Water in Brazil

Nor Any Drop to Drink

Dry weather and a growing population spell rationing

Apr 26th 2014 | SÃO PAULO - source: www.economist.com

BRAZIL has the world’s biggest reserves of fresh water. That most of it sits in the sparsely populated Amazon has not historically stopped Brazilians in the drier, more populous south taking it for granted. No longer. Landlords in São Paulo, who are wont to hose down pavements with gallons of potable water, have taken to using brooms instead. Notices in lifts and on the metro implore paulistanos to take shorter showers and re-use coffee mugs.

São Paulo state, home to one-fifth of Brazil’s population and one-third of its economic activity, is suffering the worst drought since records began in 1930. Pitiful rainfall and high rates of evaporation in scorching heat have caused the volume of water stored in the Cantareira system of reservoirs, which supplies 10m people, to dip below 12% of capacity. This time last year, at the end of what is nominally the wet season, it stood at 64%.

On April 21st the governor, Geraldo Alckmin, warned that from May consumers will be fined for increasing their water use. Those who cut consumption are already rewarded with discounts on their bills. The city will tap three basins supplying other parts of the state, but since these reservoirs have also been hit by drought and supply hydropower plants, fears of blackouts are rising.

Without a downpour, Sabesp, the state water utility, expects Cantareira’s levels to sink beneath the pipes which link reservoirs to consumers a week after São Paulo hosts the opening game of the football World Cup on June 12th. To tide the city over until rains resume in November, it is installing kit to pump half of the 400 billion litres of reserves beneath the pipes, at a cost of 80m reais ($36m). The company says this “dead volume”, never before used, is perfectly treatable. Some experts have expressed concerns about its quality.

Mr Alckmin has not ruled out tightening the spigots. Flow from taps in parts of São Paulo has already become a trickle, for which Sabesp blames maintenance work. Widespread cuts could hurt the governor’s re-election bid in October. Hours after he announced the latest measures, a thirsty mob set fire to a bus.

Paulistanos use more water than most Brazilians, but lose less of it to leaks: 35%, compared with a national average of 39%. Sabesp, listed on the New York Stock Exchange but majority-owned by the state government, is a paragon of good governance, says John Briscoe, a water expert at Harvard and a former head of the World Bank mission in Brazil.

The problem exposed by the drought is that supply has not kept pace with the rising urban population. Facing a jumble of overlapping municipal, state and federal regulations, investment in storage, distribution and treatment has lagged behind. And not just in São Paulo; the national water regulator has warned that 16 projects in the ten biggest cities must be completed by 2015 to prevent chronic water shortages over the next decade. So far only five are finished; work on some has not begun. Short-term measures should keep the water trickling for now. But the well of temporary solutions will eventually run dry.

Sweet smell of success

Do you have what it takes?

FAILURE, as a precursor for success, threads its way through each of these books. None more so than in Megan McArdle’s compelling account of her own misfortunes, as one employer after another folds beneath her and a personal relationship goes sour. Disaster piles on disaster, until the author (like the alcoholic who hits bottom) embraces failure as an opportunity to learn. From then on, every step forward brings fresh insights that build an armoury for future growth and success.

Getting the upside of down, notes the author (who used to work for The Economist), often means letting go of your instincts, ignoring conventional wisdom, and leaping for something no one has done before. America has a long history of doing this. As Ms McArdle explains, “We’re the descendants of failures who fled to these shores from their creditors, their failed farms, their disastrous love affairs.” Embracing risk and forgiving failure in others, they built the richest nation on earth.

The willingness to invest at the riskiest part of any new venture’s discounted-cashflow curve is almost uniquely American. Meanwhile, the forgiving nature of America’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy law has made the risk of doing so easier to take; the sting of failure less arduous to endure. These are signs of a country with more invested in the future than in the past.

In “The Triple Package”, Amy Chua (of “Tiger Mother” fame) and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, both law professors at Yale, identify three traits that characterise racial, religious and ethnic groups that excel in business: a deeply internalised sense of superiority, deep feelings of insecurity and an unshakable capacity for impulse control, especially the ability to resist giving up in the face of hardship.

Immigrants tend to have all three attributes. But successful newcomers to America like Cuban exiles and Asian Indians are not the only ones to share such traits. Jewish and Mormon households have long earned three to four times the median income. In all such groups, this triple cultural package instils drive, the capacity to endure, to take a hit and to start all over again. They are also often outsiders.

America was once the quintessential triple-package nation, convinced of its own exceptional destiny, a chosen people with a strong Protestant work ethic and yet riddled with insecurity in the face of Europe’s cultural imperialism. In recent decades insecurity and the will to work have all but vanished. What is left is essentially the swagger, complacency and entitlement of a perverted sense of exceptionalism.

Can America recover its triple-package verve? Hard to say. Perhaps the rise of a Chinese colossus will yet stir the country the way Sputnik and the Soviet Union did half a century ago. That will depend, of course, on whether America has the stomach for sacrifice—for telling its “trophy generation” that sweating the hard stuff is painful but unavoidable; that science and mathematics really do matter. It will take huge commitments at all levels, from the Oval Office to the kitchen table.

Commitment is something Heidi Reeder, an award-wining social psychologist at Boise State University, has devoted much of her academic career to understanding. In “Commit to Win”, she defines commitment as being psychologically invested in something and determined to stay with it at all cost. Dr Reeder identifies four key elements of commitment that allow pipe-dreams to be turned into positive achievements: the benefits of working towards a goal, overcoming difficulties, investing time, money and effort, and examining alternative choices. Her book is delightfully practical as well as informative, packed with intelligence and clarity of both thought and expression. Learned, yet eminently accessible, it is a rare pleasure.

Source: The Economist