Eronildes da Silva proudly stands next to a bunch of bananas on his farm, whose large size is the result, he says, of the effective fertilizer of reusing waste water. In addition to farming, he drives a school bus and builds rainwater tanks in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil's semiarid Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
AFOGADOS DA INGAZEIRA, Brasil, Jun 30 2023 (IPS)

“The rainwater tanks are the best invention in the world for us,” said Maria de Lourdes Feitosa, 46, who recalls the deadly droughts of the past in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region.

“There has been a reduction of many diseases” that came from the so-called “barreros”, puddles and small ponds that are the result of the accumulation of water in muddy holes in the ground that people shared with animals, Feitosa, a farmer from a rural community in Afogados da Ingazeira, a municipality of 38,000 inhabitants, told IPS.

Feitosa owns a six-hectare farm and is less dependent on water than some of her neighbors because she produces agroecological cotton, which requires less water than horticultural and fruit crops.

Nearly 1.2 million tanks that collect 16,000 liters of potable rainwater from the roofs of homes now form part of the rural landscape of the semiarid ecoregion, an area that covers 1.1 million square kilometers and is home to 28 million of Brazil’s 214 million people, which extends throughout the interior of the Northeast and into the northern fringe of Brazil’s Southeast region.

The water tanks are a symbol of the transformation that the Northeast, the country’s poorest region, has been undergoing since the beginning of this century. During the longest drought in its history, from 2011 to 2018, there was no repeat of previous tragedies of deaths, mass exodus of people to the south and the looting of businesses by desperate people, as seen in the 1980s and 1990s.

According to the Articulação Semiárido Brasileiro (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organizations that created the program, adopted as public policy by the government in 2003, some 350,000 families are still in need of water tanks.

This 16,000-liter concrete slab tank stores rainwater collected on the roof and uses pipes to provide drinking water for Josaída Nunes and Eronildes Silva, in the Sertão de Pajeú, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Another battle is to increase fourfold the more than 200,000 “technologies” for collecting water for production, or “second water”, which already benefit family farming and are decisive for food security and poverty reduction in the region.

Reusing household water

Josaida Nunes da Silva, 38, and her husband Eronildes da Silva, 41, resort to reusing water from the bathroom and kitchen in their home, faced with shortages aggravated by the altitude of the hill they live on in Carnaiba, a municipality of 20,000 people bordering Afogados da Ingazeira.

A complex of pipes carries the wastewater to the so-called “fat box” and then to the Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) reactor and a tank for “polishing”, exposed to the sun, and another for the water ready for irrigation.

This system filters contaminating components, such as fecal coliforms (bacteria), and prepares the water with fertilizers for irrigation of the fields and fruit trees. “We grow lettuce, onions, cilantro and other vegetables, as well as bananas, corn, cassava, papaya, guava, passion fruit and even dragon fruit,” said Nunes.

Dragon fruit comes from the cactus family, of Mexican and Central American origin, and has recently become popular in Brazil.

The large size of the banana bunch is “proof” of the fertilizer’s effectiveness, said Nunes’ husband, who adds cow dung. “The treated water is a blessing. Besides providing us with water, it gives us good fertilizer,” Nunes said.

A “stone tank” that takes advantage of holes in the rocks to store rainwater is one of the technologies used to coexist with the scarcity of rainfall in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast ecoregion. In the background can be seen the mountainous landscape of the Sertão de Pajeú, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Her husband Silva is also a bricklayer and has built many water tanks in the region. He also drives school children from the rural area in an old van and keeps fodder for his ten cows in hermetically sealed plastic bags.

“The drought hit us hard. We had to bring water from the ‘barrero’ on the plain, up the mountain in the ox cart. We bought a cow, when she was still a calf, for 2500 reais and had to sell it for 500 reais (104 dollars),” lamented his wife.

The couple owns 8.5 hectares of land, a large property in the region where most farms are only a few hectares in size, the result of the frequent divisions between heirs of the large families of the past. But since the terrain is mountainous and rocky, the cultivable area is limited.

Nunes and Silva have three children, although only the youngest, 17, still lives with them.

Farmer Aluisio Braz (L) dries and threshes beans, accompanied by his wife, Joselita Ramos, on the terrace of their house that collects rainwater to fill the 52,000-liter tank at the back for agricultural irrigation on their farm in Carnaiba, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Coexisting with semiarid conditions

The techniques that benefit family farmers so that they can “coexist with the semiarid conditions” and prosper have been disseminated in the municipalities of the Sertão de Pajeú by Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches.

Pajeú is the name of the river that crosses 17 municipalities, whose basin is home to 360,000 people. The mountains surrounding the territory include the headwaters of several streams and creeks, which dry up in the dry season, but ensure greater humidity compared to other areas of the semiarid Northeast.

Agroecology practices are one of the focuses of Diaconia, whose agricultural technician Adilson Viana has dedicated 20 of his 49 years to supporting farmers and who accompanied IPS on visits to families involved in the program.

A tank that collects 52,000 liters of rainwater for production is the treasure of Joselita Ramos, 49, and her husband Aluisio Braz, 55, on their two-hectare farm, also located in Carnaiba.

The UASB reactor is an important component in the system for reusing bath and kitchen water for family farming in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

The rainwater falls on a concrete terrace on the ground that is about 200 square meters in size and is slightly inclined to fill the water tank. Braz uses it to dry and thresh string beans, which are typical of the Northeastern diet.

The couple grows fruit trees that Ramos uses to make pulp using mango, guava, acerola cherry (Malpighia emarginata) and a fruit native to the semiarid region, the umbu or Brazil plum (Spondias tuberosa), that comes from a small tree native to Northeast Brazil.

