Hunger Empties Venezuelan Schools
BOCA DE UCHIRE, Venezuela — Hundreds of children filed into their school courtyard to hear a local Catholic bishop lead prayers for their education.
“We pray for the youths who are on the streets and can’t come to school,” said Bishop Jorge Quintero, addressing the Augusto D’Aubeterre Lyceum school in the beach town of Boca de Uchire on a steamy morning in October. “There are a lot of them.”
By the end of the 15-minute ceremony, five children had fainted and two of them were whisked away in an ambulance.
The faintings at the primary school have become a regular occurrence because so many students come to class without eating breakfast, or dinner the night before. In other schools, children want to know if there is any food before they decide whether to go at all.
“You can’t educate skeletal and hungry people,” said Maira Marín, a teacher and union leader in Boca de Uchire.
Venezuela’s devastating six-year economic crisis is hollowing out the school system — once the pride of the oil-rich nation and, for decades, an engine that made the country one of the most upwardly mobile in the region.
Hunger is just one of the many problems. Millions of Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, depleting the ranks of students and teachers alike. Many of the educators who remain have been driven from the profession, their wages made nearly worthless by years of hyperinflation. In some places, barely 100 students show up at schools that once taught thousands.
The collapse of the education system in Venezuela is not only condemning children to poverty, but risks setting the country’s development back decades and severely stunting its growth potential, exThe
for a country that gets most of its water from the clouds.
The problem is acute across the largely poor central Indian belt that stretches from western Maharashtra State to the Bay of Bengal in the east: Over the last 70 years, extreme rainfall events have increased threefold in the region, according to a recent scientific paper, while total annual rainfall has measurably declined.
“Global warming has destroyed the concept of the monsoon,” said Raghu Murtugudde, a scientist at the University of Maryland and an author of the paper. “We have to throw away the prose and poetry written over millennia and start writing new ones!”
India’s insurance policy against droughts, the Himalayas, is at risk, too. The majestic mountains are projected to lose a third of their ice by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current pace.
But, as scientists say, it’s not all climate change. Decades of greed and mismanagement are far more culpable. The lush forests that help to hold the rains continue to be cleared. Developers pave over creeks and lakes. Government subsidies encourage the over-extraction of groundwater.
The future is ominous for India’s 1.3 billion people. By 2050, the World Bank estimates, erratic rainfall, combined with rising temperatures, stand to “depress the living standards of nearly half the country’s population.”
Cruel, Hot Summers
The Marathwada region, stretching out across western India, is known for its cruel, hot summers. Hardly any rivers cut through it, which means that Marathwada’s people rely almost entirely on the monsoon to fill the wells and seep into the black cotton soil.
Marathwada is also a lesson in how government decisions that have nothing to do with climate change can have profoundly painful consequences in the era of climate change.
In October, just weeks before the traditional harvest season, Fakir Mohammed, 60, showed off his family’s small plot of land. A neem tree stood in the middle of the fields. Lie under it, Mr. Mohammed said with pride, and you’ll never get sick.
The same could not be said of his land. The rains had been deficient for most of the last nine years. This year, the rains came late, and the thirsty ground drank everything. Then, an infestation of fall armyworm attacked Mr. Mohammed’s corn. The millet was ravaged by a fly. “We worked very hard,” he said. “But we’ll get nothing.”
Worse, the rains this year did nothing to solve the community’s drinking water shortage. Even at the end of the monsoon, Mr. Mohammed’s well was dry. A dam nearby, built to supply drinking water to his village and nearly 20 others, had turned to scrubland, fit only for a few skinny cows to graze.
Water is so precious that the women of his family said they drank half a cup if they wanted a whole one. They went without a daily shower so their children could go to school clean and fresh. When their nerves were frayed, they smacked a child who spilled a cup by accident.
Every day, four government trucks came down the muddy lane to fill the village water tank, which provides a fraction of what the village needs.
Since 1950, annual rainfall has declined by 15 percent across Marathwada. In that same period, cloudbursts, which can dump large amounts of rain in a short amount of time, have shot up threefold.
During that same period, Marathwada, along with the rest of India, has seen a boom in the production of one of the thirstiest crops on earth: sugar cane.
Down the road from Mr. Mohammed’s village, on land that gets water from an upstream dam, farmers had planted many hectares with sugar cane. Sugar mills had sprung up across the state, some owned by politicians and their friends. They were ready to pay handsomely for cane.
The government subsidizes electricity, encouraging farmers to pump groundwater for their sugarcane fields. State-owned banks offer cheap loans, which are sometimes written off, especially when politicians are looking for votes. This year, the government has approved nearly $880 million in export subsidies for sugar mills.
Sugar cane production has grown faster than any other crop since independence from British rule in 1947, making India the world’s biggest sugar producer.
The Troubled Mithi River
The image of the pot-bellied Hindu god, Ganesha, that hangs above Savita Vilas Kasurde’s narrow doorway is intended to keep obstacles away from her family’s path.
The same cannot be said for the Mithi River, which flows a few steps from Ms. Kasurde’s door. Its path has been blocked every which way as it winds through Mumbai, a city of 13 million people.
Sewage and rubbish pour into the Mithi. A vast spread of high-rises have been built on land reclaimed from the Mithi, along with haphazard working-class enclaves like this one, perched precariously on its edge. They are the ones that flood first and flood worst after a heavy rain.
Ms. Kasurde is a veteran. When the water rises, she hauls her fridge on top of the highest table, unplugs the television, wraps her children’s school books in plastic. When the water is up to her knees, she takes it all upstairs to the second-floor bedroom.
Mumbai got more rain this year than it had in 65 years and it came in exceptionally heavy downpours several times this season. The drains overflowed. The lanes filled with muck. Commuter trains were disrupted. Flights were diverted. Several times in Mrs. Kasurde’s neighborhood, schools turned into storm shelters.
After each flood, as the waters began to recede, they returned to cover their noses and sweep the sludge out of their homes. Mosquitoes can breed in the puddles of dirty water. A dengue outbreak was a threat.
This is what worried Rajeshree Chavan in the middle of the monsoon. She had managed to save her sewing machine, the source of her livelihood, twice this year when her ground floor room flooded. She had to throw away a sack of rice and her children’s clothes.
It infuriated her that politicians came through only when they were trolling for votes. Even the state’s top politician was here earlier in the year, she said. He wanted the neighborhood’s support for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, she recalled. He promised new houses for people on higher ground, in the northern suburbs of the city. He left after giving symbolic plastic keys to five families.