Brazzil

In California there is a big desert. The Colorado River was canalized and the water was controlled. Big crops were produced. California became so wealthy, and people from all around the world went there to get fortune.
In contrast, Brazil has a dream that one day the San Francisco River will be canalized and it will irrigate the Semi Arid, transforming the region in a wealthy and developed area. This is a dream of more than one Century.
However, the fresh water is becoming an expensive material. Fresh water is so important for industries and agricultures than oil. Today, many Countries are having big problems to obtain fresh water. Canada and the USA have long term argument about how to use the waters from the great lakes. Since the water from great lakes is going down the levels, the United States wants to bring water by canalization from Alaska but Canada argues that the tubes will be ecological problems to the Caribous immigration from Alaska to Yukon.
Egypt and Ethiopia will be in a war for fresh water soon. Once, Ethiopia needs urgent the fresh water from its mountain for its agricultures and consequently, it will make the Nile River disappears.
In addition, the underground water in the United States is being used in a frenetic way and the levels are being down year after year. Therefore, it is necessary to see for the new fresh water source. The world is looking to Amazon River, San Francisco River as a new source of such material. Soon or later, the United States will try to take control from the wealthy area as they did with the oil from Iraq.
Semi Arid does not need any more help. The world needs this water, since Brazil during all those centuries did not know how to use such natural resources others Countries need such thing, fresh water can not be waist in the sea.
You can live forever with out oil but you do not live one week with out fresh water. So, it is time to be less self interest and help the world instead of looking again to drought politics from Brazilian Semi Arid.

