Two people collect drinking water in plastic containers at the intake of the pumping station of the desalination plant located in Las Mangas, Granma province, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

By Dariel Pradas
BAYAMO, Cuba, Sep 9 2024 (IPS)

Overnight, hundreds of people in the rural community of Las Mangas, located in Granma province in eastern Cuba, realised something they had already suspected: that the water they had been drinking for decades was not exactly crystal clear, but rather “salty”, as they say.

It was certainly a positive change, thanks to a desalination plant that started operating in August, five years after construction began in 2019, with a US$ 61,000 investment by the Granma Provincial Delegation of Hydraulic Resources.

“We did a test and the water coming from the plant freezes clear, while the water from the street freezes white, because of impurities. Now, with the plant, the people are happy,” community representative Rodolfo Echavarría, 55, told IPS.

Las Mangas is part of the municipality of Bayamo, the provincial capital, some 740 kilometres east of Havana. It has water networks that carry water from a well to the connections in the houses.

However, the water source contains a salinity rate exceeding one gram of soluble salts per litre of water, the limit permitted for human consumption by the country’s health authorities.“The desalination plant is a great benefit, a marvel. If something as necessary as water is not good, imagine the damage it causes to health": Óscar Fajardo.

“The desalination plant was built at the outlet of this brackish well, serving as an easy access point (where people can fetch the processed liquid with containers),” explained Yasser Vázquez, deputy sub-delegate of the Water Resources Delegation in Granma, in an interview with IPS in Bayamo.

The new facility, the third of its kind in the province, processes 2,000 litres of water a day and, according to the planners’ estimates, benefits 1,097 inhabitants. Echavarría believes that number rises to almost 2,000 people, since the villages of El Chungo, La Bayamesa and Santa María, all more than three kilometres from Las Mangas, also benefit.

The plant’s purification system uses the reverse osmosis method, one of the most widespread globally. There are others such as distillation, freezing, hydrate formation, flash evaporation or electrodialysis.

Reverse osmosis involves applying pressure to brackish water and making it flow through a semi-permeable membrane whose role is to allow the solvent (water) to pass through, but not the solute (dissolved salts).

In essence, the water in a pressurised saline solution is separated from the dissolved salts as it passes through the membrane and then goes through further rounds of filtration and chemical injection until it reaches the required standards of potability.

A local resident, Yoel González, 52, was trained to operate the plant and is in charge of its maintenance.

“You have to know how it works, because there are things that can go wrong, as has happened. I have lived all my life in Las Mangas and the best thing that has happened here is this (the installation of the desalination plant). Water has always been difficult. We used to drink that brackish water, and you could taste the acid and salt in it,” he told IPS.

Yoel Gonzáles Almeida, an operator at the pumping station of the desalination plant in the town of Las Mangas, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

A change of scenery, or rather, of waters

In this village eight kilometres from the city of Bayamo, between 6:00 am and 6:00 pm, when the desalination plant opens, people gather at the site’s only existing tap and fill various-sized containers.

The water coming out of the tap in every home or facility in Las Mangas, the brackish water that barely comes out of the well chlorinated, is only used for cleaning, dishes, laundry and sometimes cooking. In this agricultural and livestock farming village, some farmers also use it to quench their animals’ thirst.

“When the plant was set up, people said at the beginning: ‘I drink it from the street, I’ve been drinking it all my life and I haven’t died’. Cubans are like that. But when they tried the new one, everything changed,” argued Echavarría, the community leader.

Nancy Gómez, 72, was born there and is one of the few people who resists the change.

“The neighbours are surprised because I don’t look for fresh water, but I’m used to it and it has never caused me any health problems. My children grew up drinking that (brackish) water. But my granddaughter does bring it from the plant for the children and I drink it from time to time. You can taste the difference,” she told IPS.

A view of the Las Mangas desalination plant in eastern Cuba, which provides the villagers with quality drinking water. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Oscar Fajardo, 50, has always avoided drinking water from the well since he moved to Las Mangas four years ago from Guasimilla, eight kilometres away.

In his home town, the water tasted fresh and “sweet”, so he never got used to the new saltiness. Even after moving away, Fajardo still fetched it in Guasimilla on his electric motorbike whenever he visited his mother.

