‘Passion Seeds’ Fertilize Brazil’s Semiarid Northeast

Ligoria Felipe dos Santos poses for a photo on her agroecological farm that mixes corn, squash, fruits, vegetables and medicinal herbs. She is part of the women's movement that is trying to prevent the installation of wind farms in the Borborema mountain range, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Ligoria Felipe dos Santos poses for a photo on her agroecological farm that mixes corn, squash, fruits, vegetables and medicinal herbs. She is part of the women’s movement that is trying to prevent the installation of wind farms in the Borborema mountain range, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
ESPERANÇA, Brazil , Jul 14 2023 (IPS)

Zé Pequeno cried when he learned that the heirloom seeds he had inherited from his father were contaminated by the transgenic corn his neighbor had brought from the south. Fortunately, he was able to salvage the native seeds because he had shared them with other neighbors.


Euzébio Cavalcanti recalls this story from one of his colleagues to highlight the importance of “passion seeds” for family farming in Brazil’s semiarid low-rainfall ecoregion which extends over 1.1 million square kilometers, twice the size of France, in the northeastern interior of the country.”These are seeds adapted to the semiarid climate. They can withstand long droughts, without irrigation.” Euzébio Cavalcanti

Saving heirloom seeds is a peasant tradition, but two decades ago the Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organizations that emerged in the 1990s, named those who practice it as individual and community guardians of seeds. By September 2021, it had registered 859 banks of native seeds in the region.

Cavalcanti, a 56-year-old farmer with multiple skills such as poet, musician and radio broadcaster, coordinates the network of these banks in the Polo de Borborema, a joint action area of 14 rural workers’ unions and 150 community organizations in central-eastern Paraíba, one of the nine states of the Brazilian Northeast.

“These are seeds adapted to the semiarid climate. They can withstand long droughts, without irrigation, that is why they are so important,” he explained. They also preserve the genetic heritage of many local crop species and family history; they have sentimental value.

“Don’t plant transgenics, don’t erase my history”, is a slogan of the movement that promotes agroecological practices and is opposed to the expansion of genetically modified organisms in local agriculture. “Corn free of transgenics and agrotoxins (agrochemicals)” is the goal of their campaign.

In Paraíba, the name “passion seeds” has been adopted, instead of native or heirloom seeds, since 2003, when the state government announced that it would provide seeds from a specialized company to family farmers.

“If the government offers these seeds, I don’t want them. I have family seeds and I have passion for them,” reacted a farmer in a meeting with the authorities.

“‘Passion seeds’ spread throughout Paraíba. In other states they’re called ‘seeds of resistance’,” Cavalcanti said.

Agroecology is one of the banners of the Polo de Borborema, as it is for ASA in the entire semiarid ecosystem that covers most of the Northeast region and a northern strip of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.

"Passion seeds," as heirloom seeds are known locally, ensure better harvests on semiarid lands, free of transgenics or "agricultural poisons," according to Euzébio Cavalcanti, a small farmer, poet and musician who helped lead the struggle for agrarian reform and cares for the seeds in the highlands of Borborema, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“Passion seeds,” as heirloom seeds are known locally, ensure better harvests on semiarid lands, free of transgenics or “agricultural poisons,” according to Euzébio Cavalcanti, a small farmer, poet and musician who helped lead the struggle for agrarian reform and cares for the seeds in the highlands of Borborema, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Learning to coexist with semiarid conditions

This approach arose from a change in the development strategy adopted on the part of local society, especially ASA, since the 1990s. “Coexisting with semiarid conditions” replaced the traditional, failed focus on “fighting the drought”.

Large dams and reservoirs, which only benefit large landowners and do not help the majority of small farmers, gave way to more than 1.2 million tanks for collecting rainwater from household or school rooftops and various ways of storing water for crops and livestock.

