Three weeks ago we arrived in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to begin the third phase of Hooch Planet’s orbit this year. I came here to study homemade cachaça, an iconic sugarcane-based spirit that is a symbol of Brazilian national identity, made here mostly by small family farmers and sold in informal markets. The plan was to stay in the capital city of Porto Alegre for a month coordinating with local researchers and visiting nearby rural areas for interviews before moving to a couple of more remote regions for the remainder of my time here. I had just barely gotten started with my research when it started to rain.
While I want to tell you about the people I’ve met and the cachaça I have tasted so far, the climate disaster that is thrashing the state is really the urgent story at the moment.
It rained really, really hard here for 6 days in a row, with constant thunder and lightning night and day that drove our 8 year old daughter into our bed at night and made us feel dazed despite having finally recovered from India jet lag. It was dark all day long. Laundry hung on racks in the house never dried. It was weirdly hot and cold at the same time. Just when you thought it couldn’t rain any harder, it rained harder, and you think, where can all this water possibly go?
This event has now far surpassed the historic flooding of the capital city of Porto Alegre in 1941. As I publish this, 90 people have died, 132 are missing, and 155,700 have lost their homes. The governor has declared a state of emergency and to his credit has called this a “climate disaster”. President Lula da Silva paid a visit to pledge federal aid.
But, this isn’t the first time this year that the state has seen heavy rains and flooding. Last September, an extratropical cyclone hit the state, causing massive flooding and killing 21 people. The storm also pushed back the planting season for sugarcane by a couple of months, from September to November. By now, in May 2024, farmers should have had their short-season cane harvested already, but the fall rains set the harvest back to June. Now that fields across the state are inundated, who knows what harvest time will look like, if there is anything left to harvest.
I’ve written before about how hooch intersects with ecology; inevitably it intersects with climate change too. Everywhere I have been, people are talking about how unpredictable and extreme weather patterns are upending the natural rhythms of the landscape.
In one region of Romania, the distillers I met were despairing of a poor plum harvest this past fall, while in other areas, farmers were grateful for an unusually hot late summer that turned the fruit super-sweet. In the colder valleys closer to the Făgărăș mountains where folks traditionally make țuică from apples and pears, new plum trees are appearing as temperatures become friendlier to their propagation.
In Goa, 2024 was an historically terrible year for cashew as hotter summers and later monsoons interrupt the trees’ flowering and fruiting cycle. Farmers there are also seeing an increase in infestations of tea mosquito, a pest that attacks the cashew flower just as the stalk is beginning to flesh out, sucking it dry of its sap and leaving a grey, withered husk where a rosy fruit should have been. Like many tropical pests, the tea mosquito’s range is expanding.
The disaster in Rio Grande do Sul has coincided with the harvest season for the state’s most important cash crops: soybeans, rice, and corn. This video posted to YouTube shows massive combines tumbling through the rushing floodwaters, and a soy farmer looking over his inundated field says,
We get up early, we invest practically everything we have in this harvest, we work hard, we endure a drought, and when the moment comes to harvest, look at what is happening here in Rio Grande do Sul. More than 40% of our fields look like this [submerged in floodwaters]. I wish a hug to all of my fellow workers who fight so hard, but can’t control the climate. We pray that the forecast is wrong and we will be able to start cleaning this up and harvest at least some of what we planted. Because it is sad to see all of your sweat, all of your work, in the moment when you are JUST about to harvest your produce, to lose everything this way.
The anguish in his voice betrays the enormity of this kind of loss to a farmer. Farmers don’t get a paycheck every week. They pay all of their costs up front to put in a crop, and then cross their fingers that in 4 or 6 or 18 months’ time they’ll have a harvest, and a payday. But sometimes that doesn’t happen.
In tallying the economic value of these devastating losses, sugar cane ranks rather low on the scale here. Rio Grande do Sul isn’t actually a big sugarcane producer compared to the real powerhouses of São Paulo and Minas Gerais (both of which are also well known for producing quality artisanal cachaças). Most of the cane that’s grown here is planted by small family farmers, and products like melado (molasses) and rapadura (unrefined brown sugar) are important parts of cottage industry. But cachaça is by far the most important. The labor-to-value ratio for cachaça is roughly double what it is for melado. It takes twice as much time to make a liter of melado (hours spent constantly stirring a hot vat of boiling sugar) as it takes to make a liter of cachaça (a process that is comparatively hands-off). The farm-gate price price for cachaça, however, is double what it is for melado.
In rural communities where some significant part of a small farmer’s subsistence is produced on the farm, alcohol may be one of the most reliable ways—one of the only ways—to generate cash income. When climate change reduces the yield of plums or cashew or sugar cane—or wipes it out entirely—the rural economy, deprived of the alcohol that acts as an economic lubricant as well as a social one, may begin to grind its gears.
But agriculture is only the most obvious of many different ways that rural folks confront climate change on a daily basis. Like the farmers in the video above, they are often the first to feel the impact of a climate disaster like this one. In the days that follow they are often harder to reach with rescue and relief efforts, and they are the most quickly forgotten once recovery and rebuilding are no longer headline news.
Rural folks are also on the front lines of climate adaptation. The vast majority of the food, energy, and natural resources consumed in cities are sourced from rural areas. All of these systems will undergo large-scale transformation in the next decades, and rural folks will be responsible for carrying that out. They will be the stewards of these new food and energy landscapes. They will be blamed for being regressive and obstructionist if they challenge climate and food policies that do not take their livelihoods into account, but they will be doing the hard work—and living most immediately with the consequences—of the choices that we make as a society.
In the face of all this gravity, being able to continue producing your own booze may seem like a frivolous preoccupation. But for farmers watching their crops, animals, and machinery tumble slowly down a river and out of sight, having a store of last year’s cachaça might be a kind of safety net. Both to dull the pain of loss, but more importantly to provide a foundation for rebuilding the local economy when the flood waters finally recede.
It has now been two days since the rains stopped. The incessant thunder has been replaced by the constant sound of helicopters criss-crossing the sky, bringing people out of and supplies into the hardest-hit parts of the city.
We got lucky, by chance renting an apartment in a neighborhood that is on in a hill and unlikely to be inundated by floodwaters. The city’s water treatment plants are offline and so we are rationing water, but our neighborhood cafes and grocers are still open, for now, and we find ourselves in a (possibly temporary) state of reprieve.
I have so far been privileged in my life to never have lived through a climate disaster like this one, and I continue to be privileged by my geographic location, my financial security, and my US citizenship that insulate me from its worst effects. But this is coming for all of us, sooner or later.
That mural goes right to the point. It’s all a matter of ecology.
This is an excellent survey, much more illuminating than anything I have read in Wash Post, NYTimes, Reuters, and AP, and should be more widely read.