Tropic of Chaos (25 page)

The red flag of revolution whips in the hot wind atop a roughhewn pole. Below it sits a small squatter camp where poor farmers occupy land belonging to a distant and wealthy rancher. Welcome to the hot scrublands of the
Nordeste
and the tiny village of Boqueirão in Brazil's Ceará Province. The village sits on a dusty one-lane track at the bottom of a long valley, hemmed in on either side by looming mountains of dark, barren rock. If you look on Google Maps, Boqueirão is, roughly, due north of Iracuba, which sits on the road BR 222. The long valley shows up like a pale scar amidst the dark hills.

On one side of the road is the village of solid little whitewashed homes, with smooth cement floors and red-tile roofs. On the other side is the camp of peasant activists, members of the landless people's movement Movimento dos Trabalhadore Rurais Sem Terra (MST). The MST is a social movement of some 370,000 people organized in more than 1,000 communities across Brazil. Their objective is simple: redistribute land to hungry farmers. And in the last twenty years they've had remarkable success. Their methods are also simple: move in and start using the land. That is what is happening here. The MST cadres have used heavy black plastic and wood to build two long, collective shacks called
barracos
, or “barracks.” One is for cooking, eating, and meeting; the other, strung with hammocks, is for sleeping. The camp is never left unoccupied.

The
Nordeste
is semiarid, receiving very little rain. Severe floods punctuate its frequent droughts. In 1877 to 1879, a catastrophic drought killed more than five hundred thousand people and sent the rural Northeast into political crisis.
³⁸
Now, fear of drought is etched in the region's culture. For example, in parts of Ceará, the year traditionally ended with drought-prediction rituals. On December 13, the eve of St. Luzia's Day, an old man would set six pieces of rock salt out on a banana leaf, each piece representing a month of the upcoming rainy season. The following morning, the salt pieces that had
melted away in the dew symbolized the months of the coming season that would receive rain. The farmer who explained this tradition to me also said, “It doesn't seem to work well anymore.” In any event, research indicates that the drought cycle “has become more frequent over the last century, with five droughts recorded during the current decade.”
³⁹

The rainy season in Ceará runs from January to June, with much variability in duration, timing, and intensity and between localities. The rain is delivered as the Intertropical Convergence Zone moves to its southernmost position.
⁴⁰
A study in the
Journal of Applied Meteorology
finds that sea surface temperatures are the primary factor responsible for “the interannual variability of rainfall in northeast Brazil,” meaning among other things that droughts “tend to coincide with the warm phase of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episodes.”
⁴¹

More broadly, regional studies of temperature trends in the region “show changes that are in line with expected warming, most notably warmer nights.” The majority of climate models find that northeast Brazil “is expected to experience more rapid warming than the global average during the 21st century.” Depending on the model and the potential amounts of greenhouse gases loaded into the atmosphere in coming decades, projected temperature increases for this century range from 1°C to 6°C. In more concrete terms, most forecasts predict northeastern Brazil will be a region of
very severe
water stress by 2050.
⁴²

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.

“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,

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 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 agroecological 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. “People talk about sustainable farming, but that takes money and time,” Osmar said. “We need land reform and help with water harvesting and storage facilities.”

During my time in Boqueirão, I noticed a contradiction. While Osmar and the others championed “the system” and used the green farming methods on the side of the road where they
owned
land, they were still burning and monocropping on the land that they merely
occupied
. The reason for this reveals how
adaptation
and
social justice
really are linked: agroforestry takes three to five years to become profitable. Without land rights—without legal title—these families could not afford to invest their minimal capital and precious effort in the long-term and labor-intensive project of land restoration and stewardship. In another village, further north along the dirt track, I found further confirmation that land reform
is
climate adaptation.

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 mainstream methods to green farming.

At the MST camp I also found an example of reverse migration, from the favelas back to the land. Marcio Romero de Araujo Braga, a lean young farmer, had left the valley in March 2003 for the bright lights of São Paulo, where he worked painting buildings.

“It was good and bad in the city,” he explained while taking a break from uprooting small trees on the newly occupied land. In São Paulo he met and married a young woman, originally from rural Bahia, and they had a kid. “But it was dangerous. My wife had to cross a favela every morning to get to work. There was too much violence, always drugs around. I prefer working the land.”

Marcio's desire to come home was only possible once the occupation of the unused ranch began. Now there is land for him to work. “My dream would be to stay here and keep farming,” he said when I ask him how he saw his future. “When we win this struggle”—he gestured to the field that he and a dozen other men were clearing—“I can do that.”

During his eight years in power, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took seriously the task of economic redistribution and development of Brazil's infrastructure—that is, he sought to roll back neoliberalism in Brazil. He promised something like Roosevelt's New Deal but delivered something closer to Johnson's “war on poverty”—providing real benefits to the poor but leaving the rich unmolested. Lula did not address the climate crisis with an ambitious program of mitigation and adaptation. Yet, he laid the groundwork for real adaptation efforts that may come later.

Under Lula, Brazil paid off its external debt and built up reserves of $240 billion. In 2005, Brazil announced it would pay off both the Paris Club (that is, nineteen of the world's biggest economies) and the much-loathed IMF.
⁴⁵
That, in effect, redirected huge streams of revenue away from wealthy international creditors (who make money by owning the debts of others) back toward social and economic investment within Brazil.

One of Lula's central economic programs has been the Bolsa Família, which gives payments of up to $104 a month to poor families. Mothers with children are paid for sending kids to school, getting vaccinations, and following proper nutrition. The program gives food not only to the destitute but also to the solidly working class and thus enjoys wide support. The Bolsa was actually started in the 1990s by state governments and expanded under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then expanded again very widely by Lula. By 2010 one in four Brazilians depended on the Bolsa, which had helped lift 21 million out of poverty. The cost is minimal: Brazil spends less than half of 1 percent of its $1.6 trillion GDP on antipoverty programs. This is redistributive social justice, but it is not transformative of underlying social relations.

Lula's other big initiative was potentially more profound. The Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), a macroeconomic and infrastructural policy—classic Keynesianism—began in 2007 with an initial investment of $4.2 billion and aimed to revamp Brazil's infrastructure. The PAC has built roads, rails, power lines, and housing; in the
Nordeste
, it mostly helps agroexporters with water impoundment, irrigation, transportation, and port facilities.
The PAC helped maintain Brazil's robust economic growth: even during the worst of the recent world economic slump, Brazil did well and inequality decreased. Under Lula the top 10 percent of Brazilians has grown 11 percent richer, but the bottom tenth has seen incomes rise 72 percent. But the PAC's focus on large-scale, capital-intensive projects means relying on well-connected businesses, and this tends to reinforce old hierarchies.
⁴⁶

Climate change and the harsh task of adaptation at the grass roots require an expanded economic role for the Brazilian state. Yet, even simply redistributive actions by the state can inadvertently reinforce the five-hundred-year-old client-patron dynamic that has fettered Brazil. Will climate-adaptation aid in the
Nordeste
force poor people to depend on local elites—political bosses—to act as brokers with the state? Or will it work with the social movements? Time will tell.