Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence by Christian Parenti (Jun 28, 2011)
Welcome to the hot scrublands of the Nordeste and the tiny village of Boqueirao in Brazil's Ceara Province.
The Nordeste is semiarid, receiving very little rain. Severe floods punctuate its frequent droughts.
The majority of climate models find that northeast Brazil "is expected to experience more rapid warming than the global average during the 21st century." In more concrete terms, most forecasts predict northeastern Brazil will be a region of very severe water stress by 2050.
Rio's favelas (slums) are largely populated by people from these dry lands. Despite its harsh climate, the Northeast is densely populated.43 As climate change grinds down subsistence farmers, more Nordestinos leave to search for work either in the depressed cities of their nearby coastal areas, like Fortaleza and Recife, or down south in the megacities of Sao Palo and Rio. Thus, the social dimensions of the ecological crisis in the Nordeste (a front-line region for climate change) are expressed in cities as unemployment, makeshift housing, the narcotrade and violence.
This community has twenty-seven families, most of them related to each other. In face of drought and flooding, they have begun to adapt both technologically and politically. First, they switched from mono-cropping cotton and beans, which require burning the fallow fields and using expensive chemical inputs, to a form of mixed-crop agroecological farming, agroforestry, and integrated pest management that uses few or no chemical pesticides or fertilizers. They are also using inventive forms of low-impact water-capturing and rain-harvesting technologies.
Osmar and some of his compatriots take me across the road to show me "the system" and some of their alternative water-harvesting techniques.
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One method involves building "underground dams." It goes like this: First the farmers find a dry streambed or natural area of drainage. At the bottom of this feature, below and away from the slope of the hill, they dig a long ditch across the natural path of drainage. The ditch maybe one hundred or three hundred feet long and deep enough to hit solid rock?here, about five to ten feet down. Then, within the ditch, they build a cement and rock wall?or dam?lined with heavy plastic. Then the ditch is filled in, and the wall is buried. This underground dam greatly slows the natural drainage and creates a moist and fertile field "upstream."
The agroforestry crops are a mix of fruit trees, corn, cover crops, and climbing-vine crops. The fields seem abandoned due to the tangled mix of plant species. This lush mesh captures moisture and creates a balance of competing insects, limiting or eliminating the need for chemical pesticides. During the first three to five years, yields decrease, but then they increase as soil health improves. And the produce, as organic, commands higher prices.
For individual plants that need irrigation, they attach punctured empty plastic soda bottles to stakes above the thirsty plant. With this form of low-tech drip irrigation, a farmer can feed an individual plant little bits of water, allowing the precious liquid to drip out slowly and only onto the plant that needs it. The farmers' list of ingenious methods is long and evolving, thanks in part to groups like the Catholic NGO Caritas, which works to spread knowledge of best practices among the communities.
Altogether, these agroforestry or agroecological methods, which revive and enhance old ways, are in use all over the world. The IPCC mentions them in the Fourth Assessment Report: "Agroforestry using agroecologi- cal methods offers strong possibilities for maintaining biological diversity in Latin America, given the overlap between protected areas and agricultural zones."44
"The system," as the farmers call it, preserves and enhances the land's fertility and moisture, and because the fields are never left as bare ground, it helps prevent erosion.
In the village of Bueno, I met Antonio Braga Mota. "The system is a balanced system. I was really surprised that we actually did not need fertilizer and pesticides to do this," said Antonio as we tour his vine- and tree-covered crops. "The traditional method was destructive. Burning depletes the land. Unfortunately, I did a lot of that. "He said even tapirs and rare birds are returning. He could be passionate about the system because he owned his land. He was not rich but had enough land to make the transition from main-stream methods to green farming.