BRASILIA (Automotive World) -- According to Luis Guedes, Brazil's minister for agriculture, the country should more than double its sugarcane land in the next few years. This, Reuters also reports him saying, is in a bid to continue Brazil's dominance of the growing global biofuels market, especially in ethanol.

As per current agriculture ministry estimates, Brazil should plant three million extra hectares of sugarcane to meet foreign and domestic demand between now and 2013. This, however, is far below Guedes' estimate. Currently, the country produces 450 million tons of cane from six million hectares of land.

In 2005, Brazil produced 17 billion liters of ethanol, of which 2.6 billion liters were exported to Asia, Europe and North America.

Flex-fuel vehicles, which run on ethanol, gasoline or both, make up 80% of new car sales in South America's most populous country.

Although environmentalists have criticized Brazil's growing ethanol program, stating that sugarcane crop expansion threatens rainforests, Guedes claims that the proposed doubling of plantation areas will come from using degraded pastureland and existing deforested areas.