ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Drought Brings Outages, Rationing to Cities

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 6 2000 (IPS) - Drought is no longer only a problem for farmers in Brazil. Today, city-dwellers are facing water rationing and the threat of power cuts.

Since last Thursday, three million people in Sao Paulo have been on a rationing system, going without water one day out of three.

But the much more severe troubles of the big metropolitan region of Recife in northeastern Brazil date back to 1983, with urban residents often facing the problem of dry water pipes six days a week.

In the northeast, Brazil’s most impoverished region, drought is a chronic problem, and most of the rivers do not run year-round.

Sao Paulo in the southeast, on the other hand, is suffering from a drought that occurs cyclically, more or less every three decades, due to alterations in the winds caused by the heating of the waters of the Pacific ocean, according to meteorologists.

The National Institute of Meteorology forecast almost zero rainfall in south-central Brazil up to September, which is expected to cause the worst drought in 25 years.

In the state of Sao Paulo, which has been hit hardest by the drought, just two mms of rain fell in May – compared to the month’s normal average of 90 mms – after a very dry April.

The rationing had begun even earlier in several cities in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo, like Sorocaba, just over 100 kms from the state capital.

In nearby Itu, schools have asked students to use the bathroom only once a day, and school lunches consist solely of food that does not have to be cooked, in order to save water.

The city of Sao Paulo is also suffering the effects of pollution of its water courses and springs, due partly to unauthorised housing and slums crowding the banks of rivers and reservoirs.

The current rationing was adopted to prevent the exhaustion of the water in the Guarapiranga reservoir, which supplies three million residents in the southern and western parts of the city of Sao Paulo, explained the president of the Basic Sanitation Company of the State of Sao Paulo, Ariovaldo Carmignani.

But the real cause of the problem is urban sprawl around the greater Sao Paulo – Brazil’s largest city – with the expansion of the metropolis towards the area where several rivers have their source, polluting the water and reducing the available supplies of clean water, he said.

The non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA) reported that the Guarapiranga river basin lost more than 15 percent of its vegetation in the past 10 years, while urbanisation around it grew by 50 percent.

Although so far this year rainfall has surpassed the normal average in Sao Paulo, the water level in the reservoir dropped to less than half of the maximum level after two months of drought, despite normal consumption levels.

That meant the system’s water collection capacity dropped, said ISA official Marussia Whately.

Whately said illegal urbanisation along the banks of rivers and reservoirs continued, and could lead to a permanent shortage of water in the metropolitan region of Sao Paulo, a city of 17 million located on a plateau near the source of several rivers, which means the area has limited possibilities for collecting water.

The inefficiency of Brazil’s sanitation companies, which post losses of 40 percent of the water distributed, is another aspect of the problem.

But in Sao Paulo the losses amount to just 17.2 percent, “better than in Europe,” according to Carmignani. Although the official rate is 32 percent, much of that is due to unregistered consumption – the result of fraud – and to errors in measuring, he maintained.

The low levels of water are also worrying industrialists in south-central Brazil, who are concerned that electricity might begin to be rationed in the next few months, and who fear an even more severe crisis next year, during a time of economic recovery.

The effects of climate change in Brazil are also greater than in other countries, because rivers provide 93 percent of the country’s power supply.

But that high level of dependence is to be reduced to 80 percent, thanks to the construction of 49 thermoelectric plants that will use natural gas. However, it is not likely that they will all begin operating by the 2003 deadline.

One problem is a shortage of interested investors. Another is the fact that the global industry of gas turbines, made up of a handful of companies like Germany’s Siemens and the US General Electric, has warned that its production levels will fall short of meeting the needs of Brazil’s energy programme.

The eventual energy shortage, and consequent outages, could affect 11.9 percent of southeastern and west-central Brazil next year, states a report by Electrobras, the public power company, which points out that the acceptable level is six percent.

Voluntary rationing is the only way to keep the situation from getting worse, said the Brazilian Association of Energy Consumers, which links 52 large industrial groups that account for one-fifth of energy consumption in the country. The association urged the government to immediately begin to implement a rationing programme.

The Federation of the Industries of Rio de Janeiro distributed among its members a document warning that rationing would be inevitable next year, and perhaps as early as this year. The federation urged companies to expedite their power-generation and energy conservation plans.

Minister of mines and energy Rodolpho Tourinho denied, however, that rationing would be needed, pointing out that Brazil has begun to import electricity from Argentina: 1,000 megawatts, to climb to 2,000 by year-end. He also pointed to the inauguration of a number of thermoelectric and hydroelectric plants in the near future.