Ramos is taking a break from the activity “because it is not fruit season in the region and the energy to run the refrigerator is very expensive.” Another difficulty is that the city government’s payments for the pulp supplied to the schools have been delayed. “I only received a payment in November for sales from early last year,” she complained.

To boost the production of grains, such as beans and corn, as well as cassava, Braz grows them on his father’s four-hectare farm, about six kilometers from his own farm.

Ivan Lopes, an enterprising family farmer, shows a soursop plant that is highly productive thanks to irrigation with reused water and natural fertilizers, on his farm in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Agroecological productivity

An exceptional case of entrepreneurial vocation and availability of water is that of Ivan Lopes, 43, who together with his brother grows fruit, including bananas, pineapple, mango, grapes, avocado, passion fruit and many more, on nine hectares of land.

Water is pumped from a lagoon on the property to four reservoirs located at the higher elevations, which make gravity irrigation possible. That is why electricity is one of the farm’s biggest expenses. “I plan to install a solar power plant to save money,” Lopes told IPS.

Honey is another product they make. “The last harvest totaled 40 liters,” from dozens of hives distributed throughout the orchard. Sugarcane is grown for the sale of sugarcane juice in the cities.

The farm is also a kind of laboratory for the dissemination of organic tomato cultivation in greenhouses. “At the agroecological market in São José do Egito (a neighboring city of 34,000 people) people line up to buy my tomatoes, because they are known to be clean, pest-free and tasty,” Lopes said.

Based on their experience, there are now 10 projects for tomato production in the Pajeú Agroecological Association.

To achieve his high level of productivity, the farmer makes his own fertilizer from earthworm humus. The success he has experienced in farming prompted him to get rid of his 10 cows in order to focus on crops and beekeeping.

Lucineide Cordeiro loads manure from her two oxen and two calves into the "sertanejo" biodigester that produces biogas for cooking and biofertilizer for her varied crops on the one-hectare agroecological farm she manages on her own in the rural municipality of Afogados da Ingazeira, in the semiarid ecoregion of northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
AFOGADOS DA INGAZEIRA, Brazil , Jun 24 2023 (IPS)

“The biodigester really gives a huge boost to those who have the courage to do things,” said Maria das Dores Alves da Silva, based on her own experience as a 63-year-old small farmer.

She did not hesitate to accept the offer of Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, to acquire the equipment to produce biogas on her farm in the rural area of Afogados da Ingazeira, a municipality of 38,000 people in the state of Pernambuco in the Northeast region of Brazil."We seek to promote energy, food and water autonomy to maintain more resilient agroecosystems, to coexist with climate change, strengthening community self-management with a special focus on the lives of women." -- Ita Porto

At first she did not have the cattle whose manure she needed to produce biogas, that enables her to save on liquefied petroleum gas, which costs 95 reais (20 dollars) for a 13-kg cylinder – a significant cost for poor families.

She brought manure from a neighboring farm that gave it to her for free, in an hour-long trip with her wheelbarrow, until she was able to buy her first cow and then another with loans from the state-owned Banco del Nordeste.

“Now I have more than enough manure,” she said happily as she welcomed IPS to her four-hectare farm where she and her husband have lived alone since their two children became independent.

Das Dores, as she is known, is an example among the 163 families who have benefited from the “sertanejos biodigesters” distributed by Diaconia in the sertão of Pajeú, a semiarid micro-region of 17 municipalities and 13,350 square kilometers in the center-north of Pernambuco.

Farmer Maria das Dores Alves da Silva stands between the manure pit and the “sertanejo” biodigester designed by Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, which has already installed 713 biogas production plants in eight of Brazil’s 26 states. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Biofertilizer

In addition to using the biogas, she sells the manure after it has been subjected to anaerobic biodigestion that extracts the gases – the so-called digestate, a biofertilizer that she packages in one-kilo plastic bags, after drying and shredding it.

Every Saturday, she sells 30 bags at the agroecological market in the town of Afogados da Ingazeira, the municipal seat. At two reais (40 cents) a bag, she earns an extra income of 60 reais (12.50 dollars), on top of her sales of the various sweet cakes she bakes at home, at a cost reduced by the biogas, and of the seedlings she also produces.

The seedlings provided her with a new business opportunity. “The customers asked me if I didn’t also have fertilizer,” she said. The biodigester produces enough fertilizer to sell at the market and to fertilize the farm’s crops of beans, corn, fruit trees, flowers and different vegetables.

This diversity is common in family farming in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, but even more so in the agroecological techniques that have expanded in this territory of one million square kilometers in the northeastern interior of the country, which has an arid biome highly vulnerable to climate change, subject to frequent droughts, and where there are areas in the process of desertification.

The Pajeú river basin is the micro-region chosen by Diaconia as a priority for its social and environmental actions.

On Lucineide Cordeiro’s small farm, cotton, corn, sesame, sunflower, cassava and fruit trees are alternated in the fields, as recommended by agroecology, which is on the rise on family farms in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, which is threatened by longer and more severe droughts due to the climate crisis. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Energy and food security

“We seek to promote energy, food and water autonomy to maintain more resilient agroecosystems, to coexist with climate change, strengthening community self-management with a special focus on the lives of women,” Ita Porto, Diaconia’s coordinator in the Pajeu ecoregion, told IPS.

“The production of biogas on a rural family scale fulfills the needs of energy for cooking, sanitary disposal and treatment of animal waste and reduction of deforestation, in addition to increasing food productivity, with organic fertilizer, while bolstering human health,” said the 48-year-old agronomist.

More than 713 units of the “sertanejo biodigester”, a model developed by Diaconia 15 years ago, have been installed in Brazil. In addition to the 163 in the sertão do Pajeú, there are 150 in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte and another 400 distributed in six other Brazilian states, financed by the Caixa Econômica Federal, a government bank focused on social questions.

