Paraty

Cartão Postal de Paraty
Originally uploaded by Fernanda Marques.

Beautiful.... this is Paraty, where the Desafio Solar Brasil 2009 will take place.

Biofuel, for or against?

I get arguments from the horse's mouth, from both sides. For, from the president of Petrobras' new biofuel company, Petrobras Biocombustivel; against, from ecology professors from the best research centres in the country... And what am I to make of it?

Mr Kardec, the president of Petrobras Biocombustivel, a student of mine, tells me that the world needs biofuel to diversify its energy sources, fight against CO2 emissions and global warming. But that only a few countries in the world have the space and the climate to grow biofuel crops, like Brazil, for example. Here, biofuel crops will not take the place of food crops, or of the forest, or of indigenous people he says. There's a need, there's a market and Brazil has the potential to grow into a sizeable competitor. Biofuel crops are diversified - the oil isn't only produced from sugar cane here, but also from sunflower, mamona (see pic), soya, and others. And Brazil's Science and Technology Research council has just released R$4.5 billion for research into biofuel, including research into the use of microalgae to produce energy... So the race is on and Brazil has already jumped off the starting blocks.

Now what do the ecologists say to all this? Well. Biofuel is not a totally clean energy, because producing it produces carbon emissions. "The amount depends on the crop used, the cleanests being sunflower and ethanol" tells me Mr Kardec. For my ecologists friends from the Fiocruz Foundation, biofuel crops are only trouble. They are against. Acres and acres of monocultures are a disaster for biodiversity. For the soil. For the workers too - they work in near slavery conditions for a miserable salary.

I need more to make up my mind really... But my gutfeeling tells me biofuel is far from being all bad.

I will investigate more.

One day at UFRJ...

Caique and Esminia doing the coverage of the event















Flavio, Maxwell and Jose Clenio proud of their work















The girls doing their show

Rio, here we come!

Just imagine the mess: a busload of teenagers storming in on the literature department of a public University, happy, full of adrenaline, ready to invade the place...

The bus trip from Macae to Rio went surprisingly smoothly - the kids were anxious, with this mixture of anticipation and anxiety actors know well: stagefright. But then, once in the hallway of the 'Faculdade de Letras' they forgot all about knots in the belly and simply took over the place. The 40 students from the Colegio dos Pescadores were there, at UFRJ, to present their work, our work, and they didn't give anyone the chance to ignore them. There were dance shows, plays, panels, films, paintings - all the result of the work done in the school over the past years.

The kids probably didn't fully grasp the meaning of their presence there, for us, for the project, for the University. Our work is part of a social project ran by UFRJ, as part of their 'extension' programme. Our work is an attempt by the University, still considered a motor of social change in Brazil, to bring directly to the community the work of its experts. To share the knowledge it produces. To reduce the abyssal inequalities that exist in this country. Rare are the opportunities for people from the favela educated in government schools to enter a public University. They are kept out of it - what a contradiction! - by an appalling public education system and an unfair selection process, which favours rich kids educated in private schools. But now our kids got in there once, and may this moment motivate them to want to come back in a couple of years. Many of them are good and clever enough - they have all the genetic material for it, and if anything impedes them, then it is nurture, their environment, not nature that is to blame.