“He who loves does not kill, does not humiliate or mistreat” reads a poster carried in a protest against violence against women in Lima, the capital of Peru, which is part of a slogan repeated in demonstrations against femicides and other forms of sexist violence in Latin America. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
by Mariela Jara (lima)
Inter Press Service
LIMA, Nov 24 (IPS) – This article is part of IPS coverage of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, celebrated Saturday, Nov. 25.”The Latin American and Caribbean region has made many advances in the fight against gender violence, but now we are facing reactions that show that our rights are never secure and that we must always be on the alert to defend them,” said Susana Chiarotti, a member of Mesecvi’s Committee of Experts.
Chiarotti summed up the regional situation of progress and setbacks in a conversation with IPS from her home in the Argentine city of Rosario, ahead of the United Nations’ Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, commemorated on Saturday, Nov. 25.
Gender violence violates the human rights of one in four women in this region with an estimated female population of 332 million, 51 percent of the total, and escalates to the extreme level of femicide – gender-based murders – which cost 4050 lives in 2022, according to figures confirmed Friday, Nov. 24 by the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Likewise, UN Women‘s regional director for the Americas and the Caribbean, María Noel Vaeza, told IPS from Panama City that the emblematic date seeks to draw the attention of countries to the urgent need to put an end to violence against women once and for all by adopting public policies for prevention and investing in programs to eliminate it.
She pointed out that Nov. 25 is the first of 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, which run through Dec. 10, Human Rights Day.
Vaeza said that less than 40 percent of women who suffer violence seek some kind of help, which clearly shows that they do not find guarantees in the prevention and institutional response system and therefore do not report incidents.
“This has serious consequences for their lives and those of other women, as the perpetrators do not face justice and impunity and violence continue unchecked,” she said.
Uruguayan María Noel Vaeza, UN Women regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, draws the attention of countries to the urgent need to put an end to violence against women through the adoption of public policies for prevention and investment in programs to eliminate it. CREDIT: UN Women
Vaeza said that, despite these worrying trends, there is more evidence than ever that violence against women is preventable, and urged countries in the region to invest in prevention.
“The evidence shows that the presence of a strong, autonomous feminist movement is a critical factor in driving public policy change for the elimination of violence against women at the global, regional, national and local levels,” said the UN Women regional head.
She explained that many studies have shown that large-scale reductions in violence against women can be achieved through coordinated action between local and national prevention and response systems and women’s and other civil society organizations.
So in order to move towards regulatory frameworks and improve the institutional architecture and budget allocations to prevent, respond to and redress gender-based violence, strengthening the advocacy capacity of feminist and women’s movements and organizations is indispensable.
She also mentioned that whenever progress is made, there are setbacks as well, and “unfortunately history shows us that social changes against things like machismo/sexism and violence require the efforts of society as a whole and plans and policies that give answers to the victims today, but also make it possible to improve the system in the medium and long term.”
Vaeza stressed that violence against women and girls remains the most pervasive human rights violation around the world. Its prevalence worsened in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and is growing further due to the interrelated crises of climate change, global conflicts and economic instability.
She also mentioned the proliferation of new forms of violence and the persistence of those “who believe that we do not have to guarantee women’s human rights, and organize themselves, and in the region we have situations such as attacks against women human rights defenders and activists that have become more frequent.”
Vaeza, from Uruguay, underlined that there is more evidence than ever that it is possible to change this reality and that in order to have peaceful societies, reducing inequality and poverty is key, and all this will depend on advancing gender equality and the rights of those who have historically faced discrimination.
They are mainly, she said, women living in poverty, indigenous women, women of African descent, rural women, women migrants, and women and girls with disabilities.
Susana Chiarotti is a member of the Committee of Experts of the Follow-up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention, which has been monitoring the performance of States in their obligation to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women for the past 30 years. CREDIT: Cladem Argentina
Strong reactions to progress
Chiarotti said: “I have been with Mesecvi for 20 years and I can see the changes. Let’s remember that it was only in 1989 that laws on violence against women began to be enacted and that we did not have services, shelters, specialized courts and even less a specific Convention to address this issue, which was the first in the world.”
The lawyer and university professor emphasized that in 40 years the women’s movement has put the issue of violence against women on the public agenda and has made such huge strides that “we could be called the most successful lobby in history in positioning an issue in such a massive and global manner.”
And she added that “we did not believe then, in 1986, 1987 or 1988, that the phenomenon had permeated all structures, not only the intimate sphere; there was symbolic, institutional, political and many other forms of violence, which led us to demand more answers, especially from the State, which, being patriarchal, admitted women only with forceps.”
Chiarotti, who is also a former head of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights (Cladem), warns that they are now facing reactions to the extent that unimaginable alliances have arisen to stop them, such as that of the Vatican with conservative evangelical churches and far-right groups.
She also mentioned the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that in June 2022 overthrew the right to abortion in that country, which had been in force for almost 50 years.
“That makes you realize that our rights are never secure, that we must always be on the alert to defend them. And it is difficult for a movement that is cyclical, that has waves, that rises and falls, to be always alert,” she said.
In addition, she mentioned the recent victory of the candidate Javier Milei as future president of Argentina and the dangers he represents for women’s rights, sexual diversity and the historical memory of human rights abuses.
“This will not be the first time that this people, and women especially, will enter a stage of resistance, because we have been resisting misogynistic attacks and fighting for life for centuries, but we have a very hard time ahead of us,” Chiarotti said.
She added that Latin America has fragile democracies that are only a few decades old and in crisis, which impact women’s rights. “Many of our countries came out of dictatorships, the longest has had 50 or 60 years of democracy. We will have to work to defend democratic institutions, to use them to defend our rights,” she said.
Holding up signs demanding “No to violence” and “No to machismo,” women demonstrate against gender violence in front of Peru’s main courthouse in Lima. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
Prevention: a task eluded by the States
The expert argued that since the work of preventing gender-based violence is more costly and time-consuming than that of punishment and less politically profitable, the efforts of countries are weak in this area despite their importance.
“Limiting the work to punishment and addressing incidents is like seeing a big rock that people stumble over and bang up against, and they are cured and taught to go around it, but without removing it from the path. Without prevention we will always have victims because the discriminatory culture that reproduces violence will not be transformed,” she warned.
But even adding up what countries invest to address and eradicate violence against women in the region, none of them reach one percent of their national budget according to the Third Hemispheric Report published by Mesecvi in 2017, a proportion that has apparently not changed since then.
In September of this year, the United Nations published a study showing that an investment of 360 billion dollars is needed to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment by 2030, established as one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This would help to eliminate the scourge of gender-based violence.
José Lonardi stands in his tiny candy and beverage shop in downtown Buenos Aires. Customers, he says, have lost all reference points for the price of products in Argentina and so nothing surprises them anymore. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS
by Daniel Gutman (buenos aires)
Inter Press Service
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 16 (IPS) – People in Argentina have become accustomed to the fact that nothing costs the same today as it did the week before and they take price hikes in stride with resignation, says Mariano Cohen. “Almost nobody gets angry or complains anymore. They just don’t buy something if they can’t afford it,” he explains in his disposable goods store in Villa Crespo, one of Buenos Aires’ most commercial neighborhoods.
Mariano sells plastic cups, plates and bowls, cardboard packaging rolls and aluminum containers. He serves bars, restaurants and the public. He has a large sales room, about 80 square meters, and a mezzanine of the same size, which he uses as a warehouse and is a great asset for a merchant who sells non-perishable products.
The business owner tells IPS that he buys and stocks as much merchandise as he can, to anticipate price hikes.
“If I don’t have more, it’s because there’s no more coming in or because they don’t want to sell me large quantities. The other day a supplier suspended a very important delivery from one minute to the next and gave me back the money I had already paid him,” he comments, with the same gesture of resignation that, he says, his customers make when faced with the prices in his store.
The economy of this South American country, with a long history of imbalances and inflation, has entered a spiral of permanent price increases that has already squelched the capacity for amazement of its 46 million inhabitants.
In Argentina, the absurd has been normal for some time: here you can buy a pair of shoes in six installments without interest, with financing subsidized by the government or even by private banks, but to buy a house you must pay in cash, because mortgages are almost non-existent. Today, price rises are so common that people are surprised the few times that a price is the same from one week to the next.
In 2021, there was concern when inflation climbed to 50 percent per year, partly attributed to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced an increase in currency issuance to meet social assistance needs. However, people soon became nostalgic for this figure: in 2022 the index climbed to 95 percent, the highest since 1991.
Even so, the economy of this nation – where more than 40 percent of the population is poor and practically no private sector employment has been created for the last 12 years – seems to be determined to prove that it can always get worse.
This year inflation climbed again, to an accumulative 103 percent in the first nine months alone, reaching 138 percent in the interannual index (from September 2022 to September 2023), according to official data. Projections indicate that 2023 will end with an increase in consumer prices of around 150 percent.
An employee uses a machine to count banknotes in a store in Patagonia in southern Argentina. The constant increase in prices has meant that many products must be paid for with dozens of bills of the devalued Argentine peso and has forced stores to buy counting machines to save time. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS
Emerging and drowning again
“I feel that the day I get paid my salary is the best day of the month, but also the worst,” Ariel Machado tells IPS, laughing bitterly.