“Hopefully the government will make it a public policy, as it has already done with the rainwater harvesting tanks in the semarid Northeast,” said Porto.

More than 1.3 million rainwater harvesting tanks for drinking water have already been built, but some 350,000 are still needed to make them universal in rural areas, according to the Articulation of the Semi-Arid (Asa), a network of 3,000 social organizations that spearheaded the transformative program.

Maria Das Dores examines the biofertilizer that comes out of the biodigester, without the gases from the animal manure. She sells this by-product at the agroecological market in the town of Afogados da Ingazeira, the seat of the municipality where her four-hectare farm is located, which earns her an average extra income of 12.5 dollars a week. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

The value of manure

“One cow is enough to produce the biogas consumed in our stove,” said Lucineide Cordeiro, on her one-hectare farm where she grows cotton, corn, sesame seeds and fruit, in an interconnected agroecological system, along with chickens, pigs and fish in a pond.

She also has two oxen and two calves, which she proudly showed to IPS during the visit to her farm.

“Pig manure produces biogas more quickly, but I don’t like the stench,” the 37-year-old farmer who is the director of Women’s Policies at the Afogados da Ingazeira Rural Workers Union told IPS.

The difference in the crops before and after fertilization by the biodigester by-product is remarkable, according to her and other farmers in the municipality.

She tends to her many crops on her own, although she is sometimes helped by friends, and has several pieces of equipment such as a brushcutter and a micro-tractor.

“It’s the best invention,” says Lucineide Cordeiro, as she shows IPS the seeder created by the Japanese for small-scale farming, which allows her to sow in half a day the land that used to take her two days to plant, on her one-hectare farm in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“But the seeder is the best invention that changed my life, it was invented by the Japanese. Planting the seeds, which used to take me two days of work, I can now do in half a day,” Cordeiro said.

The seeder is a small machine pushed by the farmer, with a wheel filled with seeds that has 12 nozzles that can be opened or closed, according to the distance needed to sow each seed.

The emergence of appropriate equipment for family farming is recent, in a sector that has favored large farmers in Brazil.

Female protagonism clashes with male chauvinist violence

For the success of local family farming, the support of the Pajeú Agroecological Association (Asap), of which Cordeiro is a member and a “multiplier”, as the women farmers who are an example to others of good practices are called, is important.

In family farming the empowerment of women stands out, which in many cases was a response to sexist violence or oppression.

Blue flames emerge from the burners of Maria Das Dores’ biogas stove at her home in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. A single ox or cow produces enough manure to generate more biogas than a family requires for its domestic needs. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“The first violence I suffered was from my father who did not let me study. I only studied up to fourth grade of primary school, in the rural school. To continue, I would have had to go to the city, which my father did not allow. I got married to escape my father’s oppression,” said Cordeiro, who also separated from her first husband because he was violent.

After living in a big city with the father of her two daughters, she separated and returned to the countryside in 2019. “I was reborn” by becoming a farmer, she said, faced with the challenge of taking on that activity against the idea, even from her family, that a woman on her own could not possibly manage the demands of agricultural production.

Organic cotton, promoted and acquired in the region by Vert, a French-Brazilian company that produces footwear and clothing with organic inputs, has once again expanded in the Brazilian Northeast, after the crop was almost extinct due to the boll weevil plague in the 1990s.

In the case of Das Dores, a small, energetic, active woman, she has a good relationship with her husband, but she runs her own business initiatives. Thanks to what she earns she was able to buy a small pickup truck, but it is driven by her husband, who has a job but helps her on the farm in his free time.

“He drives because he refuses to teach me how, so I can’t go out alone with the vehicle and drive around everywhere,” she joked.

Many people living on the banks of rivers in the Amazon rainforest live in stilt houses over the water. Water into which garbage and other waste is dumped – the same water that is used for human consumption, with important consequences on their health, whose magnitude was underlined by the Covid pandemic. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

Basic sanitation, a sector that is undervalued because, according to politicians, it does not bring in votes, has gained relevance in Brazil due to the pandemic that has hit the poor especially hard and the drought that threatens millions of people.

Brazil has made very little progress in sewerage construction in the last decade. In 2010, only 45.4 percent of the population had sewer service, a proportion that rose to 54.1 percent in 2019. Access to treated water increased from 81 to 83.7 percent in the same period.

During that time, however, hospitalisations due to waterborne diseases decreased by 54.7 percent, from 603,623 to 273,403, according to the study “Sanitation and Waterborne Diseases” by the Trata Brasil Institute, released on Oct. 5 in the city of São Paulo.

Among children under four, who represent 30 percent of the patients requiring hospital admission, the reduction was slightly more pronounced, 59.1 percent.

“The data make it clear that any improvement in the public’s access to drinking water, collection and treatment of wastewater results in great benefits to public health,” the Institute’s president, Édison Carlos, stated in the report.

Covid-19 has underscored the country’s social and economic inequalities by disproportionately affecting the poor, who for one thing are the least likely to have sewerage services.

This is reflected in the distribution of basic sanitation infrastructure by region in Brazil. In the North, only 12.3 percent of the population was served by a sewer system in 2019, the last year data was available from the governmental National Sanitation Information System (SNIS), which served as the basis for the study.

As a result, it is the region with the highest rate of hospitalisations, 22.9 per 10,000 inhabitants. It is also the region that concentrates the country’s most generous water resources, as it is located entirely in the Amazon basin.

But the presence of so many large rivers does not mean the local population has drinking water. In fact only a little more than half of the population has access to clean water.

The result is a high incidence of diarrhea, dengue fever, leptospirosis, schistosomiasis, malaria and yellow fever, all of which are waterborne diseases.

