Newsletter January, 2004

After weeks of persistence I finally got to talk to a Trade officer at the Brazilian consulate. After an hour-long phone call he said, “Well you seem to be doing something interesting, come in and talk with me.” The consulate wasn’t exactly local being in LA. But it was clear that, like most business in Latin America, nothing is settled on the phone and you have to get to know whom you are doing business with. So I got on a plane and went to LA to meet him.

All my years of experience working in Latin America came to my aid. We did the cultural business dance and got to know each other. The way it works it that you talk about many things, only a few having to do with the business at hand. At some point a critical mass is reached where the parties realize that they know/trust/respect/appreciate each other enough to WANT to do business together. From that point on everything falls right into place.

So as we speak a first class tour of the entire alcohol fuel program of Brazil is being arranged with several parts of the government. We should be able to visit plants as small as 10,000 gallons per year to many millions, Farmer coops making fuel, and plants using unusual crops like banana waste. We’ll visit with barrio auto shops converting vehicles to alcohol, to manufacturers of conversion technology, to Bosch fuel injection engineers responsible for making alcohol work in Brazil. We will see it all. This is the first time an American has had an in depth look at their program in 20 years according to all my contacts in the field.

One of the International Institute for Ecological Agriculture's Board Members, Steve Zeifman, who is a professional film producer and videographer, will accompany me to shoot digital video of the whole thing and I will collect digital photographs for the book. Bob Fitch, who is famous as a peace and labor movement photographer, is planning on doing the still photography for the tour. The Martin Luther King and the Ceasar Chavez postal stamps are his work.

We should be in a position to work on importation of some of the auto conversion technology, additives to make alcohol usable in diesel engines and even farm scale alcohol plants once the book is out. We are still trying to raise the money for this tour for which we are budgeting a little more than $10,000 to cover the vehicle driver, translator, film, professional digital video equipment rental, stipends for the staff and of course the majority goes to travel costs.

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