B 2.4. What are todays environmental requirements for the burning of sugar-cane straw in the field?
Sugar-cane burning in the field is a practice that has been in use for centuries in many countries. The main goal is to facilitate the manual harvesting of sugar-cane, including by making it safer. It consists of using fire, in a controlled manner, to burn the straw (leaves and tops). Unlike people commonly think, that burning takes place in a small, very well-delimited area and is extremely fast (it takes 10 minutes, on average), as the sugar-cane stem is not burned during the process. Alternatively, sugar-cane can be harvested mechanically, in which case no burning is required. Because of the interest to reduce pollutants (especially unburned carbon, which causes dirt in urban areas) and risks of fire, banning that practice is advisable; that, however, must not take place abruptly because a large number of rural workers are still employed in manual harvesting (in 2006, around 70 percent of the sugar-cane harvesting was manual in Brazil), and a very fast migration to mechanical harves
