Water and Brazil
This is a preliminary reflection on water in Brazil, a country that, in principle, has enough for its needs and then some. The problem is in the distribution and management of water, and in the infrastructure that should carry it to the Brazilian population. Later versions of this post will have more research and photos, but this preliminary reflection is a rough overview of Brazil’s water situation as we have seen it over the last few months. Some of these photos have appeared in earlier posts about life in the interior.
What I show here is what I have experienced and photographed in Brazil — mostly in the northeast state of Maranhão, which is among the poorest and least developed in Brazil. My own subjective experience is augmented by reportage from São Paulo and Maranhão newspapers and weekly journals.
Some Larger Issues: Water in the Amazon and the Interior
The world is familiar with issues of conservation of the forests and aquifers in the Amazon region of Brazil. The area is being deforested at an astonishing rate by miners, lumber companies, farming businesses, and others. Farming of the lucrative cattle and grain products (e.g., soy beans) is creating more food and less water.
Directly or indirectly, forest and water in this region is especially threatened by the world’s demand for meat — either as cattle raised here or the grain used (and massively exported) to feed cattle elsewhere. Some sources say that soy would be nine times more efficient as a source of protein if used directly, rather than being used as cattle feed to produce meat. Much of the cattle ranching in Brazil is based on free range and thus needs space — this is perhaps the biggest threat to Brazil’s forests and water.
Water in São Paulo, and the Missing 20,000 Water Tanks
São Paulo’s reservoirs are threatened by a long, dry season. Their replenishment is a matter of nature providing enough rain in the wet season. But these problems are to some extent predictable and the infrastructure to manage a shortage has not yet been built.
Again, a major problem is in the distribution system. In São Paulo there are eight major systems. They are only partly connected and metro-wide “integration” of the water infrastructure is an engineer’s dream and a very problematic political task.
Brazil is currently plagued with a declining economy and is hobbled at the national level by corruption and feuding over ethics investigations, the jailing of leading political figures, and the possible impeachment of others. In São Paulo the political situation is seems less contentious, but the water infrastructure demands a huge investment that is not readily accomplished in times of economic stress.
As an example, the northern zone of greater São Paulo is somewhat distant from the central commercial district and it houses a millions of people with modest incomes and standard of living. This region is fed by the Cantareira water reserve, which has fallen to as low as 15% of capacity and has only recovered a few percent since the rains of the summer (i.e., the months that are winter in the Northern hemisphere).
Cantareira dropped to a “dead volume” — the level at which water does not freely flow out of the reservoir but must be pumped. This depletes the volume further until, in theory, they reach the mud at the bottom and the system fails entirely. This has not been happened, but the measures to improve the situation have been difficult.
At full efficiency the Cantareira reservoir supplies 31 thousand liters of water a second to 9 million people. By September (24th) the newspaper Fohla de São Paulo reported that the system had fallen to about half that performance — to 14 thousand liters/second and 9 million to 5 million people. The slack in providing water to the northern region of the city has been taken up by shifting some load to other systems.
Load sharing is more effective if there is a metropolitan-wide system of integration, but that is not yet in place.
Another second tactic is rationing. This modifies the behavior of end-users by simply shrinking the supply or, alternately, the hours of access. According to some newspaper accounts, certain areas of the affected zone are often without water for several days. Sometimes the rationing is by time of day, reportedly as low in some places as 20 of 24 hours with dry faucets and toilets. This is a working district so people may not be in their homes when there is water. They need water tanks (caixas d’agua) that could be filled and would bridge the off-times of the municipal water.
The São Paulo mayor Geraldo Alckmin promised 20,000 new water tanks to be installed in troubled areas. Thar was during an election campaign. Only a fraction have been installed. The city claims that they have not been able to deliver the tanks to many (or even most) households because nobody is home when the trucks come by (during the working hours of the city employees, of course). This troubled half-solution is proceeding slowly, and only (it appears) under great pressure from the press.
Yet, the water tank is a basic feature of the Brazilian countryside and of most towns and cities in the interior. Even in better-supplied areas, homes, businesses and factories use the tanks to stabilize their water supply. This is true all over Brazil, in cities and in rural areas.
The problem, again, is one of distribution. In this case it is the far-flung neighborhoods of São Paulo working people that are at the short end of the distribution chain.