“I’m happy when I get paid, but when I set aside the money for fixed expenses and calculate how much I’ll have left, I feel like I’m drowning again,” says Ariel, who has a son and is separated from his wife, and who is employed by a well-known public relations agency in Buenos Aires and also sells selected wines over the Internet to supplement his income.
A typical member of the strong middle class of Buenos Aires, used to going on vacation to the beaches of Brazil and dining in restaurants a couple of times a week, Ariel says that those things are now just memories and that today he sometimes feels like he’s spinning “on a wheel of unhappiness, because of the amount of things I want to do and can’t.”
He tries to forget about it, but doesn’t succeed. “Worrying about money consumes a lot of energy. Three years ago I couldn’t save either, but this didn’t happen to me. Now there are days when even having a cup of coffee outside the office seems like a wasteful luxury,” he says.
By his own admission, Ariel is not even remotely among the most vulnerable segments of the population, who spend practically all their income on food, prices of which have been rising more than average.
Latin America’s third largest economy is immersed in a process of stagnation and deterioration that began in 2012 and caused the governing parties to lose the last two presidential elections, in 2015 and 2019.
On Sunday Nov. 19, the next president will be chosen in a runoff election in which the ruling party’s centrist candidate Sergio Massa will compete against the far-right opposition candidate Javier Milei.
Only the extravagant proposals of Milei, who calls for the free carrying of arms and the creation of a market for the sale of organs, in addition to immediate dollarization and the elimination of the local peso from the Central Bank, have made Massa, who since 2022 is the Minister of Economy, competitive.
Elections always generate even more instability in the economy and situations that are difficult for visitors to understand.
Those who can afford to do so stock up on items in anticipation of what will happen to prices and consumption after the elections.
Thus, September, the month prior to the first round of elections, showed a strong increase in consumption in supermarkets (eight percent above the previous month, according to private sector data), comparable only to March 2020, when the pandemic confinement began.
In any case, the impact of inflation on the poorest is especially visible in the outskirts of the capital. Greater Buenos Aires is home to 15.5 million people, or one third of Argentina’s population, where more and more people sleep on the streets or wander around in search of something to eat.
The poor suffer from a decline that is measured not only in terms of income but also with respect to access to basic services and to environmental conditions.
A paper published in October by the Argentine Catholic University’s (UCA) well-respected Observatory of Social Debt found that since 2018 a process of reduction of the inequality gap began in Greater Buenos Aires, but due to the worsening living conditions of the middle class rather than to improvements in households in the most impoverished neighborhoods.
Members of these vulnerable sectors of Buenos Aires told IPS that the escalation of inflation is more a problem of the middle class people living in the city, who have to lower their standard of living and who are becoming poorer, while in their case “we were and are so bad off that a jump in inflation of 100 to 150 percent does not change anything for us.”
In addition, part of the poorest population of Buenos Aires and its outlying areas receives social assistance from the central or city governments, or from non-governmental organizations.
A supermarket in Buenos Aires displays a sign from the “Fair Prices” program, which consists of an agreement between the Argentine government and companies to curb the prices of basic products. People frequently complain that the products are often not available, due to the reluctance of the companies to comply with this commitment. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS
No reference point
José Lonardi owns a tiny shop selling candy, beverages and cigarettes on Paraguay Street, a few blocks from the Obelisk, an icon of downtown Buenos Aires. The prices of the merchandise, he tells IPS, increase almost every week, sometimes by three to five percent, and sometimes by 20 to 30 percent.
“Two or three years ago, customers still complained when prices went up, because they had some point of reference. Today, inflation has picked up so fast that nobody knows how much things are worth and nobody says anything anymore,” he remarks.
Against this backdrop, contradictory advice is rampant. The value of pesos is melting like ice cream under the sun and people want to get rid of them. On afternoon TV programs, a steady parade of economists advise people to buy large quantities of toilet paper to beat inflation.
Many people, however, do not pay attention to them: in different neighborhoods of Buenos Aires restaurants are always full, even on weekdays. “In the Argentine economy nobody knows what might happen next week. So pesos are burning holes in people’s pockets, and people, as long as they have them, spend them,” says José.
Tandahara women tend to the new Casuarina plants. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS
by Manipadma Jena (puri, india)
Inter Press Service
PURI, India, Nov 07 (IPS) – For more than 33 years, a group of strong-willed women from the village of Tandahara, India have kept their homes and village safe and plan to continue despite the unrelenting impacts of increasingly severe monsoons.
The sun is high in the noon sky—humidity unrelenting at 95 percent in this Indian sea-coast village. The monsoon has been deficient; rice paddies are yellowing on the edges from the salty surf misting in on them. Waves now break barely 200 metres from the farms and homes.
Sixty-year-old Bengalata Rout heads for the Casuarina “forest wall” off the shoreline, trees that the women in the 108-household village Tandahara planted after the 1999 Super Cyclonic Storm decimated their mud-walled thatched-roof huts leaving their fertile farms salt-poisoned.
That year, 33 years ago, they planted the trees on the village boundary, a good distance away from the shoreline; today, on a stormy night, the sea crashes against the tree trunks, threatening to run amok into their homes.
Tandahara, sitting on the Bay of Bengal, is one of the last villages in the eastern Indian State Odisha, some 20 kilometres from Konark Sun Temple, UNESCO’s designated heritage site that is itself showing the impacts of seas closing in.
The ‘Big Storm’ Discovery
“When the big cyclone hit us, the Casuarina shelter belt that was standing from before, planted by the government, lay battered,” Rout told Inter Press Service (IPS) as we walked toward the Casuarina forest. “We immediately realised had it not been standing there between the sea and our village we would have been wiped out.”
And it was a life-changing discovery for these rural women.
The category-5 storm, carrying wind speeds of 160 miles hourly that made landfall over Odisha in October 1999, killed more than 10,000 people, mostly owing to 20 ft high storm surges that brought water 16 to 20 miles inland.
But Tandahara had not lost a single life. Losing no time, every woman volunteering, even the children clamouring to pitch in, they sorted themselves into ten groups of ten members with a mix of young and old. Saplings were requested from government and non-profits who came to help. Planting was done; the men lent a hand, but the women took it upon themselves to make sure the saplings survived.
“It was challenging. The soil had salted up, and the young plants struggled to survive,” said Kanaka Behera, 32, one of the younger women. “And the water we got in our village had turned a bit saline also.”
“We thought, for our cooking and drinking, we fetch groundwater from a shallow dug pit; why not get the sweet water for the plants, too? But that was a kilometre inland from our village, more distance from the plantation in the opposite direction. We will do it, we decided and dug the pit wider to get more water,” Behera added.
“For months till the plants survived, we would be up before the sun, lining up our buckets around the water pit where water replenishes naturally overnight. Then the real arduous work began,” said middle-aged Bena Mallika dressed in a bright green sari. Some ten of them would fill the buckets and hand them to ten others who relayed them to more waiting women till the saplings, one-and-half kilometres away, were sloshed and glistening. Only by noon, they were done, exhausted but triumphant, having carried one thousand buckets to the plants. They did this every alternate day. Meticulously, around each baby tree, they gouged a six-inch wide circular channel with their bare hands to hold the sweet water for longer and create an oasis of nutrition.
Bengalata Rout, the women’s group leader, poses amidst the Casuarina forest the women planted after the 1999 Super Cyclonic Storm. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS The women’s group poses on the narrow strip of beach that’s all that’s left between the village boundary and the advancing sea. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS Clusters of betel-vine bowers shelter behind the protective wall of Casuarina trees. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS
Climate Events More Frequent, Intense, and the Sea Keeps Getting Closer
But growing tree shields is a daunting exercise against a wounded, intermittently raging ocean. It is a handful of strong-willed women pitted against climate events getting more frequent and more intense from a rapidly warming sea. Odisha has encountered 10 cyclones in a span of 22 years from 1999 to 2021, with frequency rising over earlier decades, according to data from the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA), which works to reduce disaster risk.
More broadly, the Indian subcontinent has witnessed more than 478 extreme events since 1970, whose frequency has accelerated after 2005, IPS had earlier reported.
But another phenomenon, more insidiously devastating, is creeping in on Tandahara.
Sitting on a cemented platform under the shade of an ageing banyan tree, there are several elders who share how the sea has moved closer. Remembering over five decades back, 70-year-old Tahali Kalia Gopal Behera narrated to IPS, “When I was 18, we youngsters went to the sea to catch the red beach crabs. We carried our lunch and left home in the morning, returning only in the evening. Those days, the sea was more than 3 kilometres away.”
“The sea has eaten away 20 hectares of our village land,” Bidyadhar Bhuyan, another elderly man, said.
Of Odisha State’s over the 480-kilometre coastline, a high 79 percent has experienced drastic modification.
The State’s coastline change trend shows 21 percent has been subject to erosion, and 51 percent is impacted by accretion. Based on 26 years of satellite images, the 2018 study by the National Centre for Coastal Research of Earth Sciences Ministry remains the latest using such extensive data.
Odisha’s Puri province, where sea-front villages like Tandahara face the brunt, experienced the highest accretion on 110 km of its total 140 km shore length, this study said.
Coastal accretion is the gradual increase or acquisition of land by the sea. It occurs through washing up sand, soil, or silt. Erosion is the gradual washing away of land along the shoreline.
While erosion-accretion phenomena are natural, climate disasters and persisting low-pressure events that cause turbulent seas are increasing ecological imbalance, according to an OSDMA expert.