The Semi Arid in Brazil is one of the political corrals from Brazil where some families landed 500 years ago and so far they administered a misery place and rule as they live in an old fashion feudalist Country. I particularly believe that everything in the semi arid in Brazil can be improved by people out of that system with open minds and general culture. The semi arid can make Brazil the most powerful country in this world if a serious, conscientious irrigation process can be implemented. It can be international disasters if done by politics and people pushing their own self interests.
Semi arid irrigation idea can be a bomb of productivity and at same time can be a bomb of misery. I went to visit Uzbekistan some years ago; I needed to prepare an environmental assignment for my college program in Canada. I saw at first glance ships over the desert. It was a funny picture in the first glance, and then you realized that in that place there was a sea 50 years ago. The Aral Sea, it was the world’s fourth largest inland body of water. Today is the man’s greatest ecological disaster.
In the early 1960s, engineers from the Soviet Union devised an ambitious program. They decided to reshape the desert and to turn sand into cotton, this way to help save the Soviet's failing economy. Tens of thousands of workers built a vast network of irrigation canals covering one hundred thousand square miles. Water laced with fertilizers and pesticides was pumped onto the land. Within a decade, Uzbekistan became the world's second-largest producer of cotton. But that was when the country's largest river; the Amu Darya was an untapped source of water. It was a river so wide it took Alexander the Greats army five days to cross it.
As expanding cotton industry consumed almost all the water flowing into the Aral Sea and it began to shrink. In just over three decades an ancient and thriving ecosystem was half its original size. Today, upstream cotton farms have sucked the lower Amu Darya dry. Huge pumps that once diverted water for irrigation are idle. Dried-out canals scar the landscape. Deprived of water, river traffic is non-existent, the abandoned cargo boats litter the shoreline. A mute testimony to a misguided agricultural policy. And a river that once wider than the Mississippi, today never reaches its natural destination in the Aral Sea.
Before the collapse of the Aral Sea a fleet of soviet trawlers worked these rich waters. Fishermen from all over Central Asia joined them. Each year they brought in over 50,000 tons of fish. Every day hundreds of boats pulled into Moynak, Uzbekistan's largest port, with their holds filled with over 20 different species of fish. Conveyor belts carried their cargo directly into dockside processing plants. At its peak the canneries produced over 12 million tons of fish a year and employed three thousand people.
Today Villages are covered with lethal dust and surface water and communal wells are contaminated. The most seriously affected are women and young children. The region has one of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world. Tuberculosis is a disease that preys upon the weak and malnourished. It doesn't discriminate between age and sex. In recent years, drug resistant strains of TB have developed and they are difficult to treat effectively. But TB is not the only problem. Every year windstorms sweep across the exposed seabed, picking up millions of tons of toxic salt and the residue of agricultural chemicals, including DDT. This legacy of the cotton industry has left behind the planet's highest concentration of air-borne pollutants. Villages are covered with lethal dust and surface water and communal wells are contaminated. The most seriously affected are women and young children.
Twenty-five years of contaminated water and air are taking a toll. Ninety per cent of pregnant women suffer from anaemia. Not unlike the Inuit of the arctic, their breast milk contains high levels of agricultural chemicals. The effect on infants is devastating. Five percent of newborns have birth defects and ten percent will die before their first birthday.
California is walking the same road than Uzbekistan. Forty miles to the south from Palm Spring and rising out of a harsh brown landscape is a vast body of water called the Salton Sea. It seems almost too good to be true, an inland lake in the middle of the desert. This is California’s crown jewel of biodiversity. A sanctuary for millions of migrating waterfowl.
But as recently as 100 years ago, there was no water here. It was a huge dried out salt basin. The remains of ancient lakes that over time, evaporated into the desert air. But in 1905, everything changed. Violent winter storms caused the Colorado River to go on a rampage. In the Spring, the swollen river suddenly jumped its banks. The entire flow of the Colorado surged into the Salton Basin. Farmland and homes were washed away. For 18 months, engineers waged a fierce battle. When the river returned to its original course. What was left behind was the Salton Sea.
Today, this is the largest inland body of water in California. For four months temperatures soar above 100 degrees. Over six feet of water is lost to evaporation every year. But unlike the lakes of ancients times, it hasn't dried up.
Five hundred thousand acres of rich farmland carpet the neighbouring Imperial and Coachella Valleys. Once a desert wasteland, today these farms provide nearly eighty-five percent of the nation's winter vegetable crops. What makes this billion-dollar industry possible is Colorado River water. It is enough water to satisfy the yearly needs of a city of 24 million. But intensive irrigation also produces massive amounts of run-off.
The Salton Sea is landlocked and surrounded by mountains and desert To the north and south are irrigated agricultural development. These farms are the source of drain water that keeps the sea from drying up. But it's a resource that presents a major paradox.
What feeds the Salton Sea is slowly killing it. The agricultural drain water contains enormous amounts of salt and chemicals. Over the years, it has become twenty-five percent saltier than the ocean. Several decades ago, the sea's ecosystem began to suffer.
In the 1980s, outbreaks of botulism and algae blooms killed millions of fish. And then, the birds began to die. Today, the shoreline often serves as a graveyard for thousands of waterfowl. In one three month period 150,000 eared grebes died. Though the exact cause remains unknown but most scientists believe the dead birds fed on tainted fish.
What is known is that the die-offs changed the public's perception of the sea. Today, the biggest fear is that if the sea gets saltier and it won't be able to support any life. Though recent tests indicate that the salinity of the Sea is still low enough for fish to reproduce, there exists another serious threat. It's all about who owns the rights to Colorado River water.
Released on demand from the Hoover Dam, the water that sustains the Salton Basin travels fourteen hundred miles. Just before the river crosses into Mexico, much of its volume is diverted into a series of canals — eventually bringing life to the farms of the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. Today, these farms consume half of California's share of Colorado River water, more than Los Angeles and San Diego combined. This has long been the focus of legal battles with the water-starved communities of Southern California.
In an historic agreement, farmers have agreed to sell to San Diego county enough water to satisfy the needs of 2 million people each year. But this has also trapped the Salton Sea between the needs of its fragile ecosystem, and the conflicting interests of farmers and developers.
As the Salton Sea begins to recede and toxic dust storms will inevitably come off the dried-out lakebed. Despite this danger, the transfer of water to San Diego has gone forward without an agreed upon plan or even adequate funds to remedy the situation. Without proper management in the future, this gift of nature will vanish again into the desert sands.
So, before do anything in the semi arid, a serious environment study must be done by people that know what they are doing and not amateur or politicians.
azteixei@yahoo.com
• Pharmaceutical R&D Technology Post Diploma 2003 - 2004
Toronto Institute of Pharmaceutical Technology – Canada
• Industrial Pharmaceutical Technology Post Diploma 2001 - 2002
Faculty of Technology, Seneca College, Toronto
• Chemical Technology Diploma 1998 - 2001
Faculty of Technology, Seneca College, Toronto
• PhD.Sc. Biochemistry Program 1988 - 1993
Centre Polytechnique, Parana University, Brazil
• B.S. in Pharmacy 1983 - 1986
University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.

I read the article very interesting. I saw the comments, very well done. However, only two comments. It seems to me that it will be necessary 4 or more generations for Brazilians to wake up about the Semi Arid Brazilian potential.

The Technological Society- the creation and maintenance of which we are all responsible for- is ultimately to blame for this and most of what are considered to be "natural" disasters. After all, when a levee breaks who's to blame? The engineers who built it or the professors who taught them? The lawyers for drafting the legislation or the politicians who signed off on it? The citizens who voted to put it there or the ones who didn't care? Or is everyone equally responsible? Unfortunately it's too late to repair a solid 10,000 years of compounding ecological disaster and to put things back into balance. From the modern point of view where only progress is acceptable there's obviously no chance of going back. All we can do is ride it out, while continuing to find and apply ever more powerful techniques to solve problems created by technology and its inherent indifference to the ultimate well-being or survival of life itself. Metaphorically this is very similar to how the earth could care less about how we pillage, plunder or abuse its resources- a few billion years from now it won’t matter one bit anyway.

USA is using billions of dollars to turn back again the marshal and swamps lands from Lousiane and Florida. They discovered one thing, it is better to save the environment and save the world. The salt sea is taking part of Southern States once there are more water in the seas due warm weather.

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