But load sharing and infrastructure provide one approach to redistributing the water supply. Another is modifying consumer behavior. For those that are more generously supplied there are a number of incentives to reduce consumption. São Paulo initiated a system of fees (equivalent to fines) for usage above normal, and included a bonus for reductions in use. Modifying consumer behavior in the better-supplied systems theoretically freed water to be distributed to the troubled districts such as those served by the Cantareira Reservoir.
By March, 2016 the São Paulo situation had improved considerably due to heavy rains. As a sign of improvement the system of fees and bonuses was scheduled to be suspended.
Recycling and Waste Management
There is an interconnected set of issues where water supply is limited and waste management is troubled. In this small city of Mirinzal trash is routinely dumped (see large appliances at photo right) and used tires are unceremoniously left about. Both catch water during the wet season and become possible breeding grounds for mosquitoes. In days of the Aedes Aegipti mosquito, such diseases as Zika, Chikunkunya and Dengue are major public issues (as is the spread of microencephalitis for which the mosquite may be a vector).
Managing water in the rainy season is important in its own way, as is distributing water in scarcity. Trash and waste disposal are deeply interconnected with the water supply in both rural and urban areas.
Some Views from the Interior
Water tanks are ubiquitous in the smaller cities of Brazil. The tanks are vital in the interior regions with no municipal water supply (photo above of ox cart, and the section below on caixas d’agua). Settlements and towns in the country are often spread along rivers and water sources, but those sources are heavily used, vulnerable and the water often dries up or is unsafe. The woman in the photo above is carrying household water from a common water source to her home. This is not an unusual scene in povoadas. The most common source is be a well or a jointly-used water tank. Rarely does a natural source meet local needs during the dry season.
Since much of our research is based in the provincial capital of São Luís and in the interior of the state of Maranhão, most of the photographs below are of that region. Not shown are the indigenous regions of the interior where in September of 2015 there was a major water emergency, exacerbated by fires, in the forests of the interior. Several cities declared water emergencies and much forested land was threatened. There was insufficient water to fight a major fire.
These issues compound problems created by both nature by human and political behavior.
By comparison, São Paulo officials said that the water situation was only “really serious” when we begin to see trucks of water roaming the streets of the city.
In São Luís we see the water trucks almost daily.
Water in the federal state of Maranhão
Maranhão is a long way from the metropolitan centers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Like those centers, it is on or near the Atlantic Ocean, but is dependent on its fresh water sources in the interior. These systems are underdeveloped in general, and subject to shortages in dry seasons.
Readers of Brazilian popular fiction and many films are aware that the region of the sertão (often translated as “backlands”) has been depopulated for decades because of drought.
This region is has similarities to America’s “dust bowl” which emptied out much of the western region of the American Midwest during the dust storms of several decades ago. In the United States this gave rise to a national rural recovery administration. This period was memorialized in such books/films as John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and in the photography of Dorothea Lange and others working for the Farm Services Administration.
The sertao is Brazil’s rough analogue to the American dust bowl. It is not geographically part of the federal state of Maranhão, but some of the dry-season problems of Maranhão are reminiscent of these famous dust bowl regions. The beautiful green of the countryside and its forests become dry and dusty waiting for the rains. Even the palm trees and ground foliage get dusty. In many years the rains are not enough to replenish the water systems. This threatens rice and cotton crops, cattle production, and the lives of the inhabitants.
Like the dust bowl, the Northeast of Brazil, of which Maranhão is a part, is a major source of out-migration. People in the interior migrate to Maranhão, and many others make the longer trip to major cities like São Paulo.
In São Paulo, however, they may live in a district like that served by Cantareira where water is in very short supply. In some sense, moving the population contributes to moving the “water problem” from place to place in Brazil.
Even where there may be water, the distribution systems may be only rudimentary — for example, as in the village market described below.
The first photo from the interior is from the small city of Pindaré where the market is a major outlet for freshly-caught fish. This is a major source of sustenance and economic life in the region.
The market in Pindaré has a common water source — the faucet below provides water for cleaning fish and other market needs.
In villages and povoadas in the interior, food preparation is a matter of careful planning and complicated hygiene. The scene below brings back childhood memories of my grandparents’ farm where animals were butchered in the open and shared by many families. There was little refrigeration and the best way to preserve meat was to keep it on the hoof.