“When I married and came to the village, there were sand dunes stretching all the way,” remembered 46-year-old Mallika. “Now there’s hardly any beach left for dunes to stand; only the shore sands are rising higher.”
So close is the sea now that this year, 2023, even without any major low-pressure event, sea-water ingress has cut a 100-metre channel into pastureland on the village outskirt, Bhuyan added.
Oxford University research from across 52 sites worldwide on ‘nature-based solutions’ said coastal forest walls, mangroves and coral reefs cause waves to break before they hit the shore or ingress towards human habitats, lowering both the force and height of the swell and in the process reducing the likelihood of the sea breaching over into people’s land.
The study found that natural habitats were 2-5 times more cost-effective than engineered structures, like the geotextile tube installed in another affected district in Odisha, which was in tatters within 10 years. These (like Tandahara’s bio-wall) can help to protect from climate change impacts while slowing further warming (by carbon sequestration), supporting biodiversity, and securing ecosystem services, researchers widely believe.
Of Bulls, Goats and Other Challenges
As the Bay of Bengal became a hotspot for tropical storms and waves inched closer to Tandahara, coating salty mist day and night on everything, their staple rice crops began failing. Employable males migrated out.
Left behind with children and ageing parents to make ends meet were again the women. They began goat-keeping. The 108 households have no less than 500 goats today.
One adult goat weighing 15kg can easily fetch up to INR 8000 (USD 96.3), extra during festive seasons.
Handsome returns, yes, but also the biggest daily menace to women’s Casuarina walls.
“Until saplings are at least 5 feet tall and out of reach of the ever-hungry goats, we need to protect them. We patrol in groups of three, morning and afternoon,” elderly Harkamani Swain said.
A woman goat herder confines her grazing cattle to the grass on the farms’ boundaries, away from the fresh Casuarina plantations, to avoid cash penalties. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS In the afternoon, with household chores done, women retreat to relax and bond under the cool forest’s shade. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS Every morning, taking turns, one group meets at the village temple to decide on patrolling responsibilities. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS Cyclone Phailin in 2013 wrought maximum damage and loss of life as rural settlements had only mud-walled, thatched-roofed homes. A woman stands desolately, having lost her home and belongings to the storm in Bhubaneswar. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS
Rout walks on purposefully; it’s difficult to keep up with her, traversing over uneven abandoned paddy fields. She is going to check if any goats or the village bull have walked in to nibble at the new saplings planted under the government’s forestry scheme earlier in August this year when rains came.
If she espies the bull amidst the plants, she’ll holler, and the women will rush and help chase it out.
“If cattle destroy the plants, their owners have to pay a 100 rupees (USD 1.2) penalty, Rout explains, sighing in relief on seeing no intruder. “To get a hungry bull off the plantation requires more than one woman. If a help call is shouted out, but the group member whose house is closest does not respond, they are charged 100 rupees as well,” she explains how strict community rules have helped them grow the tree wall.
Seeing their zeal, in 2000, the forestry officials mentored them to form a village Forest Protection Committee. They were provided, one-time and free of cost, several large party-sized ironware pots worth 60,000 rupees (USD 722.8) to rent out to village events and maintain bank funds.
“Were this active group not been looking after the coastal forest, even when the government plants and sometimes waters them too, they would not remain alive beyond a month. There is a strong sense of ownership instilled within them. With them, we have a true partnership,” a local supervisory-level government forest official told IPS, wishing not to be named as they were not allowed to speak to the media.
Green Walls Provide Direct and Indirect Income for an Entire Village
When forest officials came with saplings this monsoon, the nearby beach was littered with dead Casuarina stumps and branches left from an earlier storm and proliferating beach creepers. The women’s group offered to clear the large stretches. In return, they got to take home the dead wood.
“With the thinner branches, we were able to repair seaside fences,” Kanaka Behera told IPS. The official would otherwise have hired contractors’ men on wages. “We take ownership of the storm walls. We will patrol till the saplings are grown.”
Dead trees get used for roof beams of thatched cattle sheds and for firewood, fulfilling needs in rural households. Odisha government, since the 2013 Phailin storm, has provided concrete-roofed, brick-walled disaster-resilient houses within 5 km of high tide.
Under the thick canopy of Casuarinas, a rotting pile of hay lies in a corner. The women can grow two mushroom crops here from early July to late August. The dense thicket obstructs damaging rain directly falling on the delicate fungi; high humidity is just right for bountiful harvests, which income goes into the group’s bank account, used when members need funds urgently.
Rout points further afield at over 25 green net-cloth-covered betel vine bowers just behind the Casuarina thicket. The 8-feet high square bamboo bowers, locally called ‘bareja’, are shading structures creating a green-house environment for better quality betel leaves. It can fetch a good income but is a fragile cultivation. “Those ‘barejas’ stand because this thick line of Casuarinas stands against strong winds that can easily bring the structures down and deprive a quarter of our village households of their livelihood,” she said.
Most afternoons, with household chores and afternoon meals done, the women leave the village behind to sit in the quiet under the trees. Sometimes, they laugh together, sing even if tunelessly, as the birds call from the branches, used to their presence.
“These trees are today like our grown-up sons; they stand strong here, ready to protect us, giving us confidence and moments of contentment,” says the elderly Bengalata Rout, whose only son Ritu, 40 years old, is working as a computer clerk thousands of kilometres away in Surat in western India, holding on to a deeply grooved tree trunk. A widow, she lives with her daughter-in-law and two little grandsons.
Powerful Agents of Change United in Fighting More Than Just the Storms and Seas
The water from the borewells in Tandahara became progressively so salty that children, no matter how thirsty, would often refuse to drink. Water carried from the small groundwater pit never sufficed. Forced to drink increasingly salty water, stomach upset, nausea and skin irritation have become chronic.
Bonding together for the tree barrier has, over the years, given the women of Tandahara a sense of unity and empowerment, and they are changing the collective traditional mindset of the village as well.
Post-pandemic, taking the poor drinking water issue into their own hands, the traditionally village-bound women marched to the local-level government officer with bottles of the salty water they got from hand pumps and asked the officer to drink it. The officer was shocked at the confrontation from a group of village women but finally admitted the water was undrinkable and ordered water tankers to deliver to the village.
Water is, however, supplied only in April and May, peak summer months when local water turns saltier. Again, it is limited to daily just two buckets per household, even for large families. On repeated visits by the women, administration higher-ups even visited the village five months back, promised piped water, but work is yet to begin, said 29-year-old Gouri Padhi, who has been in school up to class ten and is more educated than the others.
Looking Ahead
“Communities already have the agency to adapt and make decisions in the face of change,” said the Global Resilience Partnership Report 2023, but often need support in the form of appropriate data, knowledge, information, and resources to further strengthen adaptation and resilience actions.
“As climate and other shocks become more frequent, severe and overlapping, it is urgent to become smarter and faster when it comes to building resilience,” Dina Esposito, Assistant to the Administrator for the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, told IPS via email. “At USAID, we’re bringing innovative solutions, such as shock response monitoring systems, to build resilience and to measure impact so that we can learn and adapt as we go.”
For the women of Tandahara, resilience is found in their collective efforts to save their village.
While murmurs are growing stronger among elderly men to step back from the advancing sea and resettle their homes at a safe distance. Two neighbouring villages have already left, illegally squatting on forest land, they point out.
“True, whenever the winds wail, my heart palpitates with dread; I think today all will end. When the government mobile alerts shriek, we flee to the two-storied storm shelter with our cattle. But we will not abandon our ancestral village,” Rout says firmly. “We will do whatever it takes to make it safer, but we will not leave,” she echoes her group’s stand on this crucial issue. Many of the younger generation youth listening nod in agreement.
Fermina Quispe (fourth from the right, standing) poses for photos together with other farmers from the Women’s Association of Huerto de Nueva Esperanza, which she chairs and with which she promotes crop irrigation with solar pumps in her community, Llarapi Chico, located more than 4,000 meters above sea level in the municipality of Arapa in the southern Peruvian highlands of the department of Puno, a region badly affected by drought. CREDIT: Courtesy of Jesusa Calapuja
by Mariela Jara (lima)
Inter Press Service
LIMA, Oct 26 (IPS) – The lack of water is so severe in Peru’s highlands that farming families are forced to sell their livestock because they cannot feed them. “There is no grass or fodder to feed them,” says Fermina Quispe, a Quechua farmer from a rural community located at 4,200 meters above sea level.
Llarapi Chico, the name of her community, belongs to the district of Arapa in the southern Andean department of Puno, one of the 14 that the government declared in emergency on Oct. 23 due to the water deficit caused by the combined impacts of climate change and the El Niño phenomenon.
Arapa is home to 9,600 people in its district capital and villages, most of whom are Quechua indigenous people, as in other districts of the Puna highlands.
With a projected population of more than 1.2 million inhabitants, less than four percent of the estimated national population of over 33 million, Puno has high levels of poverty and extreme poverty, especially in rural areas.
According to official figures, in 2022 the poverty rate in the department stood at 43 percent, compared to 40 percent and 46 percent in 2020 and 2021, respectively – years marked by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The recession of the Peruvian economy could drive up the poverty rate this year.
In addition, Puno was shaken by the impunity surrounding nearly 20 deaths during the social protests that broke out in December 2022 demanding the resignation of interim President Dina Boluarte, who succeeded President Pedro Castillo, currently on trial for attempting to “breach the constitutional order”.