One of the favelas or shantytowns of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, where local residents have turned a stream into an open-air garbage dump and a source of frequent flooding due to lack of sewage and garbage collection. Nor do favelas in Brazil’s cities have piped water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

At the other extreme, the Northeast region suffers from water scarcity in most of its semiarid territory. With only 28.3 percent of the local population served by sewer systems and 73.9 percent with access to treated water, it recorded 19.9 cases of hospitalisation per 10,000 inhabitants in 2019.

Part of the progress in sanitation in the region is due to the more than 1.2 million rainwater storage tanks that have been set up in rural areas by the Articulação do Semiárido (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organisations created in 1999.

The semiarid ecoregion, an area of 1,130,000 square kilometres (most of it in the Northeast) that is home to 27 million people, suffered the longest drought on record from 2012 to 2017, and even until 2019 in some parts.

But this time the hunger, violence and exodus to other regions triggered by similar calamities in the past did not occur.

Disparities in health

A comparison of Brazil’s 26 states reveals more alarming disparities. The northeastern state of Maranhão, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, registered 54.04 hospitalisations per 10,000 inhabitants, far higher than its Amazonian neighbour to the west, Pará, with 32.62.

“Maranhão faces huge challenges in sanitation, as does Pará, but it has higher population density, more people living close together and in contact with dirty water in the open air, for example. Its beaches, often polluted by irregular waste, are another factor to consider,” said Rubens Filho, head of communications at the Trata Brasil Institute and coordinator of its new study.

At the other end of the scale, Rio de Janeiro stands out with the lowest rate of hospitalisations, only 2.84 per 10,000 inhabitants, even though some of its low-income municipalities are among those with the poorest sanitation coverage.

“It is possible that some municipalities do not register cases of waterborne diseases or that people do not seek medical assistance,” Filho told IPS from São Paulo, in an attempt to put the low rate of hospitalisations into context.

“Above and beyond the differences between states, Brazil still has more than 270,000 hospitalisations for preventable diseases; these are costs that could be drastically reduced if everyone had sanitation coverage,” he stressed.

Rainwater harvesting tanks are now part of the landscape in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, thanks to recent initiatives to help people live with drought. There are some 200,000 tanks for irrigating crops, like those of farmer Abel Manto, and 1.2 million to store drinking water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The North and Northeast are the poorest regions in the country, despite the enormous contrast in terms of their ecosystems – rainforest vs semiarid. They are both far from the goal of near universal sanitation in the country by 2033, set by a law – the Legal Framework for Sanitation – passed in 2020.

More precisely, the aim is to bring treated water to 99 percent of the population and sewerage to 90 percent in this enormous country of 213 million people.

The three regions least affected by the lack of such infrastructure, the Midwest, South and Southeast, are suffering this year from the effects of reduced rainfall, apparently due to climate change and no longer to occasional, short-lived droughts.

The low rainfall began in 2020 and since then has caused interruptions in the water supply in cities such as Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Paraná, and an increase in forest fires in the Pantanal, wetlands on the border with Bolivia and Paraguay, and in the southern Amazon jungle.

This year, many cities in the southeastern state of São Paulo began rationing water. In the state capital, São Paulo, and surrounding urban areas, the local sanitation company reduces the pressure in the pipes at night, a measure that prevents leaks but leaves some areas without water.

The fear is that there will be a repeat of the 2014 and 2015 water shortage crisis, which was similar to other shortages that have occurred this century. Twenty years ago a similar drought caused blackouts and ushered in energy rationing for nine months, starting in June 2001.

Brazil depends heavily on rivers for its electricity supply. Even though the proportion was much higher two decades ago, hydroelectric power plants still account for 63 percent of total installed generation capacity.

Reforestation and recovery of springs and headwaters have become part of the country’s sanitation and energy policy.

The frequency of droughts in south-central Brazil confirms the role of the lush Amazon rainforest in increasing rainfall in large areas of this country and neighbouring Argentina and Paraguay.

So-called “flying rivers” carry moisture from the Amazon to South America’s most productive agricultural lands and to watersheds that play a key role in the production of hydroelectricity. But deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest is taking its toll.

A view of the shantytown in São Bernardo do Campo, the hub of Brazil’s automobile industry, near São Paulo. A common sight in the poor neighbourhoods in Brazil’s cities: unpainted cinderblock houses are stacked on top of each other over streams, into which they dump their debris and garbage. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lessons learned from Covid-19

Covid-19 has highlighted the urgent need for sanitation. There is a consensus among epidemiologists that the lack of sanitation is one of the factors in the unequal spread and lethality of the coronavirus, to the detriment of the poor, by limiting access to proper hygiene as a preventive measure.

With 598,152 deaths recognised by the Ministry of Health up to Oct. 4, Brazil’s death toll is second only to that of the United States, which counts more than 703,000 deaths due to Covid. But in proportional terms, 280 Brazilians have died per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 214 in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland., which keeps a global record on the pandemic.

The need for improved sanitation infrastructure is also gaining momentum for financial reasons. Brazil’s states, whose governments control the main sanitation companies, see privatisation as a source of revenue to overcome their fiscal imbalance and possibly give the sector a boost.

The 2020 Legal Framework for Sanitation encourages the concession of the service to the private sector as a way to attract investment and meet the goal of near universal coverage.

Companies in four Brazilian states have already been privatised. In Rio de Janeiro, on Apr. 30, 2021, the sanitation services of three of the four areas into which the state was divided will be handed over to private groups for 4.2 billion dollars, 133 percent more than expected.

The fourth area is to be privatised later this year. The 35-year concession requires larger investments than the sums paid for the operation of the services.

Cleaning up rivers, lakes and bays, expanding and repairing the pipeline network, improving water quality and reducing distribution losses, estimated at 41 percent, are tasks that will fall to the new owners.

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 23 2020 (IPS)

No one died of hunger during the worst drought in Brazil’s semiarid ecoregion, between 2011 and 2018, in sharp contrast to the past when scarce rainfall caused deaths, looting, a mass exodus to the South and bloody conflicts.

