The chairman of BSBIOS is sworn in the Council of Competitiveness of Plan Brazil Maior

Council of Renewable energies will receive the demands of biodiesel

This Tuesday morning, president Dilma Rousseff and the minister of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, Fernando Pimentel, installed the 19 Councils of competitiveness defined in the Plan Brasil Maior during ceremony at Palácio do Planalto. The chairman of BSBIOS and the Association of Producers of Biodiesel of Brazil (APROBIO), Erasmo Carlos Battistella, began to integrate the Council of Renewable Energies. The president emphasized that the council action will be important so that we may indeed have a diagnosis of the industry. "The advisors will systematically make a follow up on the situation and then they will make an adequate prognosis in order to keep Brazil in the path of development. The government has the instruments for the adjustments and the advisors will help us to build them," asserted Dilma.

The councils are formed by representatives of the government, businessmen and collaborators and they will be the space for discussion of sector-based themes and the construction of strategic agendas. The Council of Renewable Energies will bring about issues related to biodiesel, bioethanol, wind and solar power. "The exemption of the product export, the potential of the taxes reduction on fuel, and the increase of the rural product, with regard to oil raw-materials, are among other points we will discuss," asserted Battistella. Furthermore, the advisors will focus on issues like the revaluation of the biofuel commercialization models, identification of opportunities to invest in research, by focusing on diversification of vegetable oils raw material and on the development of new technologies in the industrial process. The chairman of APROBIO said that his priority in the council will be the interaction with the inter-ministerial technical group of the government which treats about the definition of the new regulatory mark to the sector, in the sense of contributing for the accomplishment of the work.

The Civil Office was responsible for forwarding a provisional measure in April or a Law Project to the National Congress with the result of this study, outlining the future of the biodiesel market in the country. Erasmo Battistella intends to include in this debate the product export perspective, improved in the studies of the chamber of competitiveness installed today by the Federal Government. The Minister of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, Fernando Pimentel, signed the creation of the councils by saying that there were more than 500 industry members there, employers and employees, demonstrating the way a democratic regime is done. "These representatives will join efforts and skills in order to reach the best result for the industries development. We will not make the decisions in the offices only, we need the involvement of everybody to strengthen the national productive sector," said Pimentel.

"Brazil will be one of the few countries which economic growth will be greater than the previous year, the prediction is that it reaches 4.5%," asserted the Minister of Finance Guido Mantega. In order to make this happen, other measures of Plan Brasil Maior were also announced during the ceremony, like the payroll exemption, tax reduction, exchange actions, increase of resources to export, credit cost reduction, stimulus to public and private investment, encouragement to information and communication, Automotive regime, among others.

Family Agriculture

The measure exempts the contribution of the companies to the Social Welfare, but it creates a mechanism of fiscal compensation with the adoption of a new aliquot on the billing recorded, in scale which was smaller than the exemption on contribution on the payroll.

The Chamber of Competitiveness of Renewable Energies will still discuss the creation and strengthening of critical competences, searching the improvement of labor training of the biodiesel productive chain, technical assistance to farmers who produce raw-materials, and strengthen family agriculture. Today, more than 100 thousand families of small farmers make part of the National Program of Production and Use of Biodiesel (PNPB), created by the government in 2005. This initiative has represented the greatest source of income to them. Last year, according to data from the Ministry of Rural Development, the purchase of raw material for the production of biodiesel represented an invoicing of R$ 1,4 billion.

Photo: Roberto Stuckert Filho/PR