“I would look for water there or in other places. Sometimes I had to drink the bad one, but after seeing the sediment that accumulated in the knobs and pots, I tried to avoid it. People here have adapted to drinking brackish water, but a few found alternative ways,” he told IPS.

While it was common to boil and drink the tap water, some people who knew better or had more money would go to Bayamo or El Chungo to fill their own household containers, or buy the liquid from owners of horse-drawn carts, who would sell 200 litres for the equivalent of US$ 0.40.

“The desalination plant is a great benefit, a marvel. If something as necessary as water is not good, imagine the damage it causes to health,” said Fajardo.

A woman uses brackish water for household chores in the community of Las Mangas, eastern Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Dangers of salinated water

The risks of consuming water with excess salt are varied: upset stomach, dehydration, high blood pressure, fluid retention in the body or kidney damage.

After all, salt contains, in addition to the chloride electrolyte, sodium, a mineral harmful to the human body in many ways when ingested in large quantities.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends an intake of no more than five grams of salt per day, equivalent to two grams (2000 mg) of sodium.

González, the operator of the Las Mangas desalination plant, said the community has several cases of kidney stones (also called nephrolithiasis or urolithiasis), which are hard deposits made of minerals and salts that form inside the kidneys and can affect any part of the urinary tract.

They may have arisen from prolonged consumption of brackish water, as several villagers interviewed by IPS suspect.

“One of my children complains when he urinates because of the stones, and he gets renal colics all the time,” said Gómez, the resident who is reluctant to drink the water processed by the plant.

Marisol Hildago, 37, also a resident of Las Mangas and mother of two, used to drink tap water until something caused her to start looking for water from El Chungo.

“My father suffered from chronic renal insufficiency and that’s why I started to look for water there. Now we only drink water from the plant and my father has improved,” she told IPS.

A view of the pumping station of the desalination plant in the town of Las Mangas. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Water issues in the province

Las Mangas is not the only community in Granma with water-related issues. There are others where the subsurface basins and water sources have high levels of salinity, which often receive drinking water from tanker trucks.

Granma, known as the ‘Key to the Cauto’ (river), where the longest watercourse in all the Antilles flows at 343 kilometres, also has a low-isometric relief and boggy areas, which makes it more vulnerable to seawater encroachment and saline intrusion into the water table, as happens in Las Mangas and other places.

Some scholars claim that the river’s flow has decreased in part due to climate change, deforestation and the construction of the Cauto del Paso reservoir, the third largest in the country and inaugurated in 1992.

With the lowering of the river level, seawater encroaches with greater force through the course itself, affecting the water basins of some lands at the mouth of the Cauto.

This province with 804,000 people – in a country with a population of 10 million – has had a stable water situation with its supply sources since the heavy rains of June 2023, which, in addition to filling reservoirs and restoring the water table, destroyed part of the infrastructure.

Marisol Hidalgo drinks potable water in the kitchen of her home, obtained from the desalination plant located in the community of Las Mangas. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Granma generally suffers from droughts which, according to water authorities, affect up to 100,000 of its inhabitants.

When this happens, river flow decreases and saline intrusion from the sea increases, disabling numerous wells, especially the shallower, artisanal ones, which are a solution for residents in places that are difficult to access.

The other major problem lies in the accessibility of water networks and the availability of the service, as only 76% of the province’s population receives piped water in their homes and only 38.7% (some 310,000 people) receive water at home at least once every three days.

Other more affected areas, such as the coastal municipality of Manzanillo, can get water supplies for up to 20 days. In all, more than 66,000 residents are supplied by water tankers.

A further 15 desalination plants are planned for Granma, to be added to the dozens existing throughout the country. In the last decade, the Cuban government has promoted the construction of these hydraulic works, both in communities with salinised water sources and in industries and beach resorts.

A group of ‘barraginhas’, the micro-dams that retain water that runs off into the ground, benefiting vegetation and accumulating water in the soil to supply lagoons. Credit: Courtesy of Lucyan Vieira Listo

By Mario Osava
SETE LAGOAS, Brazil, Aug 18 2024 (IPS)

Water shortage is over, springs have emerged or become perennial, small ponds with fish have formed and pastures have become greener and more permanent, all thanks to the ‘barraginhas’, the Portuguese name given in Brazil to micro-dams that retain rainwater and infiltrate it into the soil.