It is a process of decolonization of agriculture, education and science, which prioritizes knowledge of the climate and the regional biome, the Caatinga, characterized by low, twisted, drought-resilient vegetation. It also includes the abandonment of monoculture, with the implementation of traditional local horticultural and family farming techniques.

The Northeast, home to 26.9 percent of the national population, or 54.6 million inhabitants according to the 2022 demographic census, concentrates 47.2 percent of the country’s family farmers, according to the 2017 agricultural census. There are 1.84 million small farms worked mainly by family labor.

Brazil’s semiarid region is one of the rainiest in the world for this type of climate, with 200 to 800 millimeters of rain per year on average, although there are drier areas in the process of desertification.

A stand at the ecological market in the municipality of Esperança, in northeastern Brazil, is a link between urban consumers and family farmers opposed to agrochemicals, monoculture and transgenic products. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

A stand at the ecological market in the municipality of Esperança, in northeastern Brazil, is a link between urban consumers and family farmers opposed to agrochemicals, monoculture and transgenic products. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Borborema, the name of a high plateau that obstructs the humidity coming from the sea, making the territory to its west drier, is the scene of various peasant struggles, such as the mobilization for agrarian reform since the 1980s and for small-scale agriculture “without poisons” or agrochemicals, of which the “seeds of passion” are a symbol.

Cavalcanti is a living memory of local history, also as a founder of the local Landless Workers Movement (MST) and an activist in the occupations of unproductive land to create rural settlements, on one of which he gained his own small farm where he grows beans, corn and, vegetables and has two rainwater collection tanks.

Women help drive the expansion of agroecology

Women have played a key role in the drive towards agroecology. The March for Women’s Lives and Agroecology is an annual demonstration that since 2010 has defended family farming and the right to a healthy life.

This year, on Mar. 16, 5,000 women gathered in Montadas, a municipality of 5,800 inhabitants, to block the creation of wind farms that have already caused damage to the health of small farmers by being installed near their homes.

Borborema is “a territory of resistance,” say the women. About 15 years ago, they succeeded in abolishing the cultivation of tobacco.

The president of the Union of Rural Workers of the municipality of Esperança, Alexandre Lira (C) and other leaders pose in front of a poster declaring the union's current goals: "Agroecological Borborema is no place for a wind farm," he says about this area in Brazil's semiarid Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

The president of the Union of Rural Workers of the municipality of Esperança, Alexandre Lira (C) and other leaders pose in front of a poster declaring the union’s current goals: “Agroecological Borborema is no place for a wind farm,” he says about this area in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

When the citrus blackfly arrived, the government tried to combat it with pesticides, but “we resisted; we used natural products and solved the problem for our oranges and lemons,” said Ligoria Felipe dos Santos, a 54-year-old mother of three.

“That is agroecology, which is strengthened in the face of threats. Farmers are aware, they resort to alternative defenses, they know that it is imbalance that leads to pests,” she told IPS.

“Agroecology is a good banner for union activity,” said Lexandre Lira, 42, president of the Rural Workers Union of Esperança, a municipality of 31,000 people in the center of the Polo de Borborema.

It is also a factor in keeping farmers’ children on the farms, because it awakens the interest of young people in agriculture, said Edson Johny da Silva, 27, the union’s youth coordinator.

Maria das Graças Vicente and Givaldo Firmino dos Santos stand next to the machine they use for making pulp from native fruits little known outside Brazil, such as the umbu (Brazil plum), cajá (hog plum), acerola (Amazon or Barbados cherry), along with cashews, mangos, and guava. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Maria das Graças Vicente and Givaldo Firmino dos Santos stand next to the machine they use for making pulp from native fruits little known outside Brazil, such as the umbu (Brazil plum), cajá (hog plum), acerola (Amazon or Barbados cherry), along with cashews, mangos, and guava. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Pulp, added value

Maria das Graças Vicente, known as Nina, 51, along with her husband Givaldo Firmino dos Santos, 52, is an example of agroecological productivity. On 1.25 hectares of land they produce citrus fruits, passion fruit, acerola (Amazon or Barbados cherry), mango and other fruits, as well as sugar cane, corn, beans and other vegetables.

