The article analyzes the land rent role for the sugar cane growers of two São Paulo State regions in the context of industry deregulation happened in the early 1990. Literature has shown that deregulation has had a positive impact in the performance of the industry, improving its efficiency and effectiveness. In this context, cane growers faced new challenges demanding adaptations and were induced to adopt strategies taking the land as a reference. The analytical material was obtained through questionnaires applied in a sampling of cane growers from the Ribeirão Preto and Piracicaba regions. The results has shown that land rent has had an important role to offer the conditions to the maintenance of cane growers, the viability of a scaling production, which is compatible to the technology demanded by the new competitive pattern established by that deregulation.