Even Rocks Harvest Water in Brazil's Semi-Arid Northeast
By Mario Osava
Beans are left to dry in the sun on Pedrina Pereira’s small farm. In the background, a tank collects
rainwater for drinking and cooking, from the rooftop. It is part of a programme of the organisation
Articulation in Brazil’s Semi Arid Region (ASA), which aims to distribute one million rainwater tanks
to achieve coexistence with the semi-arid climate which extends across 982,000 sq km in
Northeast Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
JUAZEIRINHO/BOM JARDIM, Brazil, Jul 20 2018 (IPS) - Rocks, once a hindrance since they reduced arable land, have become an asset. Pedrina Pereira and João Leite used them to build four ponds to collect rainwater in a farming community in Brazil’s semi-arid Northeast.
On their six-hectare property, the couple store water in three other reservoirs, the “mud trenches”, the name given locally to pits that are dug deep in the ground to store as much water as possible in the smallest possible area to reduce evaporation.
“We no longer suffer from a shortage of water,” not even during the drought that has lasted the last six years, said Pereira, a 47-year-old peasant farmer, on the family’s small farm in Juazeirinho, a municipality in the Northeast state of Paraíba.
Only at the beginning of this year did they have to resort to water distributed by the army to local settlements, but “only for drinking,” Pereira told IPS proudly during a visit to several communities that use innovative water technologies that are changing the lives of small villages and family farmers in this rugged region.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/07/even-rocks-harvest-water-brazils-semi-arid-northeast/