Grafted fruit tree seedlings are another of the products they use to expand their income, as IPS was shown during a visit to their farm.

Using their own harvest and fruit they buy from neighbors, they make pulp in a small shed separate from their home, with a small machine purchased with the support of the Advisory and Services to Projects in Alternative Agriculture (AS-PTA), a non-governmental organization that supports farmers in Borborema and other parts of Brazil.

“Luckily we have a microclimate in the valley, where it rains more than in the surrounding areas. Everything grows here,” Santos told IPS.

But the couple created three reservoirs to collect rainwater and withstand droughts: a 16,000-liter water tank for household use, another that collects water on the paved ground for irrigation, and a small lagoon dug in the lower part of the farm.

But in 2016 the lagoon dried up, because of the “great drought” that lasted from 2012 to 2017, Vicente said.

The fruit pulp factory has grown in recent years and now has seven small freezers to store fruit and pulp for sale to the town’s stores and restaurants. The couple decided to purchase a cold room with the capacity of 30 freezers.

“I work in the mornings on the land, in the afternoons I make pulp and my husband is in charge of the sales,” she said.

Hiring workers from outside the family to reduce the workload costs too much and “we try to save as much as possible on everything, to sell the pulp at a fair price,” Santos said.

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Biodigesters Boost Family Farming in Brazil

Lucineide Cordeiro loads manure from her two oxen and two calves into the "sertanejo" biodigester that produces biogas for cooking and biofertilizer for her varied crops on the one-hectare agroecological farm she manages on her own in the rural municipality of Afogados da Ingazeira, in the semiarid ecoregion of northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Lucineide Cordeiro loads manure from her two oxen and two calves into the “sertanejo” biodigester that produces biogas for cooking and biofertilizer for her varied crops on the one-hectare agroecological farm she manages on her own in the rural municipality of Afogados da Ingazeira, in the semiarid ecoregion of northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
AFOGADOS DA INGAZEIRA, Brazil , Jun 24 2023 (IPS)

“The biodigester really gives a huge boost to those who have the courage to do things,” said Maria das Dores Alves da Silva, based on her own experience as a 63-year-old small farmer.


She did not hesitate to accept the offer of Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, to acquire the equipment to produce biogas on her farm in the rural area of Afogados da Ingazeira, a municipality of 38,000 people in the state of Pernambuco in the Northeast region of Brazil.”We seek to promote energy, food and water autonomy to maintain more resilient agroecosystems, to coexist with climate change, strengthening community self-management with a special focus on the lives of women.” — Ita Porto

At first she did not have the cattle whose manure she needed to produce biogas, that enables her to save on liquefied petroleum gas, which costs 95 reais (20 dollars) for a 13-kg cylinder – a significant cost for poor families.

She brought manure from a neighboring farm that gave it to her for free, in an hour-long trip with her wheelbarrow, until she was able to buy her first cow and then another with loans from the state-owned Banco del Nordeste.

“Now I have more than enough manure,” she said happily as she welcomed IPS to her four-hectare farm where she and her husband have lived alone since their two children became independent.

Das Dores, as she is known, is an example among the 163 families who have benefited from the “sertanejos biodigesters” distributed by Diaconia in the sertão of Pajeú, a semiarid micro-region of 17 municipalities and 13,350 square kilometers in the center-north of Pernambuco.

Farmer Maria das Dores Alves da Silva stands between the manure pit and the "sertanejo" biodigester designed by Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, which has already installed 713 biogas production plants in eight of Brazil's 26 states. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Farmer Maria das Dores Alves da Silva stands between the manure pit and the “sertanejo” biodigester designed by Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, which has already installed 713 biogas production plants in eight of Brazil’s 26 states. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Biofertilizer

In addition to using the biogas, she sells the manure after it has been subjected to anaerobic biodigestion that extracts the gases – the so-called digestate, a biofertilizer that she packages in one-kilo plastic bags, after drying and shredding it.