Social programmes such as Bolsa Familia (family grant), an expansion of pensions for retired peasant farmers and assistance to low-income disabled and elderly people helped the poor overcome their vulnerability in the semiarid region, where more than 27 million people live in 1,127,953 square kilometres, slightly larger than the size of Bolivia.

But without the water supply solution represented by tanks and other devices to collect the scant rainwater, the tragedies of the past would certainly be repeated in the semiarid region, which occupies most of the Brazilian Northeast and northern strips of the Southeast.

More than 1.1 million tanks that harvest rainwater from rooftops ensured human consumption. The 16,000 litres held by each tank were used up during the unusually long dry periods, but the system made the distribution of water by tanker trunks, generally carried out by the military, more efficient.

In addition, the “technologies” or different ways of storing water were disseminated to more than 200,000 families in order to ensure food production on family farms, which total 1.7 million in the semiarid region.

The distributed water infrastructure guarantees better quality food for the farmers themselves, supplies towns and cities in the country’s interior and boosts the local economy.

According to the Articulação Semiárido Brasileiro (ASA), a network of more than 3,000 organisations, including trade unions and farmers’ associations, cooperatives, non-governmental organisations and social movements, some 800,000 small farms are still in need of tanks that collect water for agricultural production in order to universalise this technology.

ASA, created in 1999, promoted the One Million Rural Water Tanks programme, which was made a public policy by the government in 2003. It then expanded the initiative into the One Land, Two Waters Programme, which incorporated rainwater harvesting for crops and livestock.

The basic principle is “coexisting with the semiarid”, instead of insisting on the old failed strategies of “combating drought”, based on the construction of large structures that do not serve the scattered rural population, who are the most affected, but rather favour the large landowners.

Coexistence is not limited to the water question, but extends to education, knowledge of local conditions, ecological forms of production, and clean sources of energy.

A rural settlement in the state of Pernambuco, in Brazil's semiarid ecoregion. Tanks that collect rainwater from rooftops for drinking water and household usage have changed life in this parched land, where 1.1 million 16,000-litre tanks have been installed so far. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2020 (IPS)

After centuries of poverty, marginalisation from national development policies and a lack of support for positive local practices and projects, the semiarid regions of Latin America are preparing to forge their own agricultural paths by sharing knowledge, in a new and unprecedented initiative.

In Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, the Gran Chaco Americano, which is shared by Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, and the Central American Dry Corridor (CADC), successful local practices will be identified, evaluated and documented to support the design of policies that promote climate change-resilient agriculture in the three ecoregions.

This is the objective of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo, an initiative financed by the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and implemented by the Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (ASA), the Argentinean Foundation for Development in Justice and Peace (Fundapaz) and the National Development Foundation (Funde) of El Salvador.

DAKI stands for Dryland Adaptation Knowledge Initiative.

The project, launched on Aug. 18 in a special webinar where some of its creators were speakers, will last four years and involve 2,000 people, including public officials, rural extension agents, researchers and small farmers. Indirectly, 6,000 people will benefit from the training.

“The aim is to incorporate public officials from this field with the intention to influence the government’s actions,” said Antonio Barbosa, coordinator of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo and one of the leaders of the Brazilian organisation ASA.

The idea is to promote programmes that could benefit the three semiarid regions, which are home to at least 37 million people – more than the total populations of Chile, Ecuador and Peru combined.

The residents of semiarid regions, especially those who live in rural areas, face water scarcity aggravated by climate change, which affects their food security and quality of life.

Zulema Burneo, International Land Coalition coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean and moderator of the webinar that launched the project, stressed that the initiative was aimed at “amplifying and strengthening” isolated efforts and a few longstanding collectives working on practices to improve life in semiarid areas.

Abel Manto, an inventor of technologies that he uses on his small farm in the state of Bahia, in Brazil’s semiarid ecoregion, holds up a watermelon while standing among the bean crop he is growing on top of an underground dam. The soil is on a waterproof plastic tarp that keeps near the surface the water that is retained by an underground dam. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The practices that represent the best knowledge of living in the drylands will be selected not so much for their technical aspects, but for the results achieved in terms of economic, ecological and social development, Barbosa explained to IPS in a telephone interview from the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, where the headquarters of ASA are located.

After the process of systematisation of the best practices in each region is completed, harnessing traditional knowledge through exchanges between technicians and farmers, the next step will be “to build a methodology and the pedagogical content to be used in the training,” he said.

One result will be a platform for distance learning. The Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, also in Recife, will help with this.

Decentralised family or community water supply infrastructure, developed and disseminated by ASA, a network of 3,000 social organisations scattered throughout the Brazilian Northeast, is a key experience in this process.

In the 1.03 million square kilometres of drylands where 22 million Brazilians live, 38 percent in rural areas according to the 2010 census, 1.1 million rainwater harvesting tanks have been built so far for human consumption.

An estimated 350,000 more are needed to bring water to the entire rural population in the semiarid Northeast, said Barbosa.

But the most important aspect for agricultural development involves eight “technologies” for obtaining and storing water for crops and livestock. ASA, created in 1999, has helped install this infrastructure on 205,000 farms for this purpose and estimates that another 800 peasant families still need it.

There are farms that are too small to install the infrastructure, or that have other limitations, said Barbosa, who coordinates ASA’s One Land and Two Waters and native seed programmes.

The “calçadão” technique, where water runs down a sloping concrete terrace or even a road into a tank that has a capacity to hold 52,000 litres, is the most widely used system for irrigating vegetables.

