Conflitos pelo acesso à água: impactos da Transposição do rio São Francisco sobre a Vila Lafayete, Monteiro/PB.

Abstract

The project to transpose the waters of the São Francisco River was conceived with the objective of guaranteeing water security in the semiarid region. However, the work promoted a signiicant change in terms of social reorganization along the channels, afecting, directly or indirectly, traditional communities and populations in their ways of life and social relations, as well as access to water, land use and aspects related to production. This article proposes to relect on the impacts of this project and its relation with water access deprivation, by afected families, and the socio-environmental conlicts resulting from compulsory displacement and resettlement of the impacted populations. For that, the approach to socio-environmental conlicts was used, in the sense that a large part of the project’s burden fell on a speciic social group - in this case, the local populations. The study carried out (through a questionnaire and observations) with the families resettled in Lafayete Rural Productive Village , municipality of Monteiro (PB), showed that, even though they were beneited (with the village located on the margins of the construction channels), the families were deprived of access to water for almost three years after arriving at the resettlement, demonstrating the neglect of government actions with traditional populations in the context of major development projects.