The United Nations issued a report on Oct. 19 stating that human rights violations were committed during the crackdown on the protests, one of whose epicenters was Puno.
Fermina Quispe is president of the Women’s Association of Huerto de Nueva Esperanza, which is made up of 22 women farmers who, like her, are getting involved in agroecological vegetable production with the support of the non-governmental organization Cedepas Centro.
The 41-year-old community leader spoke to IPS in Chosica, on the outskirts of Lima, while she participated in the Encuentro Feminismos Diversos por el Buen Vivir (Meeting of Diverse Feminisms for Good Living), held Oct. 13-15.
With a soft voice and a face lit up with a permanent smile, Quispe shared her life story, which was full of difficulties that far from breaking her down have strengthened her spirit and will, and have helped her to face challenges such as food security.
Pumps fueled by 180-watt solar panels draw water from rustic wells to irrigate vegetable crops in the highland greenhouses of Peruvian farming communities. In the picture, farmer Fermina Quispe is helping to move the solar panels. CREDIT: Courtesy of Fermina Quispe
As a child she witnessed the kidnapping of her father, then lieutenant governor (the local political authority) of the community of Esmeralda, where she was born, also located in Arapa. Her father and her older brother were dragged away by members of the Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), which unleashed terror in the country between 1980 and 2000.
“A month later we found my father, they had tortured him and gouged out his eyes. My mother, at the age of 40, was left alone with 12 children and raised us on her own. I finished primary and secondary school but I couldn’t continue studying because we couldn’t afford it, we had nowhere to get the money,” she recalls calmly. Her brother was never heard from again.
She did not have the opportunity to go to university where she wanted to be trained as an early childhood education teacher, but she developed her entrepreneurial skills.
After she married Ciro Concepción Quispe – “he is not my relative, he is from another community,” she clarifies- they dedicated themselves to family farming and managed to acquire several cattle and small livestock such as chickens and guinea pigs, which ensured their daily food.
Her husband is a construction worker in Arapa and earns a sporadic income, and in his free time he helps out on the farm and in community works.
Their eldest daughter, Danitza, 18, is studying education at the public Universidad Nacional del Altiplano in Puno, the departmental capital, where she rents a room. And the youngest, 13-year-old Franco, will finish the first year of secondary school in December. His school is in the town of Arapa, a 20-minute walk from their farm.
Fermina managed to build “my own little house” on a piece of land she acquired on her own and outside of her husband’s land, in order to have more autonomy and a place of her own “if we have conflicts,” she says.
She also began to look for information about support for farming families, bringing together her neighbors along the way. This is how the association she now presides over came into being.
However, the drought, which has not let up since 2021, is causing changes and wreaking havoc in their lives, ruining years of efforts of families such as Fermina’s.
“We have a water crisis and the families are very worried. We are not going to have any production and the cattle are getting thin, we have no choice but to sell. A bull that cost 2,000 soles (519 dollars) we are selling off for 500 (129 dollars). The middlemen are the ones who profit from our pain,” she says.
During her participation in the Encuentro Feminismos Diversos por el Buen Vivir held in Chosica, near Lima, Fermina Quispe, a farmer from the Andes highlands of the department of Puno, in southern Peru, dresses in a colorful lliclla, a handmade Quechua blanket. She is working on solutions in her community to mitigate the impact of a severe drought on subsistence agriculture and livestock production. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
Solar water pumps
In the face of adversity, “proposals and action” seems to be Quispe’s mantra. She wants to strengthen her vegetable production for self-consumption and is thinking about growing aromatic herbs and flowers for sale. To do so, she needs to ensure irrigation in her six-by-thirteen-meter highland greenhouse where she uses agroecological methods.
During her participation in Cedepas Centro’s training activities, she learned about solar water pumps, which make it possible to pump water collected in rustic wells called “cochas” to gardens and fields. She has knocked on many doors to raise funds to set up solar water pumps in her community.
“Fermina’s gardens and those of 14 other farmers in her community now have solar pumps for irrigation and living fences made of Spanish broom (Cytisus racemosus),” José Egoavil, one of the experts in charge of the institution’s projects, told IPS.
“They are small pumps that run on 120- to 180-watt solar panels,” he says in a telephone interview from Arapa.
He explains that the solar panel is connected to the pump, which sucks the water stored in the wells that the families have dug, or in the “ojos de agua” – small natural pools of springwater – present on some farms. Thus, they can irrigate the vegetable crops in their greenhouses, and the living fences.
“It is a sustainable technology, it does not pollute because it uses renewable energy and maintenance is not very expensive. In addition, the families give something in return, which makes them value it more. Of the total cost of materials, which is about 900 soles (230 dollars), they contribute 20 percent, in addition to their labor,” he says.
Egoavil, a 45-year-old anthropologist, has lived in Arapa for three years. He is from Junín, a department in the center of the country where Cedepas Centro, an organization dedicated to promoting food security and sustainable development in the Andes highlands of central and southern Peru, is based,
“The focus of our work is on food security and a fundamental issue is water for human consumption and production. There have already been two agricultural seasons in which we have harvested much less and we are about to start a new one, but without rain the forecasts are not encouraging,” he says.
Given the water shortage, they have promoted the community participation of families in emergency projects such as solar pumps, which help to ensure their food supply.
In addition, long-range water seeding and harvesting works are underway, such as the construction of infiltration ditches at the headwaters of river basins.
The participation of small farming families is the driving force behind the works and they are responsible for identifying the natural water sources for their conservation and the construction of the ditches that will prevent the water from flowing down the hills when it rains.
“The ditch is like a sponge that retains water, but if it doesn’t rain, we don’t know what will happen,” says Egoavil.
A veterinarian by profession, Jesusa Calapuja, born in the Peruvian highlands, participated in the Encuentro Feminismos Diversos por el Buen Vivir, held on the outskirts of Lima, where she spoke about the reality of peasant families in a context of poverty and water shortages due to drought. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
Learning to harvest water
Jesusa Calapuja, a 27-year-old veterinarian born in Arapa, is one of the people in charge of technical assistance in agroecological production, planting and water harvesting at Cedepas Centro.
Using the Escuela de Campo (countryside school) methodology, she travels by motorcycle to the different communities where she interacts with farming families. She came with Fermina Quispe to the feminist meeting in Chosica, where IPS interviewed her.
Calapuja also notes changes in the dynamics of the population due to water scarcity. For example, their production no longer generates surpluses to be sold at the Sunday markets; it is barely enough for their own sustenance.
“They don’t have the income to buy what they need,” she says.
She also notices that at training meetings, women and men no longer bring their boiled potatoes or soup made with the oca tuber, or roasted corn for snacks, but only chuño (dehydrated potatoes) or dried beans. The scarcity of their tuber and grain production is evident in their diets.
But Fermina Quispe hastn’t lost her smile in the face of adversity and is confident that her new skills will help the women in her community.
“Our great-great-grandparents harvested water, made terraces and dams; we have only been harvesting, collecting and using. But it won’t be like that anymore and we are taking advantage of the streams so the water won’t be lost. We only hope that the wind does not carry away the rain clouds,” she says hopefully.
Dozens of women environmentalists participated in Mexico City in the launch of the Voices of Life campaign by eight non-governmental organizations on Oct. 12, 2023, which brings together hundreds of activists in five of the country’s 32 states. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS
by Emilio Godoy (mexico city)
Inter Press Service
MEXICO CITY, Oct 24 (IPS) – The defense of the right to water led Gema Pacheco to become involved in environmental struggles in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, an area threatened by drought, land degradation, megaprojects, mining and deforestation.
Care “means first and foremost to value the place where we live, that the environment in which we grow up is part of our life and on which our existence depends,” said Pacheco, deputy municipal agent of San Matías Chilazoa, in the municipality of Ejutla de Crespo, some 355 kilometers south of Mexico City.
The local population is dedicated to growing corn, beans and chickpeas, an activity hampered by the scarcity of water in a country that has been suffering from a severe drought over the past year.
To deal with the phenomenon, the community created three water reservoirs and infiltration wells to feed the water table.
“Women’s participation has been restricted, there are few women in leadership positions. The main challenge is acceptance. There is little participation, because they see it as a waste of time and it is very demanding,” lamented Pacheco.
But women activists like Pacheco face multiple threats for protecting their livelihoods and culture in a country where such activities can pose a lethal risk.
For this reason, eight organizations from five Mexican states launched the Voices of Life campaign on Oct. 12, involving hundreds of habitat protectors, some of whom came to the Mexican capital for the event, where IPS interviewed several of them.
Involvement in the defense of water led Gema Pacheco to become an environmental activist, participating in the Voices of Life campaign in Mexico, which seeks to bring visibility and respect to this high-risk activity in Mexico. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS
The initiative seeks to promote the right to a healthy environment, facilitate environmental information, protect and recognize people and organizations that defend the environment, as well as learn how to use information and communication technologies.
In 2022, Mexico ranked number three in Latin America in terms of murders of environmental activists, with 31 killed (four women and 16 indigenous people), behind Colombia (60) and Brazil (34), out of a global total of 177, according to the London-based non-governmental organization Global Witness.
A year earlier, this Latin American country of almost 129 million inhabitants ranked first on the planet, with 54 killings, so 2022 reflected an improvement.
“The situation in Mexico remains dire for defenders, and non-fatal attacks, including intimidation, threats, forced displacement, harassment and criminalization, continued to greatly complicate their work,” the report says.