A group of peasant farmers from El Salvador stand in front of one of the two rainwater tanks built in their village, La Colmena, in the municipality of Candelaria de la Frontera. The pond is part of a climate change adaptation project in the Central American Dry Corridor. Central American farmers like these and others from Brazil’s semiarid Northeast have exchanged experiences on solutions for living with lengthy droughts. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

And in Argentina’s Chaco region, 16,000-litre drinking water tanks are mushrooming.

But tanks for intensive and small farming irrigation are not suitable for the dry Chaco, where livestock is raised on large estates of hundreds of hectares, said Gabriel Seghezzo, executive director of Fundapaz, in an interview by phone with IPS from the city of Salta, capital of the province of the same name, one of those that make up Argentina’s Gran Chaco region.

“Here we need dams in the natural shallows and very deep wells; we have a serious water problem,” he said. “The groundwater is generally of poor quality, very salty or very deep.”

First, peasants and indigenous people face the problem of formalising ownership of their land, due to the lack of land titles. Then comes the challenge of access to water, both for household consumption and agricultural production.

“In some cases there is the possibility of diverting rivers. The Bermejo River overflows up to 60 km from its bed,” he said.

Currently there is an intense local drought, which seems to indicate a deterioration of the climate, urgently requiring adaptation and mitigation responses.

Reforestation and silvopastoral systems are good alternatives, in an area where deforestation is “the main conflict, due to the pressure of the advance of soy and corn monoculture and corporate cattle farming,” he said.

Mariano Barraza of the Wichí indigenous community (L) and Enzo Romero, a technician from the Fundapaz organisation, stand next to the tank built to store rainwater in an indigenous community in the province of Salta, in the Chaco ecoregion of northern Argentina, where there are six months of drought every year. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

More forests would be beneficial for the water, reducing evaporation that is intense due to the heat and hot wind, he added.

Of the “technologies” developed in Brazil, one of the most useful for other semiarid regions is the “underground dam,” Claus Reiner, manager of IFAD programmes in Brazil, told IPS by phone from Brasilia.

The underground dam keeps the surrounding soil moist. It requires a certain amount of work to dig a long, deep trench along the drainage route of rainwater, where a plastic tarp is placed vertically, causing the water to pool during rainy periods. A location is chosen where the natural layer makes the dam impermeable from below.

This principle is important for the Central American Dry Corridor, where “the great challenge is how to infiltrate rainwater into the soil, in addition to collecting it for irrigation and human consumption,” said Ismael Merlos of El Salvador, founder of Funde and director of its Territorial Development Area.

The CADC, which cuts north to south through Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, is defined not as semiarid, but as a sub-humid region, because it rains slightly more there, although in an increasingly irregular manner.

Some solutions are not viable because “75 percent of the farming areas in the Corridor are sloping land, unprotected by organic material, which makes the water run off more quickly into the rivers,” Merlos told IPS by phone from San Salvador.

“In addition, the large irrigation systems that we’re familiar with are not accessible for the poor because of their high cost and the expensive energy for the extraction and pumping of water, from declining sources,” he said.

The most viable alternative, he added, is making better use of rainwater, by building tanks, or through techniques to retain moisture in the soil, such as reforestation and leaving straw and other harvest waste on the ground rather than burning it as peasant farmers continue to do.

“Harmful weather events, which four decades ago occurred one to three times a year, now happen 10 or more times a year, and their effects are more severe in the Dry Zone,” Merlos pointed out.

Funde is a Salvadoran centre for development research and policy formulation that together with Fundapaz, four Brazilian organisations forming part of the ASA network and seven other Latin American groups had been cooperating since 2013, when they created the Latin American Semiarid Platform.

The Platform paved the way for the DAKI-Semiárido Vivo which, using 78 percent of its two million dollar budget, opened up new horizons for synergy among Latin America’s semiarid ecoregions. To this end, said Burneo, it should create a virtuous alliance of “good practices and public policies.”

João Afonso stands amidst his watermelons and other forage plants on his farm in the municipality of Canudos, in the state of Bahia, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. Thanks to water and soil management techniques, the droughts are not so hard on him, his crops or his animals. Credit: Gonzalo Gaudenzi / IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
CANUDOS, Brazil, Nov 2 2017 (IPS)

Irrigated green fields of vineyards and monoculture crops coexist in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast with dry plains dotted with flowering cacti and native crops traditionally planted by the locals. Two models of development in struggle, with very different fruits.

On his 17-hectare farm in Canudos, in the state of Bahia, João Afonso Almeida grows vegetables, sorghum, passion fruit (Passiflora edulis), palm trees, citrus and forage plants.

"What we have done is simply to read nature. Observing how plants can survive for eight months without rain, and how animals adapt to drought, and drawing conclusions for how people should do things. It is not about technology or books. It is simply observation of nature applied to human action.” -- Harold Schistek
Between the rows, cactus plants grow to feed his goats and sheep, such as guandú (Cajanus cajan), wild watermelon, leucaena and mandacurú (Cereus jamacaru).

The earth is dry and dusty in the Caatinga, an ecosystem exclusive to Brazil’s semiarid region, where droughts can last for years, alternating with periods of annual rainfall of 200 to 800 mm, along with high evaporation rates.

But thanks to simple rainwater harvesting techniques, Almeida has managed to live harmoniously with the local ecosystem.

“This is a water harvesting ‘calçadão’ (embankment),” he told IPS, showing a tank installed with the help of the Regional Institute for Appropriate Small Farming (IRPAA), which is part of the Networking in Brazil’s Semiarid Region (ASA) movement, along with another 3,000 social organisations.

“The water goes to the tank-calçadão that has a capacity to store 52,000 litres. We use it to water the garden. It provides an income for the families,” he added.

For domestic consumption, he has a 16,000-litre tank that collects rainwater from the roof of his house through gutters and pipes.

ASA has installed one million tanks for family consumption and 250,000 for small agricultural facilities in the semiarid Northeast.