Every Saturday, she sells 30 bags at the agroecological market in the town of Afogados da Ingazeira, the municipal seat. At two reais (40 cents) a bag, she earns an extra income of 60 reais (12.50 dollars), on top of her sales of the various sweet cakes she bakes at home, at a cost reduced by the biogas, and of the seedlings she also produces.

The seedlings provided her with a new business opportunity. “The customers asked me if I didn’t also have fertilizer,” she said. The biodigester produces enough fertilizer to sell at the market and to fertilize the farm’s crops of beans, corn, fruit trees, flowers and different vegetables.

This diversity is common in family farming in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, but even more so in the agroecological techniques that have expanded in this territory of one million square kilometers in the northeastern interior of the country, which has an arid biome highly vulnerable to climate change, subject to frequent droughts, and where there are areas in the process of desertification.

The Pajeú river basin is the micro-region chosen by Diaconia as a priority for its social and environmental actions.

On Lucineide Cordeiro's small farm, cotton, corn, sesame, sunflower, cassava and fruit trees are alternated in the fields, as recommended by agroecology, which is on the rise on family farms in Brazil's semiarid Northeast, which is threatened by longer and more severe droughts due to the climate crisis. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

On Lucineide Cordeiro’s small farm, cotton, corn, sesame, sunflower, cassava and fruit trees are alternated in the fields, as recommended by agroecology, which is on the rise on family farms in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, which is threatened by longer and more severe droughts due to the climate crisis. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Energy and food security

“We seek to promote energy, food and water autonomy to maintain more resilient agroecosystems, to coexist with climate change, strengthening community self-management with a special focus on the lives of women,” Ita Porto, Diaconia’s coordinator in the Pajeu ecoregion, told IPS.

“The production of biogas on a rural family scale fulfills the needs of energy for cooking, sanitary disposal and treatment of animal waste and reduction of deforestation, in addition to increasing food productivity, with organic fertilizer, while bolstering human health,” said the 48-year-old agronomist.

More than 713 units of the “sertanejo biodigester”, a model developed by Diaconia 15 years ago, have been installed in Brazil. In addition to the 163 in the sertão do Pajeú, there are 150 in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte and another 400 distributed in six other Brazilian states, financed by the Caixa Econômica Federal, a government bank focused on social questions.

“Hopefully the government will make it a public policy, as it has already done with the rainwater harvesting tanks in the semarid Northeast,” said Porto.

More than 1.3 million rainwater harvesting tanks for drinking water have already been built, but some 350,000 are still needed to make them universal in rural areas, according to the Articulation of the Semi-Arid (Asa), a network of 3,000 social organizations that spearheaded the transformative program.

Maria Das Dores examines the biofertilizer that comes out of the biodigester, without the gases from the animal manure. She sells this by-product at the agroecological market in the town of Afogados da Ingazeira, the seat of the municipality where her four-hectare farm is located, which earns her an average extra income of 12.5 dollars a week. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

The value of manure

“One cow is enough to produce the biogas consumed in our stove,” said Lucineide Cordeiro, on her one-hectare farm where she grows cotton, corn, sesame seeds and fruit, in an interconnected agroecological system, along with chickens, pigs and fish in a pond.

She also has two oxen and two calves, which she proudly showed to IPS during the visit to her farm.

“Pig manure produces biogas more quickly, but I don’t like the stench,” the 37-year-old farmer who is the director of Women’s Policies at the Afogados da Ingazeira Rural Workers Union told IPS.

The difference in the crops before and after fertilization by the biodigester by-product is remarkable, according to her and other farmers in the municipality.

She tends to her many crops on her own, although she is sometimes helped by friends, and has several pieces of equipment such as a brushcutter and a micro-tractor.

