From North to South, Brazil spans a little over thirty-nine degrees of latitude, more than four-thousand-three-hundred kilometers, (greater than the distance between New York and Los Angeles).
From East to West it's not quite that big -- by about fifteen kilometers.
No wonder, then,
that Mother Nature subjects this country to great variations in climate.
But this year the Old
Lady has been unusually capricious.
To begin with, rainfall has been at record levels. This sign showed the high-water mark of the worst flood ever to hit the city of Manaus on the day the record was broken.
There, not
far above the point where the Rio Negro becomes the Amazon, many
people build their homes on stilts.
This year, for the first time, they’ve been forced to add extra
floors - or suffer the invasion of their homes by water, rats and snakes.
And while the people in the
Amazon region have a surfeit of water, the farmers in Bahia can’t get enough of it.
As a result of which, their crops and their cattle
are dying.
Their rivers have run dry.
Their reservoirs have emptied.
And the little water that remains has become largely undrinkable due to the concentration of ground salt.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the
country, the scenario is much the same.
In Rio Grande do Sul two
hundred and seventy-nine communities have declared a state of emergency for
lack of water.
More ruined crops.
More dying cattle.
And yet twelve other communities in the same state have been forced to ask for federal aid to solve a different kind of problem.
Flooding.
Yet, despite it all,
Brazil’s economy continues to grow, and São Paulo continues
to be one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in.
Please don’t ask me to explain this,
because I can’t.
And most Brazilian economists can't either.
And all I know is that, in this town, poverty
and great wealth have always lived side-by-side - no matter what Mother Nature keeps doing to us.
Leighton - Monday