The outlook remains serious for activists, as the non-governmental Mexican Center for Environmental Law (Cemda) documented 582 attacks in 2022, more than double the number in 2021. Oaxaca, Mexico City and the northern state of Chihuahua reported the highest number of attacks.
Urban problems
The south of Mexico City is home to the largest area of conservation land, but faces growing threats, such as deforestation, urbanization and irregular settlements.
Protected land defines the areas preserved by the public administration to ensure the survival of the land and its biodiversity.
Social anthropologist Tania Lopez said another risk has now emerged, in the form of the new General Land Use Planning Program 2020-2035 for the Mexican capital, which has a population of more than eight million people, although Greater Mexico City is home to more than 20 million.
“There was no public consultation of the plan based on a vision of development from the perspective of native peoples. In addition, it encourages real estate speculation, changes in land use and invasions,” said López, a member of the non-governmental organization Sembradoras Xochimilpas, part of the Voices of Life campaign.
Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental defenders. In 2022, 31 activists were murdered, the third highest number in the region behind Colombia and Brazil. CREDIT: Cemda
Apart from the failure to carry out mandatory consultation processes, activists point out irregularities in the governmental Planning Institute and its technical and citizen advisory councils, because they are not included as members.
The conservation land, which provides clean air, water, agricultural production and protection of flora and fauna, totals some 87,000 hectares, more than half of Mexico City.
The plan stipulates conservation of rural and urban land. But critics of the program point out that the former would lose some 30,000 hectares, destined for rural housing.
The capital’s legislature is debating the program, which should have been ready by 2020.
Gisselle García, a lawyer with the non-governmental Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, said attacks on women activists occur within a patriarchal culture that limits the existence of safe spaces for women’s participation in the defense of rights.
“It’s an entire system, which reflects the legal structure. If a woman files a civil or criminal complaint, she is not heard,” she told IPS, describing the special gender-based handicaps faced by women environmental defenders.
Social anthropologist Tania López is one of the members of the Voices of Life campaign, launched by eight non-governmental organizations on Oct. 12, 2023 to highlight the work of women environmental defenders in Mexico. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS
Still just an empty promise
This risky situation comes in the midst of preparations for the implementation of the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, known as the Escazú Agreement, an unprecedented treaty that aims to mitigate threats to defenders of the environment, in force since April 2021.
Article 9 of the Agreement stipulates the obligation to ensure a safe and enabling environment for the exercise of environmental defense, to take protective or preventive measures prior to an attack, and to take response actions.
The treaty, which takes its name from the Costa Rican city where it was signed, guarantees access to environmental information and justice, as well as public participation in environmental decision-making, to protect activists.
The Escazú Agreement has so far been signed by 24 Latin American and Caribbean countries, 15 of which have ratified it as well.
But its implementation is proceeding at the same slow pace as environmental protection in countries such as Mexico, where there are still no legislative changes to ensure its enforcement.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, the Escazú National Group, made up of government and civil society representatives, was formed in June to implement the treaty.
During the annual regional Second Forum of Human Rights Defenders, held Sept. 26-28 in Panama, participants called on the region’s governments to strengthen protection and ensure a safe and enabling environment for environmental protectors, particularly women.
While the Mexican women defenders who gathered in Mexico City valued the Escazú Agreement, they also stressed the importance of its dissemination and, even more so, its proper implementation.
Activists Pacheco and Lopez agreed on the need for national outreach, especially to stakeholders.
“We need more information to get out, a lot of work needs to be done, more people need to know about it,” said Pacheco.
The parties to the treaty are currently discussing a draft action plan that would cover 2024 to 2030.
The document calls for the generation of greater knowledge, awareness and dissemination of information on the situation, rights and role of individuals, groups and organizations that defend human rights in environmental matters, as well as on the existing instruments and mechanisms for prevention, protection and response.
It also seeks recognition of the work and contribution of individuals, groups and organizations that defend human rights, capacity building, support for national implementation and cooperation, as well as a follow-up and review scheme for the regional plan.
García the attorney said the regional treaty is just one more tool, however important it may be.
“We are in the phase of seeing how the Escazú Agreement will be applied. The most important thing is effective implementation. It is something new and it will not be ready overnight,” she said.
As it gains strength, the women defenders talk about how the treaty can help them in their work. “If they attack me, what do I do? Pull out the agreement and show it to them so they know they must respect me?” one of the women who are part of the Voices of Life campaign asked her fellow activists.
An aerial view of Hacendita Cafubá, on the north shore of Piratininga, a lagoon in southeastern Brazil, when ponds that serve as a spillway and to collect sedimentation of polluted water were being built and filter gardens that clean the water of the Cafubá River before discharging its waters into the lagoon were being planted. CREDIT: Alex Ramos / Niterói City Government
by Mario Osava (niterÓi, brazil)
Inter Press Service
NITERÓI, Brazil, Oct 20 (IPS) – Houses with balconies facing the street or the surrounding hills, when they are not hidden behind high walls, reflect a neighborhood where people live on the shore of a lagoon but reject the landscape it offers.
Piratininga, a 2.87 square kilometer coastal lagoon in the southern part of the Brazilian city of Niterói, began to change after several decades of uncontrolled urban growth with no care for the natural surroundings, in what has become a neighborhood of 16,000 inhabitants.
Garbage, polluted water, construction debris and bad odors hurt the landscape and the quality of life that is sought when choosing a lagoon and green hills as a place to build a year-round or weekend residence.
The accumulated sludge at the bottom of the lagoon is 1.6 meters thick, on average, resulting from both pollution and natural sedimentation.
“That’s what explains those houses that turn their backs to the lagoon,” explained Dionê Castro, coordinator of the Sustainable Oceanic Region Program (PRO Sostenible) of the city government of Niterói, a municipality of 482,000 people separated from the city of Rio de Janeiro only by Guanabara Bay.
Oceânica is one of the five administrative zones of the municipality, locally called regions, which includes 11 neighborhoods in the southern part, on the open sea coast, in contrast to others on the shore of the bay or inland areas without beaches. With two lagoons and a good part of the Atlantic Forest still preserved, the area stands out for its nature.
PRO Sostenible, which was founded in 2014, seeks to restore environmental systems and to ensure better and more sustainable urbanization in the area. Its actions are based on a systemic approach and nature-based solutions.
Dionê Castro is head of the Sustainable Oceanic Region Program of the municipality of Niterói, on the edge of the Piratininga Lagoon in southeastern Brazil. Gardens and piers jutting into the lagoon have replaced the garbage dumps, polluted water and construction debris that had led local residents to reject the landscape, leading houses to be built with their “backs to the lagoon.” CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Natural clean-up of the water
The program’s flagship project is the Orla Piratininga Alfredo Sirkis Park, which pays homage to a leader of the environmental movement, former national lawmaker and former president of the Green Party, as well as journalist and writer, who died in 2020.
The park, known by its acronym POP, has the mission of recovering and protecting the ecosystems associated with the Piratininga Lagoon, in addition to fostering a sense of belonging to the environment and its surroundings. For this reason, the participation of the local residents in all stages of the project has been and continues to be a basic principle.
It comprises an area of 680,000 square meters, the largest in Brazil in nature-based solutions projects, with 10.6 kilometers of bicycle paths, 17 recreational areas and a 2,800 square meter Ecocultural Center.
To bring residents and visitors closer to the local environment, the plan is to complete three three-story lookout points – two of which have already been built – and piers reaching into the lagoon, part of which can be used for fishing, as fish still inhabit the lagoon despite the pollution of recent decades.
The first section, known as Haciendita Cafubá, was inaugurated on Jun. 17, with a water filtration system for the Cafubá River, one of the three that flow into the lagoon, a lookout point, piers, a bicycle path and even a nursery for newborn crocodiles in a special fenced-in area.
A view of ponds and, in the background, filtering gardens after their inauguration in June 2023. Hills covered by native vegetation surround the Piratininga lagoon and the neighborhood that grew up over half a century around it and now has 16,000 inhabitants, in Niterói, a neighboring city of Rio de Janeiro in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“I went to see if I could find the crocodiles, my son made me walk down the street, he loves animals… I never thought I would see what I saw… I went to the beginning of the Haciendita, I saw fish where there was nothing living before, I saw flowers where there was only mud, I saw life where nature was already dead without any hope. Congratulations for tolerating us, that community is tough.”
This is the testimony of a resident, addressed to the head of PRO Sostenible. The park has had a large number of visitors since before its inauguration, attracted by flora and fauna that had long since disappeared from the shores of the lagoon.
The technology used to clean the waters is known around the world but has not been widely used in Brazil. It is based on filter gardens, in which layers of gravel and permeable substrates serve as a base for macrophytes, aquatic plants that live in flooded areas and are visible on the surface.
The plants filter the water in a process that does not require chemical inputs.
A special spillway receives the waters of the Cafubá, which conducts and controls them to give greater efficiency to the next pond, the sedimentation pond, the first step in cleaning the polluted waters by reducing the solid material produced by erosion and garbage thrown into the riverbed.
After the sedimentation basins, the water passes through three filtering gardens before flowing into the lagoon.
Biologists and environmental managers Heloisa Osanai and Andrea Maia are photographed at the Tibau Island lookout point at the western end of the Piratininga Lagoon in southeastern Brazil. The vegetation, dominated by the exotic and invasive white lead tree, is gradually being replaced by local species as part of the restoration and clean-up process. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Plantfilters
Twelve species of macrophytes are used in the filtration process, but the variety has been reduced due to maintenance difficulties. “We use only Brazilian species, and no exogenous species,” said Heloisa Osanai, a biologist specialized in environmental management and one of the 17 employees of PRO Sostenible.
