Case Study Costa Rica

National level: The smallest country of the Global-Bio-Pact Case Studies, Costa Rica has a long standing tradition of sugarcane production and ethanol production which started in 1918. The activity covers 9.3% of agricultural employment and 1.3% of total employment. Since 2004, Costa Rica dehydrates Brazilian ethanol to be further exported to the United States. Nowadays, the sugarcane area is 53,000 hectares, producing 400,000 tons. From these volumes ethanol production is still very limited, given favourable conditions for sugar supply and the lack of incentives to invest securely in ethanol facilities.

Local level: The local Case Study in Costa Rica is CATSA in Guanacaste representing a large modern plant in a flat area which is suitable for sugarcane monocultures. The plant produces ethanol for exportation (including to Germany) and has just passed successfully the auditing procedure of the International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC) Standard. In the 2008/09 harvesting season 13% of the national ethanol production (195,901 tons) was produced by CATSA. 800 farmers supply the plant with sugarcane (27% of cane processed in the mill).

The following Global-Bio-Pact report has been published:

CÁRDENAS A., FALLOT A. (2011)
Global-Bio-Pact Case Study: Socio-Economic Impacts of the sugarcane-to-ethanol production chain in Costa Rica
CATIE; Report of the FP7 Global-Bio-Pact Project (FP7-245085) [download]