it certainly was for sugar.
it was a happy day in hawaii when they phased it out, as the trucks hauling the cane to the mills were huge and always leaking bits of plants, whole stems sometimes.
i recall they used the bagasse (leftovers) to burn to fire the mill, but they still were losing money hand over fist.
the overall effects, from environmental to dietetic, were a right mess...
if they do extract the juice to make ethanol, then the bagasse would have serious mulching potential.
i think they burned the cane in order to strip the stems (sugar cane is a grass), so as to make it possible to haul more. the leaves have no juice, so were useless to the sugar producers.
obviously a very high-energy plant, doubtless to figure ever more in our future...though cane cutters did not have a good life, historically, in hawaii.
they worked them to death, and imported portugese overseers to crack the whips over the filipinos, chinese, and other asians. which leads me to wonder what kind of working conditions the cane cutters are experiencing in brazil, in order to produce $50 a barrel fuel...
however, the best replacement crop they've found, afaik, for the best farmland on the largely lava rock and cinders island of hawaii, was eucalyptus, which was burned for biomass, chosen for speed of growth.
which is problematic, because eucalyptus poisons the ground below it for other plants.
sigh. ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
