A problemática hídrica em área de risco à seca: o caso do município de Soledade-PB.

Abstract

In the semi-arid native of Northeast Brazil, yesterday as today, one of the phenomenons that comes as the largest obstacle to the economic and social development, in without doubt the scourge of the drought. In fact, the collective mentality associates the semi-arid to the drought, and the lack of water to the shortage of rains, as if they were synonymous. However, when analyzing referring data to the subject it is noticed that the shortage of the rains is not the only responsible for the lack of water in this area. It is suppossed that the vulnerability of the population face to the hydric problem is not only based on the physical-climatic conditions, normal of his environment, but mainly are the socially factors conditioned that generate the shortage of water affecting, above all the most vulnerable segments of the population. The main objective of this work is the study of the hydric problematic in risk of drought's areas, having chosen as empiric object the Municipal district of Soledade, located in Curimataú Paraibano's microrregion. The analysis was centralized in knowing the reality and the current situation of the problem of water's supply, access and usage and their impacts in the process that increases the social fragiliness of communities and populations, particularly viewable by the angle of the human and environmental health. In methodological terms it was considered feasible to place the hydric question in study, in the picture of the social-environmental problems that affect a vast segments of the population of the semi-arid native areas of northeast Brazil. The understanding of the urban and rural social-environmental problems will be possible if they were appraised, before anything, as products of the economical development process in validity in the country and region. The succession of the economic development plans along the times and, particularly, in the last thirty years has created the most vulnerable fields and cities to all types of threats. Following this reasoning, in this present work it was considered important not to dissociate the hydric problematic of the concepts of stake and Development on one side, and on the hand, Disaster, Risk and vulnerability to the Drought. The accomplished study revealed that the lack of water that gives a specific profile to the subject of the supply, access and usage of the water in the municipal district of Soledade, it is associated much more to the social, political and institutional conditions than the physical-climatic factors. It was also verified not only the increment of the vulnerable population in the field and urban's peripheries, but the levels of their vulnerability, especially related to human and environmental health. In this context, the atual structures of public administration of the hydric resources in the municipal district are shown obsolete and anachronic, and they don't have capacity to adapt and to change front appropriately to the speed and complexity that present those risk to the drought's areas where wide segments of the most vulnerable population are located.