Brazil’s Finance Minister has urged Britain to embrace ethanol, the petrol alternative made from sugar, as his nation attempts to use its growing agricultural might to power cars worldwide.

Guido Mantega told The Times that Brazil, the world’s largest supplier of ethanol, wanted to develop partnerships with British companies to bring the biofuel to the UK, as part of the fight against global warming.

Brazil, regarded by Goldman Sachs as one of the four emerging giant economies of the next 50 years, encapsulates both the challenge and the opportunities of climate change. The destruction of its rainforest, at the rate of 31,000sq km (12,000sq miles) a year, is one of the biggest causes of carbon emissions.

However, the country also leads the world in the use of low-emission fuel, which its scientists have spent 30 years refining from domestically grown sugar cane. Thanks to its tropical climate and a decision in the 1970s to become self-sufficient in energy, ethanol is widely available at the pump and has replaced about 40 per cent of petrol consumption.

Mr Mantega, on his first visit to London since becoming Finance Minister last year, said that Brazil hoped to double its exports of ethanol to meet growing international demand. Exports are set to rise from $600 million in 2005 to $1.3 billion in 2010, largely thanks to agreements signed with Japan and Sweden that he said could be models for Britain.

“We would like the majority of countries to adopt these alternative sources of energy and fuel,” he said. “In the UK . . . it’s possible to give more importance to ethanol. We can develop joint projects in such a way that we can introduce these alternative energy sources into regular consumption here.”

Farmers in the US produce ethanol from maize, which costs more to convert into fuel than sugar. But the farmers’ political clout has kept consumers insulated from Brazil’s cheaper product by steep tariffs.

Mr Mantega said he hoped that the Doha Round of trade talks could ease the logjam. “Our costs are 50 per cent lower, and the quality of the energy source is higher than the ethanol made from corn [maize] in America. So we can have more cooperation with America if they open the possibility for more imports from Brazil of ethanol and other agricultural products.”

He described President Bush’s proposals to cut farm subsidies by $18 billion over the next five years as “a positive signal towards the right direction”. Lower subsidies would mean that the competition from Brazilian farms would intensify. The country of 180 million already is the world’s largest exporter of beef, poultry, orange juice and coffee.

But the dark side of Brazil’s economic progress has been the deforestation of the Amazon region, which Mr Mantega calls “the lungs of the world”. The Stern Review said that land-use change accounted for 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2000, and singled out Brazil as the country with by far the worst level of deforestation.

Mr Mantega said that the challenges of patrolling the Brazilian rainforest, which is about the size of India, were legion. “You can imagine the difficulties that there are for us to avoid deforestation in such an area, and to protect the rainforest from predators, adventurers, gold-diggers and the like,” he said.

He suggested that richer nations contribute. “If other countries want to keep an atmosphere that has less pollution, these countries should help Brazil with material resources, in such a way that we could have much more rigorous surveillance . . . it could be a sort of conservation fee for nature.”

However, he said that Brazil had no specific proposals yet, and would not allow foreign aircraft to patrol the rainforest. Last month President Lula da Silva unveiled plans to boost growth and reduce government debt. The proposal includes modest tax breaks to encourage higher levels of private investment in infrastructure.

But analysts argue that high interest rates and Brazil’s bloated public sector, which takes nearly 40 per cent of GDP in taxes, have kept growth at a long-run average of only 2.5 per cent, at a time when China and India are growing four times as fast. They claim that the plans are too timid.

Mr Mantega rejected the criticism, saying that Brazil was on course to have growth of between 4.5 per cent and 5 per cent in the coming years. “After four years strengthening the fundamentals of the Brazilian economy, reducing inflation and improving our public accounts and fundamentally reducing our external vulnerability, Brazil is ready to have a growth that an emerging country should have,” he said. Brazil, the tenth-biggest economy, could reach the same size as Britain in ten to fifteen years, he said.

“And we do not need to surpass the UK,” he said. “If we get a tie with the UK, that’s fine.”

Raising cane

Brazil is the world’s largest producer and exporter of ethanol, producing 282,000 barrels per day in 2005

2010 production is forecast at 442,000 bpd

Over half of all cars in the country can run on 100 per cent ethanol or an ethanol-petrol mixture

Coimex Trading, a subsidiary of Brazilian conglomerate Grupo Coimex, is the country’s largest producer

Brazil is seeking to increase exports, but faces high tariffs in some markets. In 2005 it exported 7,200 bpd to the US

Source: US Department of Energy

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