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| Asunto: | [CeHuNews] 70/04 - A Political History of Drought in Northeast Brazil | | Fecha: | Domingo, 17 de Octubre, 2004 12:19:45 (-0300) | | Autor: | Centro Humboldt <humboldt @...............ar>
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CeHuNews 70/04
A Political History of Drought in
Northeast Brazil
Nicholas Gabriel Arons
This
supplementary article to our current issue, available on-line only, explores the
historic and on-going relationship among drought, rural poverty, and politics in
Northeast Brazil.
http://www.nacla.org/bodies/body78.php
Hundreds
of thousands of Brazilians—among them tens of thousands of children—died of
starvation and hunger-related illnesses during the 1979-1983 drought that
wracked their country. In four years, reports the Pastoral Land Commission of
Brazil, the drought killed 12 times more people than did the two atomic bombs
dropped on Japan in 1945. The human toll of drought-related disasters in the
country, of which this is but one example, has been monumentous, persistent and
unconscionable.
In the sertão—the semi-arid hinterland of northeast
Brazil—it rains often, yet it is a region beleaguered by drought. Perhaps more
ironically, long after the droughts are over there are still terrific water
shortages, as if the droughts had never left. There are expansive cracked
landscapes that look like deserts, yet beside them are large private farms,
green as Eden. There are vast citrus plantations, yet there is hunger. There are
once-fecund and well-fed towns where crusted earth and distended bellies
predominate, which just decades earlier saw their own government drain their
water supplies, and along with them, any hope for survival. Almost every three
years the region is beset by drought. The data is transparent—it has been
happening for five hundred years—yet since the beginning of recorded history in
Brazil, officials at the national and local levels have done almost nothing to
combat water shortages until it was too late.
Explanations of drought
cannot be left to meteorological or environmental specialists alone because the
primary factor causing malnutrition, disease, death and rural-to-urban migration
throughout the northeastern interior is not a lack of water, but the political
manipulation of that lack. “O problema não é a seca, é a cerca,” goes the saying
in northeastern Brazil (The problem is not the drought; it is the fence). During
droughts, while children routinely die of starvation and malnutrition, the
region continues to export huge amounts of food. Decades ago, the government was
willing to consider protecting its citizens from drought, until drought was
found to be a major boon to politicians. It became the explanation for rural
poverty, the means of attaining cheap labor, the rationale for securing
international loans, the basis for obtaining federal grants, the excuse for
failing policies and a strategy to buy votes.
In 2001, Brazil faced one
of the worst nationwide droughts in its history. The Northeast had received a
pittance of rain, and drought emergencies were erupting throughout the
northeastern interior. When the rivers and streams supposedly powering
hydroelectric dams slowed to a trickle, power shortages caused blackouts and
rationing even in cosmopolitan areas of São Paulo. The National Institute of
Meteorology reported there had been no rains during the summer of 2000 and
predicted the drought could last until 2002 with the return of El Niño.
Agricultural output was expected to drop by 90%.
Shortly before the
onset of this drought, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso dissolved the
development agencies for the Amazon and the Northeast after a series of
corruption scandals involving high-placed Senators disgraced these bodies. A
casualty of this was the Superintendency of the Development of the Northeast
(SUDENE: the northeastern development agency), a project initiated in 1959 to
combat drought. Some Senators were outraged at its termination because they
thought the project was beginning to work. “All of this is part of a macabre
vision that the ruling elite has of the northeast region,” yelled Congressman
Clementino Coelho. “For the first time in one hundred years, we [were] going to
confront drought with rationality; [now, we are guaranteeing] the apocalypse of
the Northeast.”[1]
In Sergipe, a northeastern state, the first looted
supermarket of the season was the unofficial signal marking the commencement of
the drought. The supermarket closed, adding 40 more people to the already
swollen ranks of the unemployed and hungry. Emergency meetings were called.
Governors declared they did not have enough water for irrigation, cattle or even
human consumption. Many cities were not able to consume the little water that
was available because of high salinity levels owing to poor irrigation
practices.
In the northeastern state of Ceará, famished rural workers
occupied fourteen cities. Newspapers reeled: “State of calamity declared in
several municipalities.” Hunger drove 200 farmers to block a stretch of highway
in the Ceará interior. They laid rocks and trees across the road, demanding
money from drivers to allow passage. They also camped out in front of the
mayor's home and office, begging for food-ration baskets and contemplating
supermarket invasions.