"It's the best invention," says Lucineide Cordeiro, as she shows IPS the seeder created by the Japanese for small-scale farming, which allows her to sow in half a day the land that used to take her two days to plant, on her one-hectare farm in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil's semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“It’s the best invention,” says Lucineide Cordeiro, as she shows IPS the seeder created by the Japanese for small-scale farming, which allows her to sow in half a day the land that used to take her two days to plant, on her one-hectare farm in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“But the seeder is the best invention that changed my life, it was invented by the Japanese. Planting the seeds, which used to take me two days of work, I can now do in half a day,” Cordeiro said.

The seeder is a small machine pushed by the farmer, with a wheel filled with seeds that has 12 nozzles that can be opened or closed, according to the distance needed to sow each seed.

The emergence of appropriate equipment for family farming is recent, in a sector that has favored large farmers in Brazil.

Female protagonism clashes with male chauvinist violence

For the success of local family farming, the support of the Pajeú Agroecological Association (Asap), of which Cordeiro is a member and a “multiplier”, as the women farmers who are an example to others of good practices are called, is important.

In family farming the empowerment of women stands out, which in many cases was a response to sexist violence or oppression.

 Blue flames emerge from the burners of Maria Das Dores' biogas stove at her home in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil's semiarid Northeast region. A single ox or cow produces enough manure to generate more biogas than a family requires for its domestic needs. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Blue flames emerge from the burners of Maria Das Dores’ biogas stove at her home in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. A single ox or cow produces enough manure to generate more biogas than a family requires for its domestic needs. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“The first violence I suffered was from my father who did not let me study. I only studied up to fourth grade of primary school, in the rural school. To continue, I would have had to go to the city, which my father did not allow. I got married to escape my father’s oppression,” said Cordeiro, who also separated from her first husband because he was violent.

After living in a big city with the father of her two daughters, she separated and returned to the countryside in 2019. “I was reborn” by becoming a farmer, she said, faced with the challenge of taking on that activity against the idea, even from her family, that a woman on her own could not possibly manage the demands of agricultural production.

Organic cotton, promoted and acquired in the region by Vert, a French-Brazilian company that produces footwear and clothing with organic inputs, has once again expanded in the Brazilian Northeast, after the crop was almost extinct due to the boll weevil plague in the 1990s.

In the case of Das Dores, a small, energetic, active woman, she has a good relationship with her husband, but she runs her own business initiatives. Thanks to what she earns she was able to buy a small pickup truck, but it is driven by her husband, who has a job but helps her on the farm in his free time.

“He drives because he refuses to teach me how, so I can’t go out alone with the vehicle and drive around everywhere,” she joked.

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Semiarid Regions of Latin America Cooperate to Adapt to Climate

Civil Society, Combating Desertification and Drought, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Editors’ Choice, Environment, Featured, Food & Agriculture, Green Economy, Headlines, Integration and Development Brazilian-style, Latin America & the Caribbean, Projects, Regional Categories, South-South, TerraViva United Nations, Water & Sanitation

Combating Desertification and Drought

A rural settlement in the state of Pernambuco, in Brazil's semiarid ecoregion. Tanks that collect rainwater from rooftops for drinking water and household usage have changed life in this parched land, where 1.1 million 16,000-litre tanks have been installed so far. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

A rural settlement in the state of Pernambuco, in Brazil’s semiarid ecoregion. Tanks that collect rainwater from rooftops for drinking water and household usage have changed life in this parched land, where 1.1 million 16,000-litre tanks have been installed so far. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2020 (IPS) – After centuries of poverty, marginalisation from national development policies and a lack of support for positive local practices and projects, the semiarid regions of Latin America are preparing to forge their own agricultural paths by sharing knowledge, in a new and unprecedented initiative.


In Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, the Gran Chaco Americano, which is shared by Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, and the Central American Dry Corridor (CADC), successful local practices will be identified, evaluated and documented to support the design of policies that promote climate change-resilient agriculture in the three ecoregions.