This is a common claim among the many farmers who have adopted the technique developed and promoted by Luciano Cordoval, an agronomist and researcher at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), a public entity comprising 43 research centres throughout the country.“The more the climate crisis worsens, the greater the need to capture rainwater and accumulate reserves”: Luciano Cordoval.

Cordoval has worked since 1983 at the Embrapa Maize and Sorghum unit, based in Sete Lagoas (Seven Lagoons, in Portuguese), a municipality with a population of 227,397 in the southern state of Minas Gerais, where he further specialised in irrigation and soil conservation.

His Barraginhas Project was launched in 1997 with government investment. But the specialist has been promoting micro-dams long before as a way to “capture water from streams and promote its storage in the soil, avoiding erosion, sedimentation and environmental pollution, with increased volume in the springs”, according to his resumé.

Luciano Cordoval explains the functions of barraginhas in his office at the Maize and Sorghum unit of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in Sete Lagoas, a municipality in central Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

One hundred micro-dams create a lagoon

Antonio Alvarenga, a pioneer of the initiative, built 28 micro-dams on his 400-hectare farm in Sete Lagoas in 1995, with the support of Cordoval’s project. “These were degraded and dry lands, affected by major erosion,” he recalled.

In a short time, the barraginhas filled and emptied several times and water began to flow in the lower part of the farm, which had previously been totally dry. The engineer by profession, who became a part-time cattle farmer, was then able to have his dream pond, which after extensions now covers 42,000 square metres of his land.

With the other micro-dams already built, he now has “more than 100” and has plans for another 40. The effect can be seen in the recovered springs and the abundance of water that allows him to irrigate the pastures in the dry season and double his livestock productivity.

“Before I used to raise only one cow on two hectares, today there are two animals on each hectare,” he told IPS in Sete Lagoas, highlighting the good results of the innovation.

“I became a producer of water, which fills my ‘artificial’ lagoon. Water is everything,” he praised. The benefits visible to the naked eye encouraged his neighbours to build their own micro-dams, with help from the mayor’s office. In addition, a television report helped spread the word about this ‘social technology’, as it is called.

Some of the micro-dams built in 1998, including on the farm of engineer Antonio Alvarenga. Credit: Luciano Cordoval

Also in the Amazon

In Floresta do Araguaia, 1,800 kilometres from Sete Lagoas, in the southeast of the northern Amazonian state of Pará, another cattle farmer, with some 6,000 hectares and 2,000 head of cattle, also points out impressive data.

“This part of Pará is not rich in water,” contrary to the general belief that it rains profusely in the whole Amazon region, says Pedro de Carvalho, a veterinarian from Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil, but who lives in the eastern Amazon since 1974.

“It rains a lot in the last two months of the year, but not the rest of the year,’ he told IPS in a telephone interview from his ranch. There is cerrado, a kind of Brazilian savannah, in the area, not Amazonian forest, he adds.

“I didn’t have enough water, I had to buy it from tanker trucks, and a lot of my cattle died of thirst,” he recalled.

But having been friends with Cordoval since they were young, he knew his ideas and began to build his barraginhas. He believes he now has 168 in all, although he is uncertain of the precise number. He bought an excavator to build and improve them, “because everything can be improved.”

João Roberto Moreira in the lagoon formed by water from springs revitalised by a chain of 11 barraginhas on the hill of preserved forests on his 200-hectare property in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Some sceptics of such innovation in the region recommended artesian wells. “Pure ignorance. Where you draw water and don’t replenish it, it tends to run out. The barraginhas supply the water table,” he observed.

An example is Unai, a city in Minais Gerais, which drilled many artesian wells and then had to deactivate 70% of them, “because they dried up,” he explained.

In his case, he no longer needs to buy water, having it stored in ponds where there are fish. Animals such as the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), a large rodent native to South America which lives around water, the collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu, an American wild pig), various birds and even bees, wasps and ants have proliferated on his farm.

Carvalho, a veterinarian specialising in reproduction, was one of the pioneers of Amazon colonisation in the 1970s. He first settled near Araguaína, a municipality of 171,000 inhabitants in the north of the state of Tocantins, where he has a farm of “between 3,000 and 4,000 hectares”.

