Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of the Brazilian Mercantile & Futures Exchange I would like to thank the producers, brokers, traders, manufactures, hedge funds, and everyone else who attended this meeting.
President Bush, in his State of the Union address, set a goal of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels to be used by the year 2017, including those based on grains, cellulose, and ethanol. A great effort will be necessary to accomplish that.
A report from the United Nations has recently indicated sugarcane ethanol as the best alternative to increase energy offer by 2020.
We discovered this option in Brazil more than three decades ago. Instead of bowing down to the oil crisis in 1973, Brazil recycled its sugarcane industry, created the Proálcool program, and since 1975 made it mandatory the addition of ethanol to gas.
This initiative was not only pioneering, but also stimulated the industry of flex-fuel cars and reinforced the collective consciousness about the importance of reducing CO2 emissions. Every thousand liters of ethanol avoids the emissions of 4.23 tones of carbon. In 2006, five billion liters of ethanol were added to Brazilian fuels.
The convergence between the agribusiness and energy economies is inevitable. This creates a unique opportunity to accelerate agribusiness not only in Brazil and the United States, but also in Central America, Africa, and other developing regions of the world.
The automobile and oil industry cannot be blamed because there are 800 million car owners and 2 billion undernourished people. Hunger is not a derivative of the lack of food. Hunger is a derivative of a lack of strategies to create income and mass consumption. The expansion of ethanol agribusiness will generate new consumers, and awareness of the environment’s fragility.
Brazil can double its current ethanol production by cultivating on unused grasslands, ready open for agriculture. Instead of considering this “ethanol fever” as a problem, we should be considering it as a new and promising powerful push towards global development.
What BM&F brings today to New York is an important part of a “win-win” strategy. The launching of BM&F’s Ethanol Contract may contribute to global liquidity, by increasing the number of commodities contracts traded, with a solid anchor in an environmental- friendly product.
I ask you, traders, manufacturers, brokers, and all wealth-generating men – specially the hedge funds – to embrace this initiative. Let us not pass this opportunity by.
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here for the US Dollar-Denominated Ethanol Futures Contract
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Why Brazil is the Land of Ethanol"
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