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My task is to translate, photograph, film and get permission to accompany the Brasilian government's Mobile Group on a rescue mission to release men, women and children being forced to work in sub-human conditions...[by] unscrupulous land owners...since 1995, 30,000 slaves have been freed. Sandy and I were given permission to follow a group in Boca do Inferno...a sugar-cane plantation near to Cuiabá (MT)...home to Usina Itamarati, the largest sugar refinery in the country, owned by...Olacyr de Moraes...Slave labour is mainly found on the borders of the deforested Amazon Jungle. This type of work force [is] used...by major landowners and businesses that aim to cut down on production costs...Cattle breeding and the production of soya, cotton and sugarcane are the...biggest culprits...As soon as the workers arrive at the ranch, they're already in debt...Workers spend two, three months, sometimes up to a year, and never earn a penny...500,000 people working on the cane fields...spend hours out in the blazing sun to produce ethanol and sugar...[T]he government's 2nd Plan to Eradicate Slave Labour...aims to...increase the government's "black list" of establishments involved in slave labour, punishing these organizations by preventing them from drawing up new financial contracts with a range of Brasilian state-run banks.

This year biofuels will take a third of America's (record) maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world's overall grain stocks.

Corn is caught in a tug-of-war between ethanol plants and food, one of the first signs of a coming agricultural transformation and a global economic shift. Ever since our ancestors in the Fertile Crescent first figured out how to grow grains, crops have been used mainly to feed people and livestock. But now that's changing in response to the high price of oil, the cost in lives and dollars of ensuring a supply of petroleum imports, and limits on climate-warming emissions of fossil fuels.