Abastecimento público e a presença de mercados informais de água na cidade de cabaceiras.

Abstract

Water is a public resource and a right for all, and its use and access must be free and widely available. Affected by the neoliberal project based on transforming everything possible into a commodity, water was also made into a salable object, with prices, consumers and sellers, in a market with formal and informal arrangements. Informal water markets are characterized by informality, precariousness, lack of regulation, control and inspection, and have several commercial strategies for the sale of water, whether tanker trucks, abstraction of water from artesian wells, door-to-door sales. With the drought that occurred between 2012 and 2017 in the semi-arid region of Paraíba, which culminated in the decrease in the volume of the Epitácio Pessoa Dam, the Boqueirão Dam, resulting in the public water shortage in the municipalities it benefited from, it made the public authorities seek alternatives for the water supply of the population. With strict water rationing and the Boqueirão dam in a situation of near collapse, government measures were not sufficient for a satisfactory supply. In the midst of this situation of insufficiency of the State in guaranteeing access to water, being restricted to water citizenship, which quickly developed informal water markets for the water supply of depleted cities, including the city of Cabaceiras in Paraíba. The objective of the present work is to verify how the informal water markets developed in the city of Cabaceiras in the critical period of the drought and how, currently, after the arrival of the waters by the transposition of the São Francisco River, the distribution and access to water is found. by residents and if informal markets are still present, based on the assumption that the lack of access to water is due to inefficient water management, embodied in the ineffectiveness of the state assessment, overcoming the paradigm of “water scarcity”.