BRAZIL: Water Today's Great Challenge

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dic 24 (IPS) - Water should not be a problem in Brazil, a country with abundant tropical rains and three of South America's largest river basins, but the country's major cities are suffering serious shortages.

Sao Paulo, the largest city in South America, is under a rationing scheme that affects 30 percent of its 15 million inhabitants, who only have water in their houses every four days.

The potable water reserves of the company that supplies the city of Rio de Janeiro are only half full, and the city has been put on alert.

This situation seems absurd in a country which has a potential annual water supply of over 46,600 cubic metres per inhabitant, when according to the United Nations, a shortage exists when there is less than 1,000 cubic metres per inhabitant.

However, Brazil is paying the price for a colonisation that settled all along the Atlantic coast, while the demographic density of the enormous Amazon region (home to the country's major rivers) is extremely low.

Brazil is also paying the price for the fact that only five percent of the 1.5 million square kilometres of coastal forests found when the Portuguese arrived remains today, in the states of Rio Grande do Norte and Rio Grande do Sur.

For centuries that coastal vegetation meant a system of regular rains that maintained the flow of the region's rivers. However, as forests disappeared, the riverbeds filled with sand and the low water periods became more and more prolonged.

To the problem of too little has been added the problem of poor quality: 43 percent of the Sao Paulo metropolitan area's available water is not fit for consumption due to its level of pollution, which is so high that all known treatment processes are insufficient.

"If that water could be used, Sao Paulo would have excess water rather than a shortage," said Jose Moreira, the director of the Hidroplan consortium which is studying the region's future water outlook.

Pollution plagues the large Brazilian rivers that run close to urban areas. Rio de Janeiro is facing the need to use the Paraiba do Sul river, but its waters are increasingly polluted by industrial waste from the companies installed along its banks.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service