Drought Region (Brazil)

Drought Region (Brazil), area encompassing most of eight states in Northeast Brazil; defined politically as the polígono das sêcas or drought polygon. Historically the designation has had more to do with social structure, politics, and psychology than with climate; generations of Brazilians have been conditioned through political debate, essays, novels, songs, and films to define the Northeast interior and its social problems in terms of drought. Meteorologically, the droughts are produced by Caribbean and South Atlantic weather systems, the instability of which can cause wide variations in seasonal rainfall. However, the human effects of these poorly understood natural phenomena derive historically from the social and political structure of the region.

The droughts entered the historical record in 1584, when Friar Fernão Cardim reported that over four thousand indigenes had fled from the interior to the Pernambucan coast because of a drought. The intermixture of meteorological, social, economic, and political factors in historical memory and contemporary perceptions has led to disagreement over the precise historical pattern of droughts, but most agree that severe droughts occurred in 1639, 1724–1725, 1736–1737, 1745–1746, 1777–1778, 1791–1793, 1825–1827, 1845–1847, 1877–1880, 1888–1889, 1906, 1915, 1936, 1953, 1958, and 1979–1983. The social and economic consequences of several of these earned them the label grandes sêcas (great droughts). The end of the great colonial northeastern cattle kingdoms, the "Leather Civilization," is traditionally marked by the grande sêca of 1793, and exceptionally severe droughts since that time tend to be associated with periods of economic and political stress or rapid change: the drought of 1825–1827 coincided with the political confusion of Brazilian independence and its aftermath; the drought of 1845–1847 accompanied the political and economic transformations of midcentury; the Empire of Brazil was ushered out by the drought of 1888–1889; the drought of 1958 accompanied the regional development crisis of the 1950s.

Drought Region (Brazil)

The worst drought in Brazilian history, which had a profound influence on the regional image and on the perception of and reaction to droughts in Brazil ever since, was the Great Drought of 1877–1880. This event followed two decades of population growth and incipient development spurred by an illusory cotton boom associated with the U.S. Civil War, then debt, retrenchment, and stress during the middle 1870s. Practical and psychological unpreparedness, combined with a lack of political and economic cohesion, led to at least a quarter of a million deaths, forced the permanent migration from the region of perhaps an equal number, and so profoundly dislocated the lives of survivors that its effects, on individuals, families, and the Northeast as a whole, were felt for generations thereafter. The crisis persuaded the imperial government to treat the droughts as a national problem for the first time, and added an important new factor to the Brazilian political equation. Politicians from the drought states, divided over other issues, unified to force central governments to issue drought aid.

Imperial funds injected into the Northeast provinces during the great drought of 1877–1880 and the decade following moved "drought fighting" into a central position in regional politics. The drought "solutions" that emerged—relocation of refugees, public works for emergency employment and infrastructure improvement, and hydraulic works—have persisted to the present time. The drought-fighting discourse that then engaged intellectuals contained enduring subthemes that help to explain why the region and the nation have never solved the social problems that underlie the climatic phenomena, such as the contention that the climate of the Northeast could somehow be restored through the building of large reservoirs and reforestation, or that the common people of the Sertão had been shaped permanently by the climate into an inferior race, incapable of rational, modern action.

After the establishment of the republic in 1889, the ill-managed projects initiated by the imperial government were reincarnated as a series of federal agencies: the Federal Institute of Anti-Drought Works (IFOCS), established in 1909, developed through a series of droughts, sharp regional pressure, and the politics of the Vargas years into the National Department of Drought-Fighting Works (DNOCS) in 1949. The 1934 and 1946 Brazilian constitutions stipulated that fixed percentages of national, state, and municipal revenues be set aside for antidrought works and emergency relief for drought victims. While this financial obligation to the drought polygon is absent from the 1988 constitution, mounting a "permanent defense" against natural calamities is listed among the twenty-five enumerated responsibilities of the federal government.

In the 1950s, comprehensive regional planning began to replace the single-minded "hydraulic approach" that saw building reservoirs as the answer. The corruption and inefficiency revealed in DNOCS during the severe drought of 1958 discredited (but did not end) the drought-fighting approach and brought favor to the integrated regional-development approach embodied in the giant Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast (SUDENE). After 1958, the focus of DNOCS shifted from reservoir building to irrigation projects, which often forced peasants off their land in the fertile river bottoms. Since 1970 the favored solution to the problems of the drought region has been integration into the national economy, including improved transportation and renewed encouragement of outmigration to the more developed center-south and developing Amazon basin, while paying somewhat more, but still far inadequate, attention to basic social problems and sustainable development within the region. Near the end of the twentieth century, as overpopulation, economic and social exploitation, and an inadequate resource base continue to shape recurrent climatic episodes into social disasters, the social solution to the drought problem seems as remote as it was in 1877.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anthony L. Hall, Drought and Irrigation in North-East Brazil (1978), and Kempton E. Webb, The Changing Face of Northeast Brazil (1974), are geographical surveys with good historical and political background information. Manuel Correia De Andrade, The Land and People of Northeast Brazil, translated by Dennis V. Johnson (1980), is indispensable for any study of the Northeast. Joaquim Alves, História das Sêcas (séculos XVII a XIX), is a scholarly survey from within the region, but limited to Ceará. The most complete account of any Brazilian drought is Roger Cunniff, "The Great Drought: Northeast Brazil, 1877–1880" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Texas, Austin, 1970), complemented by Gerald Greenfield, "The Great Drought and Elite Discourse in Imperial Brazil," Hispanic American Historical Review 72 (1992): 375-400. Antonio Magalhães and Pennie Magee, "The Brazilian Nordeste (Northeast)," in Drought Follows the Plow, edited by Michael H. Glantz (1994), surveys developments in the drought area.

Additional Bibliography

Heinrichs, G., and Voerkelius, S. Climate, Water, Mankind: Impacts of Long-term Climatic Changes in the Drought Polygon of Northeast-Brazil. Río de Janeiro, Brazil: 31st International Geological Congress, 2000.

Ponce, Victor Miguel. "Management of Droughts and Floods in the Semiarid Brazilian Northeast: The Case for Conservation." Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 50, no. 1 (September-October 1995): 422-431.

Roger Cunniff