Today, however, he is more dedicated to the farm in Floresta do Araguaia, a municipality with only 18,000 people, but where he foresees a promising future due to the expansion of soya bean.

A group of 23 engineers from 20 African countries visited different experiences of the Barraginhas Project, a social technology of easy application to capture, collect and disseminate water in rural areas. Credit: Barraginhas Project Archive

The multiplication of water

The barraginhas have spread throughout Brazil, from large to small farms. Cordoval and Embrapa were directly involved in the construction of some 300,000, but he estimates there may be two million of these micro-dams nationwide.

The first project, sponsored by the federal government’s Water Resources Board starting in 1997, sought to build 960 units near Sete Lagoas, Cordoval recalled in an interview with IPS at his Embrapa office in Sete Lagoas.

Between 2005 and 2008, some 3,600 were built in the northeastern state of Piauí, in a project promoted by then congressman Wellington Dias, later governor of the state and now minister of Social Development.

From the beginning, a priority was to train disseminators. “The results often turn the beneficiaries into my ‘clones’, who incorporate the DNA of the barraginhas and disseminate them out of passion, without thinking about the money,” Cordoval said.

“Barraginhas are like financial savings. You should stockpile water when there is abundance, for times of scarcity. The more the climate crisis worsens, the greater the need to capture rainwater and accumulate reserves. The growth of the country, cities and population demands more water for water sustainability,” he explained.

In 2011, a group of 23 engineers from different parts of Africa came to Sete Lagoas to learn about the local experience with micro-dams.

This social technology has received several national awards that promote other technologies also seeking to produce or protect water.

This is the case of septic tanks and biodigesters that prevent contamination of the water table. They are small multi-purpose ponds with an impermeable canvas floor to prevent water losses and an irrigation system for family farmers.

An alternative for plots of land with a slope above 10%, which is the recommended limit for establishing barraginhas, is a linear ditch that follows the contour line and withstands torrents on slopes of up to 25%.

Barraginhas and their annexes are a health factor, by improving the availability of good quality water, reducing medical expenses and increasing family income. In addition, they contain erosion, thus reducing sedimentation of watercourses, Cordoval pointed out.

A variant of this technology is built on roadsides, precisely to prevent deterioration due to erosion.

Barraginhas also prevent erosion on unpaved roads near their edges. Credit: Courtesy of Luciano Cordoval

Reclaimed springs and wells

For João Roberto Moreira, a.k.a. Betinho, a small cattle farmer with a herd of about 50 dairy cows, the major benefit of the 11 barraginhas built in 1998 on the hill of his farm was to intensify and perpetuate the springs that supply the three families that share the 200-hectare property.

“It was a blessing. The springs used to dry up, the water didn’t drain to the houses and attempts to pump it failed. Now there is water all year round. I’ve never seen so much water reaching us by gravity”, through four hoses from the top of the hill, he said.

There is also water left over for three lagoons, where they raise fish.

In Cáceres, a municipality of 90,000 inhabitants in central-western Brazil, Samuel Laudelino Silva, a chemist and retired professor at the State University of Mato Grosso (Unemat), has built 43 barraginhas of different sizes and a kilometre-long ditch on his increasingly water-scarce farm.

A 208-metre deep well, which did not produce water after a landslide reduced it to a depth of 135 metres, now provides 2,640 litres per day, enough for essential needs on the farm. It has water starting at a depth of 48 metres.

“Governments should promote the large-scale installation of this technology, including as a way to mitigate the droughts and fires that have been plaguing the Pantanal, a large wetland area on Brazil’s border with Bolivia and Paraguay, in recent years,” Silva told IPS in an interview by email.

Cáceres is located in the upper Pantanal, in the state of Mato Grosso.

Crossing the Rio Cobre, at a crossing at Tulloch, St Catherine. Water from the Rio Cobre is diverted to the artificial recharge system at Innswood. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
Kingston, Jamaica, Apr 26 2022 (IPS)

It will take billions of dollars and many years to fix a growing problem that has placed Jamaica into the unlikely bracket of being among the world’s most water-scarce countries due to the unavailability of potable water.

The worsening water crisis of the Kingston and St Andrew (KMA) metropolis results in rationing for months in some years. The lock-offs are exacerbated by droughts, broken pumps and the crumbling pipelines making up the water distribution system. At the same time, in the aquifers below the capital city, more than 104.3 million cubic meters of water, or about 60 percent of the available resource, remained unusable due to pollution.

