Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [82]
Rio’s favelas 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 São Palo and Rio. Thus, the social dimensions of the ecological crisis in the Nordeste (a frontline region for climate change) are expressed in cities as unemployment, makeshift housing, the narcotrade and violence.
In this light, we can read the struggle of the farmers in Boqueirão as an inadvertent struggle against violence and social breakdown in the cities. At the same time, their struggle to stay on the land is a struggle for social justice in one of the most unequal countries in the world. It is also a struggle to adapt to climate change in an already extreme environment; as such, it encapsulates the possibilities and perils of Brazilian life in the face of the catastrophic convergence.
Technologies of Adaptation
“Thank God we are all strong people. We don’t take loans,” said Osmar Careinro Araujo. We were sitting in the shade of the MST camp’s kitchen shack; around us the afternoon landscape was still and hot. Everything seemed to be waiting for the sun to relent. Osmar, the de facto community leader, was in his early forties, short and dark, with squinty, thoughtful eyes and a full black mustache. He had come up with the idea of the land occupation. He said,
We had a few years without bad drought. And then last year—we have never seen a winter like that. It rained until August. As for the temperature rising, we can’t measure this, but it feels much hotter. We feel the increase over the years. And for agriculture this is bad. Last year we had a really bad year. Because it flooded, we lost 50 percent of our beans. The fava did well. But there was a bumper crop, so prices were low. A real farmer always keeps back some seed. We are okay despite last year. But if the weather is really bad again we will have a hard time to recover.
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 monocropping 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. 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 may be 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