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Water War: Is Big Agriculture Killing Brazil’s Traditional Farms? - Yale E360

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As streams and springs dry up, subsistence farmers in Brazil’s western Bahia are struggling to survive. They blame big agriculture for stealing their water for irrigation. But as climate change accelerates and drought increases, scientists disagree on who or what is to blame.

Local farmer Liobino dos Santos on a dry canal near the Bota Bunda spring in Brejo Verde, a rural village in western Bahia. Dado Galdieri / Hilaea Media Algacir Schadeck snaps a fat ear of corn off a dry corn stalk in western Bahia, one of Brazil’s leading grain-producing regions. Unfazed by a withering 103-degree F heat, he’s standing at the edge of a field more than half a mile across that bears 1,000 tons of corn. As the manager of Fazenda Rio Claro farm and the descendent of a long line of farmers, he knows what a good ear looks like. Unpeeling a husk dry as scorched paper, he pronounces t

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