Drought and climate crisis: rain falls the same for everyone (3/14/23)
Article in Spanish here
Musician Enrique Rey wrote for Tótem (the prodigious Uruguayan rock-candombe band from the early 70s): “It rains the same for everyone / the poor got wet / but the rich did too. / For some, it’s a blessing / for others, it’s a cruel day.” This seems to be a record that back then there were also different evaluations of this climatological phenomenon, whose absence in recent months brings terrible hardships to all our compatriots. Despite this, only some of them are deeply affected. The discrepancies in this evaluation (which the song distinguishes by purchasing power) are also cultural and extend beyond the rain to all the consequences of climate change affecting our country.
We already know it’s a global phenomenon, but from home, we see it as foreign and it doesn’t truly sensitize us. As ecologist David Sobel explains, this may be the collateral effect of an environmental education that focused on showing us distant, overwhelming catastrophes instead of teaching us about the characteristics of where we live and how to preserve it. Endangered whales before coatis or capybaras, melting glaciers and conifers on fire before the degradation of our natural grasslands, wetlands, or coastal ecosystems. As a result, adults are overwhelmed and can’t empathize or seek solutions to environmental problems, not even when they occur in our own neighborhood.
We don’t know our country, and when the crisis manifests more, the urban/rural divide deepens: those with no connection to rural areas blame those who do for socializing losses due to their irresponsibility in managing drought. Support measures are simplified as mere assistance to the oligarchy, ignoring the social composition of our rural areas and the impact of water scarcity on our family and medium-sized business producers, crucial for internal market supply and thus our food. On the other side, the reaction is not delayed: unprecedented and unreal accusations like saying that “there are Uruguayans who don’t want it to rain to enjoy beach days and carnival nights.”
We must understand that in an increasingly interconnected world, any problem that arises directly affects us. The current agricultural crisis is framed within a national and global climate crisis. A response is needed, and perhaps there is an opportunity to build a collective sensitivity that leads to addressing climate change comprehensively and making economic and environmental problems associated with it a true national cause.
This isn’t just about “the countryside”: it’s about the massification of forest fires, neighbors facing water access problems for consumption, the supply, quality, and prices of food for consumers, or jobs associated with production in every corner of the territory. At this very moment, organized neighborly solidarity is supplementing the State in providing water for consumption and maintaining productive systems in the most vulnerable areas of the countryside. Furthermore, there are serious deficiencies in building a consolidated environmental law that allows us to combat associated crimes, as well as those who exploit scarcity to speculate. We have the opportunity to vindicate the role of Uruguayan producers — especially family ones — as potential suppliers of sustainable food to the world and as stewards of our natural resources.
Although drought “has always happened,” it now happens more frequently and therefore with more serious consequences. Whose responsibility is it? Of a production, distribution, and consumption system whose only criterion is economic profit measured in money. This is referred to as the Capitalocene: a process by which the capitalist system has modified the planet’s structure, ushering humanity into a new geological era characterized by rising atmospheric temperatures, the fragmentation of natural cycles — like rainfall — and the reduction of biodiversity. Never before has so much wealth been created in human history, nor has technology advanced so much, and yet there have never been so many overexploited and disconnected systems on the brink of chaos.
Once a national sensitivity is built, we can have better discussions about the kind of State policy we want. The current government did not anticipate this drought (which has been predicted for months) and has discouraged the incipient mitigation and adaptation programs to climate change that were started in previous governments. For example, cutting the “More Water” program for irrigation system construction or financing programs for producers to generate surface water reserves. At the same time, the functioning of Rural Development boards, created as a fundamental tool for connecting agricultural production with various state actors, has stopped in various corners of the country. To build unity in the face of crisis and defend national production, efforts during the catastrophe or palliative measures are not enough: we need to work with what was done before and have a long-term discussion about the challenges we face.
Uruguay aims to be a country with food sovereignty: this implies producing enough quality food for our entire population, with resilient and sustainable systems. For this, an active and innovative role of the State is necessary; this climate crisis cannot be solved with individual ventures and private capital alone. The investments required to address the consequences of global warming are the responsibility and right of society as a whole, as the “cost-benefit” is measured in social and environmental benefits, not just monetary ones.
We must adapt to find ways to keep producing, and this is not compatible with apparent “solutions” in immediate debt or risk management and comprehensive access to financial insurance. Dismissing the possibility of individually investing in irrigation or other technologies because of difficulty in amortization cannot be an option. This is particularly evident in the case of farming: those who supply Uruguayan tables must have guarantees so that the consequences of water deficits do not compromise future internal supply, quality, and sustainability. State policy must focus on ensuring that all food producers have a secure way to finance access to sufficient water sources and technologies that maximize efficiency in their use as needed.
It is time to implement (also in cities) adequate infrastructure to make water use efficient so that future generations do not lose the quality of life we have had — we have a responsibility to be good ancestors — assuming that extreme weather events will be the new norm and no longer the exception.
Undoubtedly, there are local environmental problems that are the responsibility of our own systems management. However, it is essential to recognize that a handful of countries — whose affluent classes generate unsustainable and obscene emissions from the global south — are primarily responsible for climate change. Without falling into chauvinistic positions, it does not seem logical to analyze this crisis only by seeking culprits among ourselves as if the context did not exist. Uruguay must advocate for initiatives for a new global governance that makes those responsible for climate change bear the costs, not the victims. Environmental justice.
The world’s inhabitants are increasingly alienated from the web of life, processes, and systems that compose us, of which we are part and to which we add value. We urgently need to reverse that process. If it’s true what the song says and it rains the same for everyone, it behooves both the countryside and the city to build a new sensitivity where we revalue the local environment that sustains us, where environmental awareness can connect with agriculture. Perhaps it’s a new way to safeguard life, defend synergistic systems that protect biodiversity, which means more and better opportunities to avoid dying either drowned or of thirst.
This article was co-written with Juan Erosa and Agustina Corbo and published in La Diaria on February 14, 2023.
