You could call it a lunar landscape, but since the cracked earth is red, it seems to come straight from the planet Mars. Welcome to the Gilbués region, a municipality in northeastern Brazil where desertification is occurring rapidly.
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Only a few small bushes with yellowed leaves remain as far as the eye can see in the middle of this hilly land, which now stretches over an area larger than the city of New York and swallows up farms and houses.
Experts say erosion of the already naturally fragile soil in this area of Piaui state has been significantly accelerated by deforestation and other human activities.
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But a few hundred farming families continue to fight to preserve some oases in the middle of the “Desert of Gilbués”.
“Everything is out of control. “It’s not raining like before,” complains Ubiratan Lemos Abade, a 65-year-old breeder who is trying to keep his fifteen cattle alive despite the extreme drought.
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“Here you have to irrigate to make ends meet, otherwise (…) our whole country would have died of thirst,” he explains, pointing to a pasture with lush grass that stands out in the middle of the red desert.
He set up a makeshift irrigation system himself and dug a well that was connected to a network of pipes.
“Here you need technology to do farming. But when you’re poor, it’s complicated,” he sighs.
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“Fragile Earth”
Viewed from the air, the landscape looks like a giant, crumpled sheet of bright red sandpaper.
The erosion problem is not new. One of the hypotheses about the origin of the name “Gilbués” is an indigenous term meaning “fragile earth,” explains Dalton Macambira, environmental historian from the Federal University of Piaui.
But human activities have made the situation significantly worse by destroying or burning native vegetation, whose roots helped give the soil more consistency.
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Not to mention the urban expansion of Gilbués, which is now a town of 11,000 inhabitants.
This city experienced a diamond rush in the middle of the last century before the sugar cane boom began in the 1980s.
Today it is one of the largest soy producers in Piaui.
“These activities are accelerating the problem as the need for natural resources is not sustainable for this type of environment,” warns Mr Macambira.
In January, he published a study showing that the area affected by desertification more than doubled from 1976 to 2019, from 387 to 805 km2.
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Around Gilbués, 14 other communities in the region and around 500 farming families are affected.
Climate experts say more studies are needed to determine with certainty whether global warming is also a factor in accelerating this desertification.
Local farmers report that the dry season is getting longer.
During short periods of rain, the rainfall is more intense, which makes the situation even worse: the ground is so fragile that the flooding creates huge craters, so-called “voçorocas”, which swallow up fields and houses.
“Wherever the environment is damaged, climate change tends to have more perverse effects,” concludes Dalton Macambira.
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potential
Desertification, described by the United Nations as a “silent crisis,” affects 500 million people worldwide.
But Fabriciano Corado, president of the SOS Gilbués association, still sees great potential in his region.
If we can protect it from erosion, phosphorus-rich clay soils are every farmer’s dream: no fertilizer is required for cultivation.
According to him, small farmers like Mr Abade have managed to ensure the survival of their farms by protecting native vegetation, adopting drip irrigation systems or traditional terrace farming techniques to better resist erosion.
“We didn’t invent gunpowder, the Aztecs, the Incas and the Mayans had already done the same thing,” recalls Mr. Corado, who sharply recalled the closure six years ago of a public research center that helped farmers implement the techniques criticized.
Local authorities assure that they intend to reopen, but do not give an exact date.
The region also has great potential for solar energy production: a huge park with 2.2 million panels was recently inaugurated and another is planned.