The term sustainability has been widely used in practically all productive sectors and society. Almost always focused on the environment and natural resources, it encompasses a broad concept, including social, energy and economic issues. In agriculture it has a strong meaning and an even greater importance, notably in our sugar-bioenergy sector.

I would like to give special focus now to an aspect that is no less important than the others, that is, the sustainability of production, a prerogative of the others. Not opportunely, we are experiencing an example of this production instability. Last harvest, driven by a favorable climate with adequate rainfall volumes and distribution, we had record production and productivity.

Challenging regions such as Araçatuba and São José do Rio Preto produced more than 90 tons of sugarcane per hectare, some units even reaching more than three digits. The Center-South produced a total volume of 646.6 million tons of sugarcane in the 2023/2024 harvest (April 2023 to the first half of February 2024), compared to 543.2 million of tons in the same period of the 2022/2023 season, representing an increase of 19.03%. Well, unfortunately this production is not expected to be confirmed for the 2024/2025 harvest, with initial forecasts of 580 to 590 million tons.

In any productive sector, this instability generates, in addition to marketing, investment and planning uncertainties, an inevitable increase in costs. But what has caused this instability, both in sugarcane production and in sucrose content? We have already highlighted in more detail in a previous article some of these main reasons, such as the unstable and unfavorable climate with more intense summers and prolonged droughts, the increase in plant losses and impurities during harvesting and failures and high consumption of seedlings during planting, the expansion for unfavorable edaphoclimatic environments, the aging of the sugarcane field, increasing the average age, with a reduction in the percentage of renewal and planting, the small renewal of the varietal stock and the increase in pests and diseases, among others.

We have also previously discussed that adequate and correct management can help to increase productivity. But how can we directly mitigate deflators in our production? Without a doubt, the climate, more specifically water stress, is the main and most difficult challenge to be mitigated. Irrigation has once again become one of the most discussed tools that we can use to guarantee the sustainability of production, as well as the longevity of sugarcane fields.

Not long ago, we associated irrigation only with regions with a very pronounced water deficit, or a very concentrated rainfall regime, such as the Brazilian Northeast or the north of Goiás, and even semi-arid conditions. Many of us went to visit irrigation in the Peruvian desert to encourage us to adopt it in our own conditions.

This paradigm has been broken, fortunately. In recent research and semi-commercial areas, we were able to verify the economic responses in productivity of rescue irrigation, even in traditional regions such as Ribeirão Preto. The rescue by spraying water depths of 40 to 60 millimeters, with the correct waiting time, guarantees not only the sprouting of ratoons and production of the next cut, but above all a greater longevity of the sugarcane field and better harvest management.

Full or deficient irrigation, by drip or pivots, has also brought surprising economic results, valuing the rational use of water, undoubtedly one of our most precious resources. Many groups in our sector have devoted increasing attention to irrigation, implementing large projects in some regions, thus aiming to stabilize its production, even in unfavorable years.

Among the mitigation of the harmful effect of the climate we can also mention the use of flowering inhibitors in years of greater induction and the intensive use of chemical, physiological and nutritional ripening agents to improve Total Reducing Sugar levels at the beginning and middle of the harvest. In the variety sector, it is necessary to intensify the use of those that have good ratoon sprouting, as well as abundant and deep rooting and a high population of stalks per area.

Upright bearing and harvestability are fundamental characteristics to reduce plant and mineral losses and impurities during harvest. We cannot think about production sustainability if we do not adopt urgent and efficient pest control measures, such as Sphenophorus levis, which has expanded and harmed the development of our sugarcane fields.

In the nutrition and physiology sector, we increasingly need to improve the rooting conditions for clumps, whether in the physical part, by improving soil preparation and decompaction, or in the chemical and physiological part, through the use of inputs that improve the emission of roots and their deepening. The use of humic and fulvic acids, growth and rooting promoters, nitrogen and phosphorus solubilizing fungi and bacteria, and a wide range of new agents that act on the plant's physiology and metabolic processes, can provide mitigation of stress effects water and nutrition.

To guarantee and measure this production sustainability, I propose that production units start to have the production or issuance of decarbonization credits as one of the parameters to be used. Not only in filling out the RenovaCalc, but also in building the amount of decarbonization credits generated, plot by plot, year by year. We cannot forget to encourage all these measures and considerations among independent producers or, as some still call them, sugarcane suppliers, responsible for almost 30% of our production.

Concluding our opinion, we also suggest continued attention to a series of procedures, attitudes and processes that are part of sustainability as a whole and which government bodies and financiers have expected from our sector, such as: maintenance of Permanent Preservation Areas and reforestation; preservation of biological assets and improvements in firefighting; reduced use of water in industrial processes; reduced tillage and soil conservation; rational use of inputs and increased waste application; increased use of bioinputs and biological control; crop rotation; decrease in traffic in the sugarcane field; rationalization of tire use; reduction in diesel consumption.

This last item is worth a special note, as I still consider it to be a major “Achilles heel” in our sector. We urgently need to reduce diesel consumption, either by improving yields and agricultural processes, or by replacing it with biomethane in the fleet of trucks, tractors and even harvesters. A sector that consumes an average of 5 to 6 liters of diesel to produce a ton of sugarcane and, consequently, ethanol, our fuel from the cleanest and most sustainable energy matrix on the planet, does not sound completely coherent.