Almeida uses an “enxurrada” (flow) tank, and an irrigation system for his citrus trees, which through a narrow pipe irrigates the roots without wasting water. He also opted for plants native to the Caatinga that adapt naturally to the local climate and soil conditions.

“Production has improved a great deal, we work less and have better results. And we also conserve the Caatinga ecosystem. I believed in this, while many people did not, and thank God because we sleep well even though we’ve already had three years of drought,” he said.

In the past, droughts used to kill in this region. Between 1979 and 1983, drought caused up to one million deaths, and drove a mass exodus to large cities due to thirst and hunger.

Part of the extensive vineyards of the Especial Fruit company in the São Francisco River valley, where irrigation projects have made it possible to grow fruit on a large scale for export, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS

“The farm used to be far from any source of water. We had to walk two to three kilometers, setting out early with buckets,” he recalled.

The droughts did not end but they no longer produce deaths among the peasants of Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, a region that is home to some 23 million of Brazil’s 208 million people.

This was thanks to the strategy of “coexistence with the semiarid”, promoted by ASA, in contrast with the historical policies of the “drought industry”, which exploited the tragedy, charging high prices for water or exchanging it for votes, distributing water in tanker trucks.

Thanks to simple rainwater harvesting techniques, Almeida has managed to live harmoniously with the local ecosystem. “This is a water harvesting ‘calçadão’ (embankment), the water goes to the tank-calçadão that has a capacity to store 52,000 litres. We use it to water the garden. It provides an income for the families” Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS

“Coexistence with the semiarid ecosystem is something completely natural that actually people around the world have done in relation to their climates. The Eskimos coexist with the icy Arctic climate, the Tuareg (nomads of the Sahara desert) coexist with the desert climate,” the president of the IRPAA, Harold Schistek, told IPS in his office in the city of Juazeiro, in the Northeast state of Bahía.

“What we have done is simply to read nature. Observing how plants can survive for eight months without rain, and how animals adapt to drought, and drawing conclusions for how people should do things. It is not about technology or books. It is simply observation of nature applied to human action,” he explained.

The “coexistence” is based on respecting the ecosystem and reviving traditional agricultural practices.

The basic principle is to store up in preparation for drought – everything from water to native seeds, and fodder for goats and sheep, the most resistant species.

The fruits are seen in the Cooperative of Farming Families from Canudos and Curaçá (Coopercuc), made up of about 250 families from those municipalities in the state of Bahía.

Almeida uses an “enxurrada” (flow) tank, and an irrigation system for his citrus trees, which through a narrow pipe irrigates the roots without wasting water. He also opted for plants native to the Caatinga that adapt naturally to the local climate and soil conditions. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS

Coopercuc, which Almeida is a member of, has an industrial plant in Uauá, where they make jellies and jams with fruits of the Caaatinga, such as umbú (Spondias tuberosa) and passion fruit, with pulps processed in mini-factories run by the cooperative members.

“We’re not only concerned with making a profit but also with the sustainable use of the raw materials of the Caatinga. For example, the harvest of the ombú (Phytolacca dioica) used to be done in a very harmful way, swinging the tree to make the fruit fall,” Coopercuc vice-president José Edimilson Alves told IPS.

Now, he said, “we instruct the members of the cooperative to collect the fruit by hand, and to avoid breaking the branches. We also do not allow native wood or living plants to be extracted.”

The cooperative sells its products, free of agrochemicals, to large Brazilian cities and has exported to France and Austria.

“This proposal shows that it is possible to live, and with a good quality of life, in the semiarid region,” said Alves.

Coopercuc vice-president José Edimilson Alves. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS

This reality exists in the 200,000-hectare fruit-growing area of the São Francisco River valley, located between the municipalities of Petrolina (state of Pernambuco) and Juazeiro. Government incentives and irrigation techniques favoured the installation of agribusiness in the area.

According to the State Development Company of the Valleys of São Francisco and Parnaíba, fruit growers in the area generate over 800 million dollars a year, and provide about 100,000 jobs.

“It is estimated that this use of irrigation represents 80 percent of all uses of the basin. But we have to consider that the collection of water for these projects promotes the economic and social development of our region by generating employment and revenues, through the export of fresh and canned fruit to Europe and the United States,” explained the company’s manager, Joselito Menezes.

The company Especial Fruit, which has about 3,000 hectares in the valley and 2,200 workers, produces thousands of tons of grapes and mangos every year, which are exported mostly to the United States, Argentina and Chile, along with a smaller volume of melons, for the local market.

“All the irrigation is done with the drip system, since good management of water is very important due to the limitations of water resources,” the company’s president Suemi Koshiyama told IPS.

He explained that “The furrow irrigation system only takes advantage of 40 percent of the water, and spray irrigation makes use of 60 percent, compared to 85 percent for drip irrigation.”

“The region that has the least water is the one that uses the most. Thousands of litres are used to produce crops, so when the region exports it is also exporting water and minerals from the soil, especially with sugarcane,” said Moacir dos Santos, an expert at the IRPAA.

“In a region with very little water and fertile soil, we have to question the validity of this. The scarce water should be used to produce food, in a sustainable manner,” he told IPS.

According to ASA, one and a half million farm families have only 4.2 percent of the arable land in the semiarid region, while 1.3 percent of the agro-industrial farms of over 1,000 hectares occupy 38 percent of the lands.

“Family farmers produce the food. Agribusiness produces commodities. And although it has a strong impact on the trade balance, at a local level, family farming actually supplies the economy,” dos Santos said.

ASA rainwater tank. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 31 2013 (IPS)

The decisions taken by the Brazilian government in the fight against drought in the country’s semiarid Northeast are an example of the disconnect between politicians and the citizens, which triggered an unexpected wave of protests in June.