A heavily armed police force went to the site to
“prevent violence.” To avoid further disturbances, the military police initiated
an operation along the entire highway to ensure that people did not block
traffic to request handouts. According to the lieutenant who was responsible for
the force's actions, they were going anywhere there was a serious drought
“because that is where people do outrageous things.”[2]
`With a $9
million budget, Agricultural Development Minister Raul Jungman announced that he
would immediately begin dispensing government handouts—ultimately, however, no
funds were allocated to his work or to the agencies still existing to combat
drought. He visited drought-stricken regions and wept upon seeing the poverty
and sadness abounding throughout the interior. Brazil’s emperor did the same two
centuries ago, when he vowed to sell every jewel in the royal crown in order to
prevent mass starvation (the crown stayed intact and nearly one million
Brazilians died). The Brazilian dictator Gen. Emílio Médici also visited in the
1960s. The cycle seems endless. The social consequences of this drought were
considered relatively minor when compared to previous droughts; yet thousands of
deaths occurred throughout the Northeast from dehydration, diarrhea and other
diseases commonly linked to water shortages. Tens of thousands of rural farmers
migrated south and west that year alone, adding further pressures on overcrowded
cities but giving Amazonian developers access to even cheaper labor.
Droughts have been a fact of life in Brazil as long as history has been
recorded. Indigenous tribes migrated according to the rain cycle. Portuguese
priests wrote about devastating droughts as early as 1559. Severe droughts
throughout the 17th century led to a scarcity of resources, intensifying the
conflicts between the colonizers and the indigenous populations. The 1721-1726
drought was calamitous, as was that of 1777-1778, which killed almost 90% of the
cattle in the Northeast. The 1790-1793 rain shortage was called the “Big
Drought” because not a single drop of water fell during this period; cattle
ranches were decimated and thousands of people perished. Historian Marco Antônio
Villa reports that during these years “water disappeared completely in most of
Ceará.” Three plagues then visited the region: grasshoppers “looking like clouds
blocking the sun,” snakes and rats. A third of the population of Pernambuco
died. The 1824-1826 drought brought smallpox, and a third of the sertão's
population died of hunger and disease. During the 1877 drought, well over
330,000 died of hunger, 100,000 of fever and 70,000 of smallpox.[3]
Since 1877, republic replaced colony, and dictatorship and democracy
alternated various times. Yet the curse of water deprivation remained constant.
Statistics from recent decades paint a grim picture: Health directors reported
that, of forty thousand deaths in towns in 1969, 13.2% were caused by
dehydration and diarrhea—causes of death usually associated with drought. The
average age of death in the Northeast hovered around 42 years. A 1971 United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report found no agrarian policy or
irrigation program to speak of in the region, and that resources were wasted and
personnel inefficiently used. In 1979, a drought beset the “polygon”—the
drought-prone region that the federal government redefines annually—causing
“irreversible damage and trends in thousands of municipalities,” documents Maria
do Rosário Vieira de Almeida. She further records how, in 1980, the production
of beans, rice and corn fell by 2.4 million tons, compared to production levels
just two years before. More than 250,000 people died throughout the sertão as a
result of the drought; infant mortality rates jumped to 250 per 1,000 births in
some places. In Pernambuco, many reservoirs had not reached capacity in 20
years, and the only available water was unsafe to drink.[4]
An
investigation into the history of Brazil’s drought agencies uncovers two
persistent themes: government incompetence and corruption. While other nations
around the world—from Israel to Iraq, China to South Africa—used irrigation to
get through dry spells and droughts, Brazil was never able to solve its drought
problems. The first federal agency to combat drought was created in 1906. This
agency was replaced by National Department of Works Against Drought (DNOCS) in
1934, and augmented by the Superintendency of the Development of the Northeast
(SUDENE) in 1959. The performance of both has been markedly poor.
“Insufficiency of rainfall,” explains author Albert Hirschman, “is by no
means the principal characteristic of the northeastern interior area.” The total
rainfall in a normal year, he found, is 27 inches, on par with other nations
around the world that do not experience water shortages with the frequency of
northeast Brazil. The key issue is that less than 10% of rainfall in the drought
polygon is actually retained because the Brazilian government has not developed
the infrastructure necessary to store water—a major sign of its inefficiency.
