Brazilian farmer Silvani Gonsalves do Santos, 60, and her family had their lives changed that day in 2016 when a gigantic cistern was installed next to their little house. Made of cement, it collects rainwater (up to 52,000 liters) which can then be dosed so that it lasts the rest of the year. “Until this technology arrived, we were the famous scourges of drought,” he says, referring to the starving Brazilians with very brown skin—as cracked by the sun as the thirsty earth—because every day they walked kilometers to get well water with a tin. In the 1980s, the worst drought of the century killed hundreds of thousands of people in northeastern Brazil. Thanks to the cistern, this family living in a small rural community of Juazeiro (Bahia) began to trace a virtuous circle. They no longer live pending the sky. They plan. And they eat. They eat healthy because they grow vegetables. And they have another smaller cistern with water for showering, washing or washing clothes that they reuse in growing fodder for the goats.
The families of the Malhada da Areia community have learned to live with the drought and are in the process of revitalizing their communal pasture lands, exhausted after decades of overexploitation. They live in the epicenter of desertification in Brazil, a phenomenon that consumes 100 million productive hectares on the planet every year and threatens one in five Brazilian municipalities.
Garanhuns, the city of Pernambuco where Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was born, is 550 kilometers away, close by Brazilian standards. With his family and thousands of his compatriots, the president of the republic emigrated to São Paulo as a child driven by poverty. His first governments installed a million cisterns like Mrs. Do Santos’. Since then they symbolize the policy of the Workers’ Party (PT) against desertification and exodus in Caatinga, the most arid region, where one in every seven Brazilians lives. The water tanks are one of the many public policies abruptly abandoned by Jair Bolsonaro, who did not invest a real, and which is now taken up by Lula, idolized here. “Lula is our boss after God. He works a lot for the poor, he doesn’t hate us,” emphasizes Maria Gonsalves Santana, 60 years old. She takes the opportunity to speak with infinite pride about her son: “I fought hard and made him become a journalist.”
They also venerate the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva. Just look at the reception she received last Monday when she arrived in the community with the executive secretary of the UN convention to combat desertification, the Mauritanian Ibrahim Thiaw, and with the governor of Bahia, Jeronimo Rodrigues. For the locals, the fact that so many high authorities visit them refutes that this is the end of the world.
A swarm of neighbors, local politicians, and journalists barely let them advance, among cacti and bushes under an inclement sun, during the visit, to which this newspaper was invited by the UN. The minister and the senior official came to learn about the community’s projects to heal their lands, degraded by years of hunting, deforestation to feed herds of goats and sheep, land usurpation…
Priceless opportunity for these humble people to convey their urgencies to power. They present two priorities: that the support projects are not interrupted and that the authorities recognize once and for all that these lands inhabited by their ancestors more than two centuries ago belong to them. And, of course, cisterns for everyone. Maricelia Santana Gonsalves, 56 years old, has been waiting for one for years. For now she manages with the water that she receives through the pipe every 15 days. When she runs out, she appeals to neighborhood solidarity. The current government tanker program includes more than 130,000 new units between last year and this year.
On the day of the authorities’ visit, Brazil announced that it is joining the international alliance for drought resilience (IDRA, in English) promoted by Spain and Senegal. The lack of rain, aggravated by climate change, gradually and silently causes very serious damage. Quite the opposite of floods or storms, which are always spectacular and receive much more attention. Thiaw, from the UN, warns that land degradation threatens 50% of the world’s GDP, which is said to be soon. “It creates conflicts over land, unwanted immigration…” he adds.
Brazil hopes that the alliance will help it create synergies with other countries affected by desertification, attract public and private funds to confront it and export successful experiences such as cisterns, already adopted in Africa.
The residents of Malhada da Areia do their best to explain to the illustrious visitors how years ago they changed their strategy in the face of drought. They no longer fight it, they live with it, explains Luís Almeida Santos, from Irpaa (Regional Institute of Appropriate Small Agriculture). This has translated into fencing 50 of the 2,000 communal hectares so that the vegetation can grow as it pleases without the threat of voracious herds. They are delighted with this small reserve that they will keep practically intact for 15 years. They have planted native flora and now manage it sustainably. The bald spots between the vegetation are decreasing. Jaguars and snakes have reappeared, as have some plant species. Now they grow tropical fruits and produce honey.
With cisterns they manage to get the most out of every drop of rain. Now that they can grow crops next to the house, the diet is much richer and more varied. “Organic,” says Do Santos, who enjoys experimenting with new seeds while trying to recover the old ones with the flavors of his childhood. For some time now, she and her neighbors have been writing down their daily lives in a notebook: selling a chicken, picking thyme, some peppers… “this way we show that we also contribute to the family income.”
![Water tank being refilled at Geraldo Apurinã's house in an indigenous community in Brazil.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/NVCCPIUUQBDYLH7UT6QRLCC76Y.jpg?auth=621619518ef5265ff8e934fcb29dd35fad0538f0ac482e0282277369af781249&width=414)
The youth exodus is unstoppable, confirms Gilberto Raimundo Santana, who grew up without electricity or water. “We old people live here, but the young people go to the city to work in the grape and mango packing plants.” Like other men, he protects himself from the sun with the typical northeastern Brazilian hat, made of leather and short brim.
In a couple of decades, their lives have changed radically. They even already have an Internet connection, that is, WhatsApp. Iracema Helena da Silva, 46 years old, the community leader, the one in charge of transmitting demands and thanks to the authorities, says that they are fun people, very party-goers. They love a barbecue and a good forró dance.
The bad news is that, with prosperity, unknown problems have come, such as diabetes or hypertension, according to Da Silva, who works as a health agent. The main suspects, the plague of ultra-processed foods. “You know, once the electricity arrives, everything else arrives,” says a neighbor.
In addition to the project to regenerate native vegetation and communal lands, this small community is embarking on another mission. This one, on your own. “We are building a Catholic church,” the leader says with emotion. “We have done bingos, raffles, cowboy masses… we are raising it ourselves.” Until now they prayed under a tree or in the home of one of the faithful.
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