Bringing Spice To A Hot Land

Don't look for Baixas in a guidebook. There are no hotels or historical landmarks here, only a dirt track leading to a cluster of mud-and-wattle huts. The model-studded beaches on Brazil's gilt northeast seaboard lie just 140 miles south, but they might as well be a world away. Baixas is the poorest zone of São José da Tapera, one of the most desperate municipalities on the continent, where the average monthly wage is $24, half the population is illiterate and the human-development index of .56 rivals that of the most wretched regions of Africa.

So when José Roberto Fonseca—an engineer, environmentalist and inveterate tinkerer—told the farmers of Baixas they could use solar energy to grow their way out of poverty, most thought he was crazy. In the sertão, or semidesert, the sun has mostly been a curse, withering crops and baking the topsoil. It's a landscape where only churches and graves seem to flourish. But where others saw privation, Fonseca saw opportunity. "Poor people in the sertão have been farming beans, manioc and corn the same way they have since Brazil was discovered, and poverty is as bad as ever," he says, waving at the monotonous expanse of balding scrub and cactus. "It's time they tried something different."

Not far from here, industrial-scale planters grow grapes, mangos and melons for export, using water pumped from the giant São Francisco River. Fancy irrigation schemes are for agrimoguls, not peasants, of course. But Fonseca was convinced that with a little seed money, some simple technology and the right crops, small farmers might also be able to turn this semidesert, where some 30 million of the poorest Brazilians languish, into a garden. The engineer, who runs Eco-Engenho, a small company specializing in renewable energy, got on the phone and in a few months had drummed up support, from the economics department of the local university to international aid groups.

Now the parched acres of Baixas are flush with red, orange and yellow hot peppers, which women painstakingly sort, chop and bottle with vinegar for sale as gourmet vinaigrette. Clean water flows from household taps and bare light bulbs blaze from dozens of windows in Baixas, defying the long night of the sertão. "Everything has changed," says Josefa Silva, a 52-year-old mother of eight, who used to weave palm fronds into brooms for 12 cents apiece until peppers came along. "We even have television."

Baixas's secret, oddly enough, is water. "The problem of the sertão is not lack of water, but the inability to manage it," says Fonseca. His answer was hydroponics—suspended gardens where plants sprout not from the ground but in water laced with nutrients. Nestling in planters fashioned from plastic Coca-Cola bottles, the pepper vines sprawl over a simple wooden trellis, crisscrossed with a web of ultra-thin irrigation tubes. At first, Fonseca's team drew well water and filtered away the salt (a vestige of the ancient sea that once covered the sertão), using a solar-powered desalinator. Now the community taps a natural spring from a nearby hillock, letting gravity whisk the water to the gardens below. A bank of photovoltaic panels there powers pumps that keep water flowing through the pepper garden, into buried cisterns and back into the holding tanks. The tidy recycling system avoids evaporation and cuts waste to a minimum.

What's remarkable about Fonseca's effort is not the gadgets but the daisy chain of inventors, entrepreneurs and problem solvers he lined up to turn good will into a good business. An agronomist and an engineer designed the hydroponic gardens, while a nutritionist taught villagers the secrets of making spices and condiments. An economist worked up a business and marketing plan, while Fonseca began building a distribution chain with start-up money from international benefactors. "Often you see development projects that address pieces of the production chain," says John Ryan, the head of the Charlottesville, Va.-based Institute for Environmental Development, which finances development projects in rural India, China and Latin America. "The difference is, he [Fonseca] has thought it through, from the soil down to the dinner table. He really gets his teeth into the project."