A 2020 study, Groundwater Availability and Security in the Kingston Basin, found that high levels of nitrates in the city’s main aquifer were making the water unusable for domestic purposes. The study conducted by researchers at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus’ Departments of Chemistry and Geology and Geography, pointed to the contamination by effluent from the septic and absorption pits that litter the city’s landscape and saline intrusion from over-pumping as the cause of the pollution.

Lead researcher Arpita Mandal told IPS via email that the two-year study, which started in 2018, showed no “significant change” in the levels of chloride and nitrates during the period, noting: “The historic data is patchy, but the chloride and nitrate levels have always shown high above the permissible limits”.

The report concluded that there is an urgent need to address the continued contamination of the Kingston Basin, but Debbie-Ann Gordon Smith, the lead chemist in the study, noted that the cleaning process would be extremely lengthy and costly.

According to the study, many of the wells across KSA were decommissioned because between 50 and 80 per cent of the effluent from absorption pits and septic tanks goes directly into the ground. The report said the same was true for many Caribbean Islands, including Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, and Grenada.

Noting the concerns for the quality and quantity of water in the aquifers of the KSA, the managing director of the Water Resources Authority (WRA) Peter Clarke pointed to the existence of several working wells in use by companies that treat the water to potable standards for industrial use.

He said that while the contamination from “200 years of pit latrines” (in KSA) continues to cause concern, “the hardscaping of car parks and roofs” means there is less water available to recharge the aquifer. Therefore, to preserve the continued viability of the aquifer, the WRA, Jamaica’s water management and regulatory body, is preparing to put a moratorium on new wells.

Clarke is confident that the island has enough water and reserves of the precious liquid for decades to come. He noted, however, that in Jamaica’s case, it is the distribution and access that makes water a scarce commodity in some areas.
“It is where the people are, where water is distributed, and access to the water that is important,” he said.

In 2015 the state-owned domestic distribution agency, the National Water Commission (NWC), announced an extensive 15 million US dollar programme to refurbish Kingston’s ageing distribution network. The programme included decontamination and recovery of old wells, decommissioning old sewage plants, and rehabilitation of water storage facilities.

In the process, the water company mended 40,000 leaks, which back then were reportedly costing the city 50 percent of the potable water it produced. They also replaced the ageing pipelines installed before the country’s independence in 1962. The programme continues with the replacement and installation of hundreds of miles and pipelines.

Clarke explained that Jamaica’s groundwater supply is three to four times greater than that which runs to the sea via the island’s 120 rivers and their networks of streams and provides 85 per cent of potable needs. Jamaica uses roughly 25 per cent of its available groundwater resources and 11 per cent of its accessible surface water.

To satisfy the growing demand in the KMA, Clarke said, the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation is considering a new treatment plant in St Catherine among its planned and existing solutions. In 2016, an artificial groundwater recharge system was built at the cost of just over 1 billion Jamaican dollars or 133 million US dollars, on 68 acres (27.5 hectares) of what was once cane-lands in Innswood, St Catherine, to replenish the wells that supply the most populated areas of the metropolis and surrounding areas.

The system currently injects an extra five million gallons of potable water per day to replenish abstractions from the supply wells. The Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development announced last month that it is considering similar systems to store excess water for use in times of drought and to reduce evaporation from surface systems like reservoirs and dams in other water-stressed areas of the island,

Both Gordon Smith and Mandal agree that Kingston’s water shortage is worsened by climate variations, increased urbanisation, and the inadequate management of existing resources. In the last few years, a construction boom in the KMA has transformed the KMA, placing increased pressure on the available water supply.

The UWI’s Climate Research Group has warned of increased temperature and extremes in rainfall and droughts. Based on the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Group warned Caribbean governments to brace for more prolonged and more intense droughts and higher temperatures that will impact, among other things, food production and water supplies.

In the case of the KSA, the NWC has continued to build and upgrade the city’s sewage treatment capacity in the areas affected to end sewage and wastewater contamination of the aquifer. Hopefully, the aquifer will naturally flush itself when the work is complete.

“Jamaica is not short of water,” Clark said. “It’s a distribution issue”.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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