The water that is not stored seeps off into eroded lands, where it evaporates or
becomes inaccessible and polluted.[5]
Brazilian well construction,
reservoir projects and agricultural irrigation schemes have always been
capital-intensive, but locally ineffective and often counter-productive. The
Brazilian government—with millions of dollars loaned by the World Bank—relies on
huge projects at the expense of local needs. For instance, rather than dig
small, local reservoirs, DNOCS and SUDENE chose to build huge reservoirs on
private lands while relocating poor families to supposedly wetter regions. But
to accommodate 100 families in the 1960s, they had to expel almost six times
that many. Compounding the calamity of moving communities around as if they were
chattel—which continued well into the late 1970s—was the sad reality that no
formal or adequate system existed to compensate the dispossessed. Lacking
official leases to their land, nearly 70% of expelled families received no
compensation. What’s more, rates paid by DNOCS were “well below market values,”
and people who actually owned their land but could not provide proof at the time
were thrown off. It often took several years to secure compensation, during
which time the value of any compensation was “seriously eroded through
inflation,” observes researcher Anthony L. Hall.[6]
The sites of
irrigation schemes were not selected carefully enough with regard to ecological
factors. Most, for instance, “were not chosen according to the criteria of
highest soil fertility and consistency.” The process “brought with it its own
share of problems in terms of soil saturation and salinization, pollution and
depletion of aquifers, and drainage of lakes and inland seas,” a World Bank
document noted. Reports from DNOCS show that 20% of irrigated land faces
problems of salinization, compaction or flooding. Independent scientists argue,
however, that the figure might be as high as 30 to 50%. Profits originating from
irrigation often correspond to the losses resulting from salinization. “While
the profits are whisked away to outside markets, the losses accumulate on the
land,” according to Jesse Ribot, Adil Najam, and Gabrielle Watson.[7]
In
addition to such inefficiencies, corruption often pervades government efforts.
According to a 1993 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, veteran Liberal
Front Party leader Inocencio de Oliveira's six wells, producing 26,000 gallons a
day, “were not planned to relieve anyone's thirst. Their water is for the
private use of Brazil's virtual vice president, and most of it goes to aid the
cleaning of motorcycle engines in a shop Oliveira owns.” Since the beginning of
drought planning in Brazil, the article says, “DNOCS has drilled 18,000 wells on
private property out of 25,000 and built 500 private dams out of 800.” It also
notes the Brazilian federal Chamber of Deputies report that “most DNOCS
customers are federal deputies, mayors, fazendeiros [large landowners],
businessmen and multinational corporations.” The article’s summary assessment
reaffirms the centrality of government corruption: “Federal relief efforts in
the current drought have been spotty, and the aid is often diverted by local
politicians, who resell food for profit. They also use the aid to solicit votes
by doling out beans, bricks to build homes and emergency jobs at the minimum
wage.”[8]
It is “the social dimension that accentuates the climatic
problem in northeast Brazil,” say researchers in an article on climate change
and sustainable development. According to Anthony L. Hall, even in times of
normal rains, the “meager resource reserves are barely enough to meet [the
inhabitants’] subsistence needs.” He further points out that droughts in the
polygon are only one of the causes of rural unemployment, underdevelopment,
poverty and migration. “The human tragedy of the drought,” he argues, “is a
direct result of the way in which the rural structure of the sertão places
thousands of peasants at the economic margin, vulnerable to even the slightest
climatic vicissitude.”[9]
Droughts are often blamed for rural poverty
and marginalization in northeast Brazil, but they only partly explain rural
poverty. Brazil’s political, economic and climatic conditions are inextricably
linked; drought is a cause of regional poverty, yet ironically, also an effect
of it. Northeast Brazil has long constituted the single largest area of rural
poverty in Latin America; two-thirds of Brazil's rural poor live in the
Northeast. Of its 45 million inhabitants, 47.2% cannot read. A full third lives
in “absolute poverty.” The infant mortality rate in the sertão is one of the
highest in the world, at 75 per 1,000 live births, compared to a Brazilian
national average of 58 per 1,000 (itself a high figure). Seventy-three percent
of northeastern households lack access to proper sanitation facilities, compared
to 46% nationwide.[10]
Droughts are not responsible for rural poverty;
rather, they expose pre-existing inequalities. Droughts would be quite harmless,
perhaps the subject of policy debate—as in Israel, Texas and California—were it
not for the political factors that exacerbate their effects. “Vulnerability,
social and geographic marginality, environmental change and dryland
degradation,” explain water experts, “are central, interlinked and chronic
problems.”[11] The combination of drought, inequality and entrenched, corrupt
political structures causes social marginalization and poverty.