This is the objective of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo, an initiative financed by the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and implemented by the Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (ASA), the Argentinean Foundation for Development in Justice and Peace (Fundapaz) and the National Development Foundation (Funde) of El Salvador.

DAKI stands for Dryland Adaptation Knowledge Initiative.

The project, launched on Aug. 18 in a special webinar where some of its creators were speakers, will last four years and involve 2,000 people, including public officials, rural extension agents, researchers and small farmers. Indirectly, 6,000 people will benefit from the training.

“The aim is to incorporate public officials from this field with the intention to influence the government’s actions,” said Antonio Barbosa, coordinator of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo and one of the leaders of the Brazilian organisation ASA.

The idea is to promote programmes that could benefit the three semiarid regions, which are home to at least 37 million people – more than the total populations of Chile, Ecuador and Peru combined.

The residents of semiarid regions, especially those who live in rural areas, face water scarcity aggravated by climate change, which affects their food security and quality of life.

Zulema Burneo, International Land Coalition coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean and moderator of the webinar that launched the project, stressed that the initiative was aimed at “amplifying and strengthening” isolated efforts and a few longstanding collectives working on practices to improve life in semiarid areas.

Abel Manto, an inventor of technologies that he uses on his small farm in the state of Bahia, in Brazil's semiarid ecoregion, holds up a watermelon while standing among the bean crop he is growing on top of an underground dam. The soil is on a waterproof plastic tarp that keeps near the surface the water that is retained by an underground dam. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Abel Manto, an inventor of technologies that he uses on his small farm in the state of Bahia, in Brazil’s semiarid ecoregion, holds up a watermelon while standing among the bean crop he is growing on top of an underground dam. The soil is on a waterproof plastic tarp that keeps near the surface the water that is retained by an underground dam. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The practices that represent the best knowledge of living in the drylands will be selected not so much for their technical aspects, but for the results achieved in terms of economic, ecological and social development, Barbosa explained to IPS in a telephone interview from the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, where the headquarters of ASA are located.

After the process of systematisation of the best practices in each region is completed, harnessing traditional knowledge through exchanges between technicians and farmers, the next step will be “to build a methodology and the pedagogical content to be used in the training,” he said.

One result will be a platform for distance learning. The Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, also in Recife, will help with this.

Decentralised family or community water supply infrastructure, developed and disseminated by ASA, a network of 3,000 social organisations scattered throughout the Brazilian Northeast, is a key experience in this process.

In the 1.03 million square kilometres of drylands where 22 million Brazilians live, 38 percent in rural areas according to the 2010 census, 1.1 million rainwater harvesting tanks have been built so far for human consumption.

An estimated 350,000 more are needed to bring water to the entire rural population in the semiarid Northeast, said Barbosa.

But the most important aspect for agricultural development involves eight “technologies” for obtaining and storing water for crops and livestock. ASA, created in 1999, has helped install this infrastructure on 205,000 farms for this purpose and estimates that another 800 peasant families still need it.

There are farms that are too small to install the infrastructure, or that have other limitations, said Barbosa, who coordinates ASA’s One Land and Two Waters and native seed programmes.

The “calçadão” technique, where water runs down a sloping concrete terrace or even a road into a tank that has a capacity to hold 52,000 litres, is the most widely used system for irrigating vegetables.

A group of peasant farmers from El Salvador stand in front of one of the two rainwater tanks built in their village, La Colmena, in the municipality of Candelaria de la Frontera. The pond is part of a climate change adaptation project in the Central American Dry Corridor. Central American farmers like these and others from Brazil's semiarid Northeast have exchanged experiences on solutions for living with lengthy droughts. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

A group of peasant farmers from El Salvador stand in front of one of the two rainwater tanks built in their village, La Colmena, in the municipality of Candelaria de la Frontera. The pond is part of a climate change adaptation project in the Central American Dry Corridor. Central American farmers like these and others from Brazil’s semiarid Northeast have exchanged experiences on solutions for living with lengthy droughts. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

And in Argentina’s Chaco region, 16,000-litre drinking water tanks are mushrooming.

