By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 30 1998 (IPS)

The severe drought in northeast Brazil, that caused near riots by 10,000 hungry citizens has forced officials to dust off plans to divert the waters of the Sao Francisco river to irrigate parched farmlands.

The project, estimated to cost at least 850 million dollars, was raised by president Fernando Henrique Cardoso during his campaign in the 1994 election. Now, it is resurfacing as a priority for the next presidential term, possibly headed once again by Cardoso, from 1999 to 2002.

The current drought, attributed to El Nino, has produced numerous incidents of looting of supermarkets, trucks and even schools that offer lunches to the students. A broad-based solidarity movement is collecting food from other eions around the country and delivering them to the 1,209 affected municipalities.

The national upheaval has given new life to the idea of using the Sao Francisco river – one of Brazil’s largest waterways — to help stop other rivers in the northeast from drying up in summer.

The waters diverted from the river would cross over 2,100 kilometers in four of the nine states of the northeast, providing water to an area inhabited by some six million people and irrigating at least 333,000 hectares of agricultural land.

The idea is to develop agro-industry in the region, especially fruit production, and in the process create close to 1.2 million jobs.

There are opponents to the scheme, however, with the strongest resistance concentrated in the state of Bahia, home to the largest segment of the Sao Francisco river. The waterway is known as the “river of national unity” because it connects the northeast with the center-south of Brazil. Bahia’s most prominent political leader, Antonio Carlos Magalhaes – president of the Senate – is opposing the project “until detailed studies prove that there will be no damages” to his state. he is fearful that Bahia will lose water resources that could be necessary for the expansion of farmlands after another project successfully transformed one of its municipalities, Juazeiro, into n important center of fruit production.

Bahia’s secretary of agriculture, Pedro Barbosa, meanwhile fears that the project could cause serious environmental damage.

and tyhe diversion of more than 80 cubic meters per second will reduce the flow of the river to such an extent that it will affect the production of energy in seven hydroelectric plants fueled by its waters, according to Jose Tedomiro de Araujo, director of the Executive Committee of Integrated Studies of the Sao Francisco River.

Each extra cubic meter will subtract 2.6 megawatts from the capacity of those plants. That, together with the energy that will be needed to raise the waters to 160 meters, will be a significant loss for the northeast, said Araujo.

The latest version of the project announced the diversion of 70 cubic meters per second. This is not sufficient for irrigation, nor is it justified for human consumption, because the states benefitted by the project will already will have enough water for that, he argued.

The projected irrigation requires 280 cubic meters per second, one-tenth of the average flow of the Sao Francisco. But that flow is very irregular: it reaches 11,000 in the rainy season and dips to 600 meters in September, the driest month, he added. The dams partially regulate this.

Politicians and technicians in favor of the project estimate that with the waters of the Sao Francisco river the northeast could be transformed into the largest fruit producing region in the world. Chile exports more than 1 billion dollars worth of fruit, with less than 200,000 irrigated hectares, they argue.

The semi-arid climate – which keeps plagues at bay and the land cheap and fertile — works to the advantage of agriculture, which could exceed productivity in other regions. The valley of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, for example, produces 130 tons of bananas per hectare, almost double the amount produced in Central America.

The challenge is to avoid certain political errors of the past, analysts opined. Northeastern areas already have spent billions of dollars in projects to fight the drought, especially dam construction. But these were built mostly on the land owned by large landholders, exacerbating social inequality and increasing overty among marginalized peasants.

The water in the dams was used for cattle rather than for irrigation which could have benefitted the poorest sectors. That distortion occurred due to the political influence of the landowners, who strongly support the government of president Cardoso, observed Celso Furtado, a former Minister of Planning.

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