Examples include water lettuce and water lilies with orange flowers.
“One of the effects of the water treatment is the reduction of mosquitoes, which is important to local residents, who used to burn dry vegetation in an attempt to drive away the insects. People no longer build bonfires in the evenings. The filter gardens attract dragonflies that eat the mosquitoes,” said Osanai.
In the larger Jacaré River, 11 filtering gardens were created, which operate in sequence and whose size was designed for greater efficiency, said Andrea Maia, another biologist and environmental manager of the team.
Filter gardens beautify the environment and expel mosquitoes, with macrophyte aquatic plant species that clean the water, in addition to decontaminating the Piratininga lagoon, restoring fishing and local tourism in a long-neglected ecosystem of Niteroi, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Awards and results
PRO Sostenible has already won several national and international awards. It was named one of the three best environmental sustainability programs in Latin America and the Caribbean in the Smart Cities 2022 award.
This year it won another award from Smart Cities Latin America, as the best in Sustainable Urban Development and Mobility. The Park also won awards for valuing biodiversity, from the Federation of Industries of Rio de Janeiro, and another as an environmental project, from the São Paulo city government, for contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda.
In addition to the Park, the program has inaugurated a Sports and Leisure Center on the island of Tibau, on the other side of the Piratininga Lagoon, closer to the sea.
As part of this project, sports fields, a playground and a lookout point have been built, while an invasive tree, the white lead tree (Leucaena leucocephala), native to Mexico and Central America, which dominated the island’s vegetation, has been gradually replaced with local species.
The systemic thinking that guides PRO Sostenible is based on three pillars, explained Dionê Castro.
First is the complexity of local ecosystems and of the projects being implemented, focusing on the environmental, natural, social and cultural dimensions.
In second place is what is called “intersubjectivity”, which takes into account new paradigms of science, leaving behind “simplistic and Cartesian views…The changes do not come from outside, but from local residents, with public input from the conception of the project to its execution,” said the geographer who holds a doctorate in environmental management.
The third pillar is irreversibility. The lagoon and its ecosystems will not return to their original state, “to zero,” but will be cleaned up as much as possible to reach a “new equilibrium,” she said.
Local support for the environmental project led to solutions in different areas, such as the regularization of real estate in the favelas or shantytowns, the improvement of health, the revitalization of fishing, and even the creation of a fishermen’s association.
“It’s environmental justice on the march,” Castro summed up.
Oil workers are busy on the banks of the Tiputini river, on the northern border of the Yasuní National Park, in Ecuador’s Amazon region. CREDIT: Pato Chavez / Flickr
by Carolina Loza (quito)
Inter Press Service
QUITO, Oct 09 (IPS) – The decision reached by Ecuadorians to put an end to oil production in Yasuní National Park, in a popular referendum in August, was a triumph for civil society and a global milestone in environmental democracy. But when it comes to implementation, the result is less promising.
Despite being a democratic decision, taken by the majority of Ecuadorians, who voted to halt oil exploration and production in the park, the authorities say the verdict is not clear.
During the Aug. 20 presidential and legislative elections, 59 percent of voters voted Yes to a halt to oil extraction in one of the most biodiverse protected areas in the world, part of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest that has been a biosphere reserve since 1989.
At the same time, 68 percent of the voters of the Metropolitan District of Quito voted against continued mining in their territory, in order to protect the biodiversity of the Chocó Andino, a forest northwest of the capital that provides it with water.
In the midst of an unprecedented political and criminal insecurity crisis in Ecuador, the two votes were a historic landmark at a democratic and environmental level, in addition to demonstrating that Ecuadorians are increasingly looking towards alternatives that would move Ecuador away from the extractivism on which the economy of this South American country has depended for decades.
But the No vote, i.e. the answer that allowed oil extraction to continue in the Yasuní ITT block, won in the provinces where the national park is located: Orellana and Sucumbíos. This is one of the arguments of the current authorities to stop compliance with the referendum, arguing that the areas involved want oil production to go ahead.
Constitutional lawyer Ximena Ron Erráez said the Ecuadorian government cannot escape the obligation to abide by the result of the referendum.
“As far as the Ecuadorian constitution is concerned…..it must be complied with in an obligatory manner by the authorities; there is no possibility, constitutionally speaking, that the authorities can refuse to comply with the results of the referendum,” she told IPS.
One of the murals that still remain on the streets of Quito from the campaign for the August referendum on whether or not to keep the oil wealth underground in Yasuní National Park, to which voters decided “yes”: leave it untouched. CREDIT: Carolina Loza / IPS
Ron Erráez also complained about a lack of political will.
On Sept. 5, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, in a meeting with indigenous communities, described the referendum as “not applicable”.
A leaked video in which he made the statement drew an outcry from civil society groups that pushed for the referendum for more than 10 years. Yasunidos, the group that was formed to reverse the 2013 decision by the government of then President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) to begin oil drilling and production in Yasuní, has declared itself in a state of permanent assembly.
The Correa administration had proposed a project that sought to keep the oil in Yasuní ITT (Ishpingo, Tambococha, Tiputini), also known as Block 43, in the ground, on almost 2,000 hectares, part of which is within the biosphere reserve and the rest in the so-called buffer zone.
The initiative consisted of asking for international economic compensation for not exploiting the oilfield, which contains more than 1.5 billion barrels of reserves, in order to continue to preserve the biodiversity of the park and its surrounding areas. But the proposal did not yield the hoped-for results in international financing and the government decided to cancel it.
This is despite the fact that Yasuní, covering an area of 10,700 square kilometers in the northeast of the country within the Amazon basin, is home to some 150 species of amphibians, 600 species of birds and 3,000 species of flora, as well as indigenous communities, some of which are in voluntary isolation.
Environmental activists and organizations working in favor of keeping Yasuní’s oil in the ground say the management of the project showed the dilemma of finding alternatives to the extractive industry and the lack of real political will on the part of the political powers-that-be to come up with solutions.
View of one of the rivers inside the Yasuni park, in northeastern Ecuador, which preserves an incomparable biodiversity. CREDIT: Manel Ortega Fernández / Flickr
Ron Erráez mentioned an important fact: Lasso, in power since May 2021, will be an outgoing president after the second round of presidential elections is held on Oct. 15, and it will be his successor who will have to fulfill the mandate of the referendum on the national park.
One difficulty is that his successor, who will take office on Nov. 25, will only serve as president for a year and a half, to complete the term of Lasso, who called for an unprecedented early election to avoid his likely impeachment by the legislature.
Alex Samaniego, who participates in Yasunídos from Scientist Rebellion Ecuador, said it was clear from the start that the campaign for the Yasuní and Andean Chocó referendums was a long-term process, which would not end with whatever result came out of the vote.
“We know that we have to defend the result, defend the votes of the citizens and make sure that the referendums are fully complied with,” he told IPS.
According to the environmental activist, the democratic process behind the referendums will serve as an example for many countries, including Brazil, where communities are waging a constant struggle to combat climate change by seeking alternatives to the extractive industries.
Capture from a video of the Quito Free of Mining campaign, which triumphed in the popular referendum on Aug. 20. CREDIT: Carolina Loza / IPS
“We are told about all the money that oil brings to the economy, but very little money stays in the communities,” said Samaniego, who mentioned alternatives such as community-based tourism and biomedicine and bioindustries as economic alternatives to oil production.
Ron Erráez said “the referendum process sets a precedent because it is a way of establishing what is called an environmental democracy, where the people decide what to exploit and what not to exploit.”
“These principles in practice are in harmony with the rights of nature that are mentioned in the Ecuadorian constitution, to protect nature above and beyond economic profit,” she added.
Ecuadorian voters decided at the ballot box, and their decision should accelerate the possibility of a transition to alternatives for their economy. But what will the implementation look like?
The referendum on the Andean Chocó region covers a conservation area of which Quito is part, which includes nine protected forests and more than 35 natural reserves, in order to avoid the issuance of mining exploration permits, a measure that will be implemented after the vote.
There are contrasting views over the halt to oil exploration and production in Yasuni. The state-owned oil company Petroecuador highlights the losses for the State and presents figures that question the studies of groups such as Yasunidos.
The referendum gives the government one year to bring oil production activities to a halt. But Ron Erráez said it could take longer to dismantle Petroecuador’s entire operation in Yasuní ITT. Meanwhile, operations in Block 43 continue.
Sofia Torres, spokesperson for Yasunidos, said that despite all the talk during the campaign about economic losses, the vote showed that a majority of Ecuadorians question the country’s extractivist industry status quo.
In her view, although government and oil authorities insist that oil resources are indispensable for the country’s development, Ecuadorians have not seen this materialize in terms of infrastructure, social measures or services.
For this reason, they decided that “it is better to opt for the preservation of something concrete, such as an ecosystem that provides us with clean water and clean air and that is something like an insurance policy for the future,” she told IPS.
On Oct. 15, Ecuadorians will choose between left-leaning Luisa Gonzalez, the protegé of former President Correa, and businessman Daniel Noboa. It will fall to one of them to enforce the majority vote on the future of Yasuní and the halt to oil industry activity in the park.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 19 (IPS) – It’s a year since a photo of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini – bruised and in a coma she would never recover from after being arrested by the morality police for her supposedly improperly worn hijab – went viral, sending people onto the streets.
