How Brazil’s 1970s–80s Biofuel Program Turned Rural Workers into a Cold Lunch

This paper discusses the emergence of a particular race- and class-linked term to identify sugarcane workers in twentieth century Brazil: the bóia-fria, or cold lunch. The term gained currency as a consequence of labor informalization in Brazil’s sugarcane sector, especially in São Paulo. The term carried the weight of assumptions both about sugarcane labor and the cane fields themselves, as well as about workers. Long-term patterns of cane labor and exploitation mixed with more immediate transformations in agriculture to inflect people’s ideas about race, class, and environment. The paper covers debates about and among mobile workers from 1975 to 1980, a period corresponding to the first phase of the National Alcohol Program (Proálcool), which incentivized the production of fuel ethanol from sugarcane. Sugarcane workers were seen as the quintessential mobile rural laborers in a country where this category as a whole was growing. The paper establishes the economic context of the sugarcane sector, assesses the treatment of the mobile worker as a category, and then places cane workers’ experiences in the context of debates in the field of political ecology. Finally, it examines how rural workers’ unions confronted their increasingly precarious conditions under Proálcool by drawing attention to the impacts of agricultural and policy changes and demanding improvements.