Brazilians struggle for water in arid northeast

NTD Staff
By NTD Staff
February 20, 2017World News
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Brazilians in the northeast of the country are struggling as reservoirs and rivers dry up and water runs out.

Brazil’s arid northeast is weathering its worst drought on record, with rainfall sparse and reservoirs running at around four percent capacity, revealing dry and cracked land.

Several areas are undergoing water rationing whilst locals complain the water which is left in the reservoirs is dirty and undrinkable.

Shepherd Heleno Campos Ferreira, 65, lives in Paraiba by the Pocoes reservoir, where he travels with goats and sheep to collect water. Retired and living alone, he spends roughly one tenth of his monthly pension on bottled water for his own consumption.

“This water is for the animals, it’s for bathing, and to clean dishes and to wash clothes, which I do myself. I do everything here because I live on my own with God. For drinking, cooking and making coffee, I buy water because the water here is no good,” said Ferreira.

Francisco Barbosa Cruz, 82, and his wife, Maria De Lourdes Da Conceicao, 68, depend on water from the Coremas reservoir to fill a stream nearby their house, and over the last five years have lost many cattle due to the drought as water no longer finds its way down the stream.

“Before, that stream always had water, but it hasn’t had water for five years,” said Conceicao.

Cruz spends some $40 dollars a month on bottled water from occasional deliveries but says he feels impotent when he looks at his undernourished herd.

Climate change has worsened the droughts in Brazil’s northeast over the last 30 years, according to members of Funceme, the meteorological agency in the northeastern state of Ceara. Rainfall has decreased and temperatures have risen, increasing demand for agricultural irrigation just as water supplies fell and evaporation accelerated.

After decades of promises and years of delays, the government says the rerouting of Brazil’s longest river, the São Francisco, will soon relieve desperate farmers in four parched north-eastern states.

Water will be pumped over hills and through 400 kilometres (248 miles) of canals into dry river basins in the states of Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, and Paraíba. Many are sceptical, however, of seeing swift results, having seen the project delayed by political squabbles, corruption and cost-overruns of billions of dollars since it begun in 2005.

Residents of the town of Itaporanga were served some respite at the start of the month when it rained three times in one week, bringing water back to the Pianco River for a short time. Shouts of celebration from delighted teenagers mixed with loud croaking from toads, which had not been heard in some time.

The momentary relief, however, is far from resolving the problems in the northeast.

“There are no more fish. Surviving off fish here is very difficult, unless the reserve fills up with water again. With things the way they are we are very scared that there won’t be any water to drink, because things are very difficult, but it has started to get better, as it rained three days ago,” said Jose Havelino da Silva, 64.

Where Silva used to work as a fisherman before the drought, he now plants beans and corn in the empty reservoir, hoping for rain on one hand, but on the other, time for his plants to grow.

Economists calculate that Brazil’s ongoing recession has shrunk the economy of the impoverished northeast by over four percent during each of the past two years, making issues even worse.

The Brazilian government has no available money to replenish depleted public stocks of food and will not buy staples such as grains anytime soon, despite an expected record crop this year, Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi said on Monday (February 20).

Maggi told reporters in Sao Paulo that an exception regarding government actions in the sector was intervention in the corn market, where the government decided to use part of reduced public corn stocks to ease a supply tightness in some Northeast states impacted by drought.

(REUTERS)

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