Análise das mudanças da colheita manual da cana-de-açúcar para a mecanizada no setor sucroenergético

Abstract

Brazil is the largest producer of sugarcane and its by-products in the world. For the 2020/21 harvest, sugarcane crushing in Brazil was 657,433 thousand tons, with the North-Northeast region responsible for 7.9% and the Center-South for 92.1%, of which the state of São Paulo alone is responsible for 54.22% of the Brazilian crushing (UNICA, 2022). From the beginning of the crop in Brazil until 2002, the manual harvest system predominated, until the arrival of Law 11.241 of 2002 and the Agri-Environmental Protocol of 2007, which promoted the mechanization of harvesting, due to the prohibition of the practice of straw burning, which resulted in changes in the sugar-energy sector. The objective of this study was to analyze the changes in the sugar-energy sector brought about by the transition from the manual harvesting system to mechanized harvesting, emphasizing the economic, social and environmental aspects throughout the 2000/01 to 2018/19 harvests for the sector in the State of São Paulo. The methodology used was the use of secondary data obtained by means of bibliographic reviews, books, academic papers, and other productions existing in the literature related to the area with emphasis on the sugarcane harvesting process. As a result, from the economic aspect, from the 2007/08 harvest to the 2018/19 harvest, there was an increase of 4437 harvesters in the state of São Paulo and the area harvested mechanically jumped from 33% to 93.3%, while manual harvesting declined from 67% to 6.7%. In the social aspect, one can see a reduction of 222,943 manual jobs in the sector, from 2007/08 to 2018/19, and an increase in the amount paid to sugar cane cutters. On the environmental side, there was a 46% reduction in water consumption from the 2010/11 to 2018/19 harvests, to produce 1 ton of sugarcane and, from the 2006/07 to 2020/21 harvests, there was a reduction of 1.63 million hectares with the use of authorized burning and a reduction of 11.82 million of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. In this sense, it can be concluded that with the advent of the Environmental Protocol in 2007, the practice of straw burning had its use limited and generated advances in the harvesting system, which resulted in a more sustainable harvest and less labor since the harvesters had greater harvesting capacity.