Even though the centre-left government of Dilma Rousseff embraced a solution that emerged from civil society – distributing rainwater collection tanks – it did so in a way that ignored essential aspects of the successful decade-long initiative, the organisers complain.

“They didn’t listen to us,” said Naidison Baptista, one of the leaders of the Articulação no Semiárido Brasileiro (ASA) – the “Brazilian semiarid network” made up of nearly 1,000 non-governmental, community, labour, religious and smallholder farmer groups that was created in 1999 to provide clean water to poor rural families in drought-prone areas.

Rousseff announced in July 2011 that by the end of her term in 2014, her government would distribute 750,000 rainwater tanks in the Northeast, through the “Water for All” programme, as part of the government’s poverty eradication efforts.

That would have been a major triumph for the ASA movement, which had distributed 476,040 rural water tanks as of Jul. 17 – nearly half of its goal of one million.

ASA’s tanks, along with the 750,000 promised by the government, would mean total coverage for the poor rural population in need of water in the Northeast, the country’s poorest region.

Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region, as large as Germany and France combined, is home to 22 million of the country’s 198 million people, including 8.6 million peasants, according to the 2010 census.

But the water tanks offered by the ministry of national integration, which is in charge of the government programme, are plastic, made by industrial companies, and are distributed through state and municipal governments.

“It is the old model, without participation by the people,” Baptista told IPS.

He said it was a return to a paternalistic relationship based on government donations, which generates dependency by the beneficiaries, because they don’t know where the tanks came from or how to maintain them.

“If they don’t get involved in the construction process, they don’t take proper care of the tanks,” he said.

The ASA tanks, by contrast, are made of prefabricated cement slabs produced by local workers and installed by the families themselves, who receive training in water management to make the rainwater they collect last for the entire eight-month dry season, and to ensure that it is always potable.

This way, the tanks give a boost to the local economy, by using materials and services from nearby suppliers and increasing remunerated employment in a job-scarce market.

“It is an endogenous, autonomous solution that helps people live in the Northeast’s semiarid conditions and distributes income,” Baptista stressed.

He said the government programme, on the other hand, focuses the funds on a handful of far-away companies and strengthens the traditional “drought industry” – an expression that refers to the exploitation of tragedy by local elites who charge high prices for the dirty water distributed by trucks, benefit from federal aid, or dole out food, water or jobs to potential voters in an election year.

Besides, a plastic water tank costs 5,090 reals (2,300 dollars), according to the ministry of national integration – more than twice the cost of a cement tank. That, multiplied by hundreds of thousands, reflects “big profits for industry,” Baptista said.

ASA launched a campaign against the PVC water tanks after the government shifted to plastic tanks in late 2011.

The movement complains that the plastic tanks exclude the local population from the process of installing and maintaining the tanks and sharing their knowledge and training.

The national government argues that large-scale industrial production is necessary to accelerate distribution of the tanks for collecting and storing water for household and agricultural use at a time of prolonged drought.

But Baptista said that argument is false, because ASA can mobilise up to 3,000 local organisations and expand its activities, if it has the financing.

The government’s decision required institutional changes, because it transferred the reins of the project to local governments, at the expense of civil society organisations.

A first consequence was that the ministry of social development suspended its financial support for the “One Million Water Tanks” (P1MC) programme that ASA has been carrying out since 2003 with funding from a diverse range of sources, including banks, companies and foreign donors, as well as the national government.

But a Dec. 20, 2011 demonstration by some 15,000 people in Petrolina, a city in a major irrigated fruit-growing area in the Northeast, forced the ministry of social development to backtrack and sign a new agreement with ASA.

The plastic tanks, which began to be widely distributed last year, have met with rejection in some communities. A few city governments, in Serra Talhada in the state of Pernambuco, for instance, have also refused to accept them.

The plastic is deformed by the hot sun and “the water heats up, it hurts your stomach,” complained Rosalina Maria de Jesus, an indigenous woman who said she was “70 years old, more or less,” belonging to the Pankararú people in Pernambuco.

Industrially-produced tanks deformed by the sun were replaced by new ones from the factories and the problem was corrected. But many people continue to believe that they cannot withstand the tropical sun for long.

In some towns, the tanks pack the central square for weeks or months because of how slowly the municipal governments distribute them to rural families. In one case, in Maracás in the state of Bahia, 830 PVC tanks caught fire after spending 40 days in a municipal lot.

The cement tanks, which have been proven to last for decades, were created by a young peasant farmer who migrated to São Paulo in 1955, where he learned to make pools.

After returning to Bahia, he invented the prefabricated slabs with which it is possible to make, in a few hours, the cylindrical tanks that are eradicating thirst and saving the lives of children previously cut short by contaminated water.

The two kinds of tank are now operating side by side in the Pankararú village, as they are in many other municipalities.

But critics say the plastic tanks reflect the penetration, in the government, of the old conception of “fighting drought” that led to failure after failure in the Northeast.

The biggest current project in that respect is the diversion of the São Francisco river, designed to pipe water to 12 million people, mainly in cities, in the Northeast.

The megaproject, which got underway in 2007, has drawn public criticism because of its growing costs, currently estimated at 3.7 billion dollars, and the constant delays in the construction of the 713 km of canals, aqueducts and tunnels, raising fears of another “white elephant” in the Northeast.

Rather than “fighting drought”, the focus of ASA is on promoting “coexistence” with semiarid conditions, whose most noteworthy example is the rainwater tanks that serve the rural population, the hardest-hit by drought.

The ambiguity of the Rousseff administration, which earmarks tiny amounts of financing to civil society projects like ASA in comparison to its huge investments in megaprojects, is one element that has fuelled the protests that have filled the streets of Brazil’s cities for the last two months.

People are growing more and more sceptical, believing that national decisions have turned into business opportunities between government leaders and large companies.