In the scenes below animals come to the party alive and become dinner in the course of the celebration. This is not “animal sacrifice” in the religious sense, but rather a practical way of feeding a large group. The practice gains a spiritual/community sense in that there are often rituals or moments of praise for the gifts of food that they share.
Food Preparation
Some Household Systems
Grocery stores sell 6-liter bottles of household water. These are helpful, but also enter the refuse stream of un-recycled plastic in the waste system. More efficient are the delivery services that will bring you a 20-liter bottle within an hour or so if you live in a major service area.
A commonly-used word is “Diskagua,” which means you simply call and the water is delivered, usually by motorcycle (the disk portion of the word refers to the old-style telephones with a “disk” of numbers on a rotary dialer).
If you live in the interior away from an incorporated city or town, getting the bottles is much more difficult. In some areas delivery is by truck, in others by motorcycle or by bicycle.
We have seen unlucky motorcycle diskagua drivers in heavy traffic with damaged and leaking 20-liter bottles lashed to the back. In larger areas there are trucks carrying the bottles, but the “capillary” distribution to individual households is usually by small vehicle (or even by donkey cart in some places).
Apartments in the city of São Luís use this system since there is no potable water in the municipal pipes. Many have a boutique dispenser that also cools the water.
The older water system below is from the kitchen of a pousada, or bed-and-breakfast where we sometimes stay in Pindaré. We don’t think of this as a 5-star experience, and on our last visit there was no water at all until sundown.
Plastic bottles are part of the solution, and part of the problem.
In the household systems above and below you can see that plastic bottles are an important part of the system.
Dependence on water, and dependence on plastic, go together in Brazil, creating a huge problem of recycling and plastic waste. Plastic waste adds to other waste/rubbish removal problems to create standing water where mosquitoes breed in season. This chain of interconnected water-refuse-public health issues begins with problematic hygiene in sewage and water systems, water shortages, generation of plastic alternatives for water, and the absence of recycling in many areas.
Solving any of these problems is like doing paper work with the Brazilian bureaucracy (where “Catch 22” is a basic situation) — you often can’t do just one thing at one office, you need to solve several other problems at different offices (which may be closed or across town). The public health analogue is in the interconnectedness of water, sewage, waste removal, and recycling (all of which are, in turn, related in some way to other infrastructure issues in roads and the underlying water/sewer systems).
It is difficult to encourage recycling of plastic or reduce people’s dependence on plastic when getting water is so critical. You might ask whether Brazilian could not simply get a reusable water bottle (like campers use). Many recycling-conscious people in other countries use camping bottles and refil them from a water tap. This works where the municipal water supply is safe. Many people do indeed reuse plastic water water bottles to reduce cost and waste. When we are traveling in the interior we try to reuse commercial plastic bottles filled from our 20-liter tank at home — that is how we learned that they are thin and fragile, often cracking and losing the water (in your luggage or camera bag).
The home below is a modest one, but has the rare good fortune to have its own well water. There is otherwise no municipal system of water or sanitation in this neighborhood in the interior of Maranhão (near the city of Rosário).
In several of these photos (including the one below) you can see that individual households do try to recycle plastic bottles to cut cost and waste. The bottle are not made to last, however.
Americans will be familiar with similar situations in the United States. Residents in Flint Michigan suffered a serious pollution of their water, apparently due to decisions made at the state level. As their water became unpotable, they were forced to buy bottled water (in plastic bottles, usually). The irony is compounded by the fact that some of the bottled water supply was originally from the Great Lakes — rebottled and sold to them commercially.
Calhau Beach Restaurants, São Luís
The beaches in São Luís are lined with restaurant and bars. They vary in quality and hygiene, but some are quite popular regardless of what lies behind. On the beach side of these businesses you can see the motley infrastructure that supports the kitchen and bathrooms. It is hard to tell how much the bathrooms and kitchens are supported by city water or sewer system. On rainy days effluent from the city purges into the bay.
The restaurant may be doing alright, but the runoff is part of the pollution in the the San Marcos Bay.
The Ubiquitous Water Tank (caixa da agua)
The various household and commercial systems are often depending on water tanks for stabilizing the water supply. They show up in the photos above. Below are more such systems showing how common and essential they are outside areas of reliable municipal systems.
Sanitation