Warren
Dean writes that only 2.6% of a sample of Paraná University students in the
interior city of Maringá knew of the catastrophic drought, freeze and fire that
destroyed 21,000 square kilometers of their state's forests 20 years earlier.
“Should not this holocaust of human making be recounted from generation to
generation?” he asks. “Should not the history textbook approved by the Ministry
of Education begin: 'Children, you live in a desert; let us tell you how you
have been disinherited'?”[12] One of the 20th century's greatest paradoxes is
that in the country with the world’s largest supply of clean water and some of
the world’s largest reservoirs, children died of thirst.
About the Author:
Nicholas
Gabriel Arons graduated from Yale College, researched in Brazil as a
Fulbright Scholar, traveled to Iraq in the 1990s to observe the effects of
economic sanctions and is a recent graduate of NYU School of Law, where he was a
Robert McKay Scholar, a Hays Fellow, and an Institute for International Law and
Justice Fellow. His book, Waiting for Rain: The Poetry and Politics of
Drought in Northeast Brazil (foreword by Nancy Scheper-Hughes), will be
published by the University of Arizona Press this October.
Notes:
1- Information on the 2001
drought and Coelho quotation: Edson Luiz, "Ministro transfere-se para Recife
para cuidar da seca," O Estado de São Paulo, May 25, 2001.
2- On Sergipe,
Ceará, and police response: Andreza Matais, "Governo federal segura dinheiro," O
Povo, June 3, 2001.
3- Marco Antônio Villa, Vida e morte no sertão (São
Paulo: Editor Ática, 2000), 18, 20-21; Alberto de Oliveira, A saga de um povo
(Fortaleza: ABC Fortaleza, 1999), 7, 41.
4- "Brazil: More Promises for the
Northeast," Latin America Newsletters, Ltd. (July 16, 1971), 228; Maria do
Rosário Vieira de Almeida, O fenômeno da seca no Rio Grande do Norte (Natal:
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 1993), 30.
5- Albert Hirschman,
Journeys Toward Progress (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1963), 14; "Rising
Tide of Anger in Brazil's Desert," San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1993.
6- Anthony L. Hall, Drought and Irrigation in North-East Brazil (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978), 73.
7- World Bank, Natural Resources and
Rural Poverty Division, Brazil: Irrigation, Water Policy, and Legal Implications
Report of a World Bank Seminar, Internal Discussion Paper (Washington, D.C.:
World Bank, June 1994), i; Jesse Ribot, Adil Najam, and Gabrielle Watson,
"Climate Variation, Vulnerability, and Sustainable Development," in Climate
Variability, Climate Change, and Social Vulnerability in the Semi-arid Tropics,
edited by Jesse Ribot, Antônio Rocha Magalhães, and Stahis Panagides (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43.
8- "Rising Tide of Anger in Brazil's
Desert," San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1993.
9- Ribot, Najam, and
Watson, "Climate Variation," 14, 21; Hall, Drought and Irrigation, 19.
10-
World Bank, Natural Resources Management and Rural Poverty Division, Northeast
Rural Poverty Alleviation Program, Rural Poverty Alleviation Project—Bahia,
Staff Appraisal Report no. 14390 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, June 6, 1995),
2; Judith Tendler, Good Government in the Tropics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), 10.
11- Ribot, Najam, and Watson, "Climate
Variation," 13.
12- Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 363.
NORTH AMERICAN CONGRESS ON LATIN AMERICA
38 GREENE
ST. 4TH FL., NEW YORK NY 10013
TEL: (646) 613-1440 / FAX (646)
613-1443
Marie-Christine
LACOSTE
lacoste@univ-tlse2.fr
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