You are promoting the greatest mass extinction since the asteroid hit the Yucatan. Tropical rain forests have by far the greatest biodiversity of any terrestrial habitat. A huge chunk of the Brazilian rain forest has already been converted to sugar cane fields just to meet the drive for internal energy self sufficiency. How many species are already extinct, no one will ever know as scientists were far from cataloguing all the rain forest species. Turning all the tropics into sugar cane production will not even come close to replacing fossil fuels. Brazilian ethanol is an ecological disaster.
Your friend from the biofuel company has another reason to want to obtain entry to the US market. The Brazilian national oil company recently made a huge offshore oil find and the need for ethanol to reduce dependency on foreign sources will be eliminated in a few years. While he is right that sugar cane is a more efficient source than corn, this doesn't mean that trying to supply the much larger US market will be anything but environmentally destructive.