The protests became the fiercest challenge ever faced by Iran’s theocratic regime. The unprecedented scale of the protests was matched by the unparalleled brutality of the crackdown, which clearly revealed the regime’s fear for its own survival.
Led by women and young people, mobilisations under the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ banner articulated broader demands for social and political change. They spread like wildfire – to streets across Iran, to universities, even to cemeteries where growing numbers of the regime’s victims were being buried. They were echoed and amplified by the Iranian diaspora around the world. The Iranian people made it abundantly clear they wanted the Islamic Republic gone.
A year on, the theocratic regime still stands, but that doesn’t mean nothing has changed. By sheer force, the authorities have regained control – at least for now. But subtle changes in daily life reveal the presence of active undercurrents that could once again spark mass protests. The regime knows this, hence the fear with which it has awaited this date and its redoubled repression as it neared.
A glimpse of change
Last December, as protests raged and the authorities were busy trying to stop them, women could be seen on Iranian streets without their hijabs for the first time in decades. After the protests were quelled, many simply refused to resubmit to the old rules. A tactical shift followed, with mass street mobilisation turning into more elusive civil disobedience.
Women, particularly Gen Z women just like Mahsa, continue to protest on a daily basis, simply by not abiding by hijab rules. Young people express their defiance by dancing or showing affection in public. Cities wake up to acts of civil disobedience emblazoned on their walls. Anti-regime slogans are heard coming from seemingly nowhere. In parts of the country where many people from excluded ethnic minorities live, protest follows Friday prayers. It may take little for the embers of rebellion to reignite.
Preventative repression
Ahead of the anniversary, family members of those killed during the 2022 protests were pressured not to hold memorial services for their loved ones. The lawyer representing Mahsa Amini’s family was charged with ‘propaganda against the state’ due to interviews with foreign media. University professors suspected to be critical of the regime were dismissed, suspended, forced to retire, or didn’t have their contracts renewed. Students were subjected to disciplinary measures in retaliation for their activism.
Artists who expressed support for the protest movement faced reprisals, including arrests and prosecution under ridiculous charges such as ‘releasing an illegal song’. Some were kept in detention on more serious charges and subjected to physical and psychological torture, including solitary confinement and beatings.
Two months ago, the regime put the morality police back on the streets. Initial attempts to arrest women found in violation of hijab regulations, however, were met with resistance, leading to clashes between sympathetic bystanders and police. Women, including celebrities, have been prosecuted for appearing in public without their hijab. Car drivers carrying passengers not wearing hijab have been issued with traffic citations and private businesses have been closed for noncompliance with hijab laws.
The most conservative elements of the regime have doubled down, proposing a new ‘hijab and chastity’ law that seeks to impose harsher penalties, including lashes, heavy fines and prison sentences of up to 10 years for those appearing without the hijab. The bill is now being reviewed by Iran’s Guardian Council, a 12-member, all-male body led by a 97-year-old cleric.
If not now, then anytime
In the run-up to 16 September, security force street presence consistently increased, with snap checkpoints set up and internet access disrupted. The government clearly feared something big might happen.
As the anniversary passes, the hardline ruling elite remains united and the military and security forces are on its side, while the protest movement has no leadership and has taken a bad hit. Some argue that what made it spread so fast – the role of young people, and young women in particular – also limited its appeal among wider Iranian society, and particularly among low-income people concerned above all with economic strife, rising inflation and increasing poverty.
There are ideological differences among the Iranian diaspora, which formed through successive waves of exiles and includes left and right-wing groups, monarchists and ethnic separatists. While most share the goal of replacing the authoritarian theocracy with a secular democracy, they’re divided over strategy and tactics, and particularly on whether sanctions are the best way to deal with the regime.
Ever since the protests took off last year, thousands of people around the world have shown their support and called on their governments to act. And some have, starting with the USA, which early on imposed sanctions on the morality police and senior police and security officials. New sanctions affecting 29 additional people and entities, including 18 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and security forces, were imposed on the eve of the anniversary of the protests, 15 September, International Day of Democracy. That day, US President Joe Biden made a statement about Mahsa Amini’s inspiration of a ‘historic movement’ for democracy and human dignity.
The continuing outpouring of international solidarity shows that the world still cares and is watching. A new regime isn’t around the corner in Iran, but neither is it game over in the quest for democracy. For those living under a murderous regime, every day of the year is the anniversary of a death, an indignity or a violation of rights. Each day will therefore bring along a new opportunity to resurrect rebellion.
Education Cannot Wait’s #AfghanGirlsVoices shines a light on young Afghan girls deprived of their basic right to education and learning.
Credit: ECW
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Sep 18 (IPS) – A Taliban edict is rolling back time in Afghanistan after access to education for all Afghan girls over the age of 12 was indefinitely suspended on September 18, 2021. Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls are forbidden from attending school beyond the primary level, leaving more than 1.1 million girls and young women without access to formal education.
With an estimated 80 percent of school-aged Afghan girls and young women now out of school – in the blink of an eye – Afghanistan has gone back 20 years. As gains made over the last two decades go up in smoke, Afghan girls are bravely breaking through the frightening dark cloud of misogyny and gender persecution to tell the world about the injustice of being denied an education and their burning desire to return to school.
“It is hard to think of anyone further left behind than the girls in Afghanistan who are being denied their most basic human rights, including their right to education, based solely on their gender,” said Education Cannot Wait (ECW) Executive Director Yasmine Sherif.
“We will continue to steadfastly advocate for the full resumption of their right to education in Afghanistan and to work with our partners to deliver crucial learning opportunities to Afghan children through the community-based education programmes we support.”
To mark the tragic anniversary of the de facto authorities’ unacceptable ban on secondary school girls’ education in Afghanistan, ECW – the UN global fund for education in emergencies – has updated its compelling #AfghanGirlsVoices Campaign with new multilingual content to include English, French, Spanish and Arabic.
To mark the anniversary of the Taliban authorities’ unacceptable ban on secondary school girls’ education in Afghanistan, ECW has updated its compelling #AfghanGirlsVoices Campaign with new multilingual content. Credit: ECW
The multilingual #AfghanGirlsVoices Campaign intends to break through language barriers so that more people in the global community can read inspiring, resilient, and heartbreaking testimonies conveyed through moving artwork by a young Afghan female artist.
The girls want the world to know that they are at risk of missing a lifetime of learning and earning opportunities – never acquiring the skills needed to prosper and contribute to building the stable and prosperous future that they, their families and the people of Afghanistan deserve.
An entire generation of girls and young women could be lost – as they are being pushed out of public life, not to be seen or heard. Prospects of a bleak future have compromised their mental health.
First launched on August 15, 2023 – two years after the de facto Taliban authorities took power in Afghanistan and subsequently banned girls’ access to secondary and tertiary education – the campaign was developed in collaboration with ECW Global Champion Somaya Faruqi, former Captain of the Afghan Girls’ Robotic Team.
The Taliban have implemented over 20 written and verbal decrees on girls’ education. With each new edict, restrictions on Afghan girls and young women’s right to education have gotten even more serious and severe. Today, girls over the age of 10 years are not allowed to go to school.
Prior to the indefinite suspension of university education for female students, they were not allowed to undertake certain majors in areas such as journalism, law, agriculture, veterinary science, and economics.
#AfghanGirlsVoices Campaign seeks to bring to the attention of the global community what is at stake and why urgent action is much needed to end a brutal clampdown on education. Between 2001 and 2018, the country saw a tenfold increase in enrolment at all education levels, from around 1 million students in 2001 to around 10 million in 2018.
#AfghanGirlsVoices Campaign seeks to bring to the attention of the global community what is at stake and why urgent action is needed to end a brutal clampdown on education. Credit: ECW
“The number of girls in primary school increased from almost zero in 2001 to 2.5 million in 2018. By August 2021, 4 out of 10 students in primary education were girls. Women’s presence in Afghan higher education increased almost 20 times, from 5,000 female students in 2001 to over 100,000 in 2021. Literacy rates for women doubled during the period, from 17 percent of women being able to read and write in 2001 to 30 percent for all age groups combined,” according to a recent UN report.
The girls’ powerful words are conveyed together with striking illustrations depicting both the profound despair experienced by these Afghan girls and young women, along with their incredible resilience and strength in the face of this unacceptable ban on their education.
The timing of the campaign will lift the voices of Afghan girls on the global stage as world leaders convene at the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Summit on 18-19 September at the UN General Assembly in New York. The Summit aims to mark the beginning of a new phase of accelerated progress towards the SDGs with high-level political guidance on transformative and accelerated actions leading up to 2030 – progress that cannot be achieved with Afghan girls left behind.
ECW has been supporting education in Afghanistan since 2017, first through a mix of formal and non-formal education and now exclusively through programming outside the formal education system. The ECW-supported extended Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP) in Afghanistan aims to support more than 250,000 children and adolescents across some of the most remote and underserved areas of the country.
The programme delivers community-based education, organised at the local level with support from local communities, and is critical to keep education going. Girls account for well over half of all the children and adolescents reached by the MYRP. To access ECW’s social media kit to support the #AfghanGirlsVoices campaign, click here.