But tanks for intensive and small farming irrigation are not suitable for the dry Chaco, where livestock is raised on large estates of hundreds of hectares, said Gabriel Seghezzo, executive director of Fundapaz, in an interview by phone with IPS from the city of Salta, capital of the province of the same name, one of those that make up Argentina’s Gran Chaco region.

“Here we need dams in the natural shallows and very deep wells; we have a serious water problem,” he said. “The groundwater is generally of poor quality, very salty or very deep.”

First, peasants and indigenous people face the problem of formalising ownership of their land, due to the lack of land titles. Then comes the challenge of access to water, both for household consumption and agricultural production.

“In some cases there is the possibility of diverting rivers. The Bermejo River overflows up to 60 km from its bed,” he said.

Currently there is an intense local drought, which seems to indicate a deterioration of the climate, urgently requiring adaptation and mitigation responses.

Reforestation and silvopastoral systems are good alternatives, in an area where deforestation is “the main conflict, due to the pressure of the advance of soy and corn monoculture and corporate cattle farming,” he said.

Mariano Barraza of the Wichí indigenous community (L) and Enzo Romero, a technician from the Fundapaz organisation, stand next to the tank built to store rainwater in an indigenous community in the province of Salta, in the Chaco ecoregion of northern Argentina, where there are six months of drought every year. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Mariano Barraza of the Wichí indigenous community (L) and Enzo Romero, a technician from the Fundapaz organisation, stand next to the tank built to store rainwater in an indigenous community in the province of Salta, in the Chaco ecoregion of northern Argentina, where there are six months of drought every year. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

More forests would be beneficial for the water, reducing evaporation that is intense due to the heat and hot wind, he added.

Of the “technologies” developed in Brazil, one of the most useful for other semiarid regions is the “underground dam,” Claus Reiner, manager of IFAD programmes in Brazil, told IPS by phone from Brasilia.

The underground dam keeps the surrounding soil moist. It requires a certain amount of work to dig a long, deep trench along the drainage route of rainwater, where a plastic tarp is placed vertically, causing the water to pool during rainy periods. A location is chosen where the natural layer makes the dam impermeable from below.

This principle is important for the Central American Dry Corridor, where “the great challenge is how to infiltrate rainwater into the soil, in addition to collecting it for irrigation and human consumption,” said Ismael Merlos of El Salvador, founder of Funde and director of its Territorial Development Area.

The CADC, which cuts north to south through Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, is defined not as semiarid, but as a sub-humid region, because it rains slightly more there, although in an increasingly irregular manner.

Some solutions are not viable because “75 percent of the farming areas in the Corridor are sloping land, unprotected by organic material, which makes the water run off more quickly into the rivers,” Merlos told IPS by phone from San Salvador.

“In addition, the large irrigation systems that we’re familiar with are not accessible for the poor because of their high cost and the expensive energy for the extraction and pumping of water, from declining sources,” he said.

The most viable alternative, he added, is making better use of rainwater, by building tanks, or through techniques to retain moisture in the soil, such as reforestation and leaving straw and other harvest waste on the ground rather than burning it as peasant farmers continue to do.

“Harmful weather events, which four decades ago occurred one to three times a year, now happen 10 or more times a year, and their effects are more severe in the Dry Zone,” Merlos pointed out.

Funde is a Salvadoran centre for development research and policy formulation that together with Fundapaz, four Brazilian organisations forming part of the ASA network and seven other Latin American groups had been cooperating since 2013, when they created the Latin American Semiarid Platform.

The Platform paved the way for the DAKI-Semiárido Vivo which, using 78 percent of its two million dollar budget, opened up new horizons for synergy among Latin America’s semiarid ecoregions. To this end, said Burneo, it should create a virtuous alliance of “good practices and public policies.”

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