Alfalfa farmer Dionisio Antiquera stands in front of one of the wastewater treatment ponds at the modernized plant in Cerrillos de Tamaya, a rural community in the Coquimbo region of northern Chile. The thousands of liters captured from the sewers are converted into clear liquid ready for reuse in local small-scale agriculture. CREDIT : Orlando Milesi / IPS
by Orlando Milesi (coquimbo, chile)
Inter Press Service
COQUIMBO, Chile, Sep 18 (IPS) – The reuse of treated wastewater in vulnerable rural areas of Chile’s arid north is emerging as a new resource for the inhabitants of this long, narrow South American country.
The Coquimbo region, just south of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest in the world, is suffering from a severe drought that has lasted 15 years.
According to data from the Meteorological Directorate, a regional station located in the Andes Mountains measured 30.3 millimeters (mm) of rain per square meter this year as of Sept. 10, compared to 213 mm in all of 2022.
At another station, in the coastal area, during the same period in 2023, rainfall stood at 10.5 mm compared to the usual level of 83.2 mm.
Faced with this persistent level of drought, vulnerable rural localities in Coquimbo, mostly dedicated to small-scale agriculture, are emerging as a new example of solutions that can be replicated in the country to alleviate water shortages.
The aim is to not waste the water that runs down the drains but to accumulate it in tanks, treat it and then use it to irrigate everything from alfalfa fields to native plants and trees in parks and streets in the localities involved. It is a response to drought and the expansion of the desert.
“We were able to implement five wastewater treatment projects and reuse 9.5 liters per second, which is, according to a comparative value, the consumption of 2,700 people for a year or the water used to irrigate 60 hectares of olive trees,” said Gerardo Díaz, sustainability manager of the non-governmental Fundación Chile.
These five projects, promoted by the Fundación Chile as part of its Water Scenarios 2030 initiative, are financed by the regional government of Coquimbo, which contributed the equivalent of 312,000 dollars. Of this total, 73 percent is dedicated to enabling reuse systems, for which plants in need of upgrading but not reconstruction have been selected.
The common objective of these projects, which together benefit some 6,500 people, is the reuse of wastewater for productive purposes, the replacement of drinking water or the recharge of aquifers.
Díaz told IPS that the amount of reuse obtained is significant because previously this water was discharged into a stream, canal or river where it was perhaps captured downstream.
The Huatulame treatment plant in the rural municipality of Monte Patria in northern Chile is being completely repaired with the support of the local municipality. Waterproof plastic sheeting and rocks have been installed, and in the final stage sawdust and earthworms will be incorporated before receiving wastewater from local households for reuse. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
A successful pilot experience
In Coquimbo, which has a regional population of some 780,000 people, there are 71 water treatment plants, most of which use activated sludge and almost all of which are linked to the Rural Drinking Water Program (APR) of the state Hydraulic Works Directorate.
Activated sludge systems are biological wastewater treatment processes using microorganisms, which are very sensitive in their operation and maintenance and rural sectors do not have the capacity to maintain them.
“Most of these treatment plants are not operating or are operating inefficiently,” Diaz acknowledged.
But one of the plants, once reconditioned, has served as a model for others since 2018. Its creation allowed Dionisio Antiquera, a 52-year-old agricultural technician, to save his alfalfa crop.
“We have had a water deficit for years. This recycled water really helps us grow our crops on our eight hectares of land,” he said in the middle of his alfalfa field in Cerrillos de Tamaya, one of the Coquimbo municipalities that IPS toured for several days to observe five wastewater reuse projects.
Raúl Ángel Flores stands in his nursery, where the plants and trees are irrigated with recycled water from the Punta Azul project in the town of Villa Puclaro, in Chile’s Coquimbo region. All profits from the town’s wastewater treatment are reinvested in its maintenance. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
He explained that using just reused water he was able to produce six normal alfalfa harvests per year with a yield per hectare of 100 25-kg bales.
“That’s 4500 to 4800 bales in the annual production season,” he said proudly.
These bales are easily sold in the region because they are cheaper than those of other farmers.
The water he uses comes from an APR plant that has 1065 users, 650 of whom provide water, including Antiquera.
On one side of his alfalfa field is a plant that accumulates the sludge that is dehydrated in pools and drying courts, and on the other side, the water is chlorinated and runs into another pond in its natural state.
“This water works well for alfalfa. It is hard water that has about 1400 parts per million of salt. Then it goes through a reverse osmosis process that removes the salt and the water is suitable for human consumption,” the farmer explained.
In Chile, treated wastewater is not considered fresh water or water that can be used directly by people, and its reuse is only indirect.
Antiquera sold half a hectare to the government to install the plant and in exchange uses the water obtained and contributes 20 percent to the local APR.
He recently extended his alfalfa field to another seven hectares, thanks to his success with treated water.
Deysy Cortés, president of a rural drinking water system in Huatulame, stands in front of the dry riverbed of the town of the same name. Today there is no water in the river, where local residents swam and summer vacationers camped on its banks 15 years ago. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
Flowers and trees also benefit
In Villa Puclaro, in the Coquimbo municipality of Vicuña, Raúl Ángel Flores, 55, has an ornamental plant nursery.
“I’ve done really well. My nursery has grown with just reuse water….. I have more than 40,000 ornamental, fruit, native and cactus plants. I deliver to retailers in Vicuña and Coquimbo,” a port city in the region, he told IPS.
The nursery is 850 square meters in size, and has an accumulation pond and pumps to pump the water. He has now rented a 2,500-meter plot of land to expand it.
Flores explained to IPS that he manages the nursery together with his wife, Carolina Cáceres, and despite the fact that they have two daughters and a senior citizen in their care, “we make a living just selling the plants…I even hired an assistant,” he added.
In the southern hemisphere summer he uses between 4,000 and 5,000 liters of water a day for irrigation.
“I have water to spare. Here it could be reused for anything,” he said.
Joining the project made it possible for Flores to make efficient use of water with a business model that in this case incorporates a fee for the water to the plant management, which is equivalent to 62 cents per cubic meter used.
Arnoldo Olivares operates the water treatment and recycling plant in Plan de Hornos, northern Chile. The plant’s infrastructure and operation have been upgraded, and it can now deliver water to rural residents to irrigate trees and plants, instead of using potable water. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
Eliminating odors, and creating new gardens
In the community of Huatulame, in the municipality of Monte Patria, Fundación Chile built an artificial surface wetland to put an end to the bad odors caused by effluents from a deficient waste-eater earthworm vermifilter treatment plant.
“This wetland has brought us peace because the odors have been eliminated. For the past year people have been able to walk along the banks of the old riverbed,” Deysy Cortés, 72, president of the APR, told IPS.
The municipality of Monte Patria is financing the repair of the plant with the equivalent of 100,000 dollars.
“The sprinklers will be changed, the filtering system will be replaced, and sawdust and worms will be added. It will be up and running in a couple of months,” explained agronomist Jorge Núñez, a consultant for Fundación Chile.
As in other renovated plants, safe infiltration of wastewater is ensured while the project simultaneously promotes the protection of nearby wells to provide water to the villagers.
The Huatulame treatment plant in the rural municipality of Monte Patria in northern Chile is being completely repaired with the support of the local municipality. Waterproof plastic sheeting and boulders have been installed, and in the final stage sawdust and earthworms will be incorporated before receiving wastewater from local households for reuse. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
Cortés warned of serious difficulties if no more rain falls in the rest of 2023, despite the relief provided by the plant for irrigation.
“I foresee a very difficult future if it doesn’t rain. We will go back to what we experienced in 2019 when in every house there were bottles filled with water and a little jug to bathe once a week,” she said.
During a recent crisis, the local APR paid 2500 dollars to bring in water from four 20,000-liter tanker trucks.
In Plan de Hornos, a town in the municipality of Illapel, irrigation technology was installed using reused water instead of drinking water to create a green space for the community to enjoy.
The project included water taps in people’s homes for residents to water trees and flowers.
Arnoldo Olivares, 59, is in charge of the plant, which has 160 members.
“I run both systems,” he told IPS. “I pour drinking water into the pond. After passing through the houses, the water goes into the drainage system, where there is a procedure to reclaim and treat it.”
“This water was lost before, and now we reuse it to irrigate the saplings. We used to work manually, now it is automated. It’s a tremendous change, we’re really happy,” he said.
Antiquera the alfalfa farmer is happy with his success in Cerrillos de Tamaya, but warns that in his area 150 to 160 mm of rainfall per year is normal and so far only 25 mm have fallen in 2023.
“The water crisis forces us to find alternatives and to be 100 percent efficient. Not a drop of water can be wasted. They have forecast very high temperatures for the upcoming (southern hemisphere) summer, which means that plants will require more water in order to thrive,” he said.
Díaz, the sustainability manager of Fundación Chile, said the Coquimbo projects are fully replicable in other water-stressed areas of Chile if a collaborative model is used.
He noted that “in Chile there is no law for the reuse of treated wastewater. There is only a gray water law that was passed years ago, but there are no regulations to implement it.”
He explained, however, that due to the drought, “rural localities today are already reusing wastewater or gray water. This is going to happen, with or without us, with or without a law. The need for water is so great that the communities are accepting the use of treated wastewater.”
The governor of Coquimbo, Krist Naranjo, argued that “a broader vision is needed to value water resources that are essential for life, especially in the context of global climate change.”
“We’re working on different initiatives with different executors, but the essential thing is to value the reuse of graywater recycling,” she told IPS from La Serena, the regional capital.
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