MACEIO, BRAZIL (AP) – This part of Maceio, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern Alagoas state, used to buzz with the sounds of cars, commerce and children playing. It went silent as residents evacuated en masse, eager to escape the looming destruction of their homes, which were cracking and crumbling.

Beneath their floors, the subsurface was riddled with dozens of cavities: the legacy of four decades of rock salt mining in five urban neighbourhoods. That caused the soil above to settle and structures atop it to start coming apart. Since 2020, the communities have hollowed out as tens of thousands of residents accepted payouts from petrochemical company Braskem to relocate.

Few holdouts remain, several of whom told the Associated Press they imagine the ground under their feet resembling Swiss cheese. Still, Paulo Sergio Doe, 51, said he will never leave his home in the Pinheiro neighbourhood where he grew up.

“The company can’t impose what it wants overnight to do away with the lives and histories of so many families,” he said in an interview outside his home.

Braskem is one of the biggest petrochemical companies in the Americas, owned primarily by Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras and construction giant Novonor, formerly known as Odebrecht.

The company isn’t forcibly evicting anyone, though those still here said it feels that way. It reached an agreement with prosecutors and public defenders to compensate families so they could uproot and start over elsewhere. By Braskem’s count, 97.4 per cent of affected homes – more than 14,000 – are now vacant, the company said in its 2021 earnings call last Thursday.

The 55,000 evacuees left behind not just neighbours and friends, but also jobs; 4,500 mostly small- and medium-sized businesses that sustained 30,000 people were shuttered, according to a study The Federal University of Alagoas published last year. Among those businesses were local supermarkets and a ballet school that operated for 38 years, according to Adriana Capretz, part of the university’s work group to monitor the neighbourhoods.

The exodus is evident from above; departing residents salvaged everything they could sell for extra cash, including their roof tiles. Their removal allows unimpeded views inside the once-occupied spaces.

The amount Braskem offered wasn’t enough for Natalícia Gonçalves. The retired teacher, 77, also said she felt too old to start fresh. So she watched as everyone in Pinheiro left her. Now she lives inside a makeshift fortress behind boards and plants aimed at deterring would-be burglars. Braskem security guards do rounds on motorcycles, briefly interrupting the evenings’ eerie silence.

“They’ve already done everything to force me to go, but I have my rights,” she said from behind her home’s fortified exterior. “I’m afraid, especially at night when no one is around. The light is dim, there’s hardly any. I protect myself with my plants, but I’m alone, with God.”

Braskem has so far disbursed about 40 per cent of the more than BRL5 billion (about USD1 billion) it has set aside for relocation, compensation of individuals including residents and local employees and the transfer of facilities like schools and hospitals, the company said in its earnings call. It is directing BRL6 billion more for closing and monitoring the salt mines, as well as social, environmental and urbanistic measures.

Wrapping up the call, Braskem Chief Executive Officer Roberto Lopes Pontes Simões highlighted the company’s year, including “all the advance we had in Maceio” in having relocated nearly everyone from the neighbourhoods.

No house has been swallowed by the earth, nor was any person killed. , Professor in the university’s architecture and urbanism school, Capretz, said that doesn’t mean heartache was avoided. “The tragedy is happening, not just regarding the geological phenomena but, primarily, because there are cases of people who committed suicide, many who became sick with depression, lost their social lives, family ties, friends and neighbours,” Capretz said as she walked through the Bebedouro neighbourhood. “None of that is being considered by Braskem.”

The company’s press office said in a lengthy response to AP questions that it provides free psychological consultations to any residents participating in the compensation and relocation programme. It said the programme was created based on law and legal rulings in similar cases and said compensation offers are always presented to individuals alongside their lawyer or a public defender.

But negotiations can be clouded by sentiment; the price of a house isn’t the same as the value of a home.

Quitéria Maria da Silva, 64, and her grandson were waiting for the rest of their family to come play dominos on a table they set up beneath the only lamppost on their street that’s still functional. Even as da Silva said she would move were Braskem to pay her requested amount, she expressed ambivalence:

“I always lived in my house and now, if I have to leave here, where will I go?”

NEFTA, TUNISIA (AFP) – A remote oasis in Tunisia’s desert was exhausted by decades of wasteful water use for agriculture – but now pioneers around an eco-lodge are reviving the spot with innovative projects.

They hope their back-to-basics approach can keep alive the ancient Saharan caravan stop and its traditions as a sustainable alternative to the region’s high-irrigation date plantations.

“Among the palm trees, everything can grow,” said Mohamed Bougaa, 63, a farmer in the remote Nefta oasis, a seven-hour drive from the coastal capital Tunis.

“There’s everything you need here: vegetables, fruit. We can plant peppers, tomatoes, carrots – everything grows when there’s sun and water.”

The problem has been that the Nefta spring – which once delivered some 700 litres of water per second – has been exhausted to irrigate the region’s famous dates, called “deglet nour”.
“The Nefta springs dried up 20 years ago,” said Bougaa.

As underground water sources have failed and summer temperatures peaked at a scorching 55 degrees Celsius last August, the season’s crop has been disappointing.

Patrick Ali El Ouarghi, who runs an eco-tourism lodge in the oasis, said date palm plantations, at the right scale, can be run sustainably.

He called them an ideal demonstration of permaculture, a system for producing food organically by mimicking natural ecosystems.

“The palm trees protect the fruit trees, and the fruit trees protect the vegetable patches, it’s natural in an oasis,” El Ouarghi said.

The French-Tunisian set up his Dar Hi lodge 11 years ago – including the so-called “Palm Lab” where engineers, architects and artists discuss how to conserve the oasis.

The ecology project aims “to make investors and farmers want to reinvest in the oasis, because it’s decaying a bit”, he said.

A key theme is tackling the severe water shortages by experimenting with technology such as drip irrigation.

The current system of flooding orchards with water, pumped from 100 metres below ground, is wasteful, he said.

Not far from Dar Hi, others are trying different ways of creating value in the oasis.

American Kevin Klay, 35, a former resident of Sousse in northern Tunisia, said he fell in love with dates during a visit to the south.

“We realised that many dates, up to 20 to 30 per cent, were thrown out and not used because of a small visual blemish,” he said.

So he bought a few kilos, removed their seeds, dried them and then put them through a coffee grinder.

The result, he said, was a sweetener “with a fifth of the calories of white sugar” that is full of fibre and contains “more potassium than bananas”.

Armed with this knowledge, Klay in 2018 launched “Dateible”, selling his “date sugar” produced from the organic-certified desert fruits for export.

He now employs nine people, seven of them women.

“We’ve seen huge demand, particularly in the US where our main market is,” he said.

The firm is exporting dates in bulk and also starting to sell on online retail site Amazon.

Several firms are producing other date derivatives such as a coffee substitute made of date pips and a form of molasses for use in pastries.

Back at the lodge, the restaurant is reviving traditional desert cuisine.

“It’s very simple and dates from the arrival of nomads,” when Nefta, today regarded as a spiritual home of Sufism, was a key stop on Saharan desert routes, El Ouarghi said.

They brought “unknown flavours and spices that have remained here as a tradition”, he said.

Chef Najah Ameur said residents create their own unique spice mixes.

“It’s not the same as buying them at the market: cleaning the leaves, the smell, the flavour, you have to know exactly how to do it,” the 40-year-old said. She cooks a menu of dishes she learned from her mother and from French celebrity chef Frederick Grasser Herme, the recipes collated in a recently published book on oasis cuisine.

“Many ingredients come from the palm groves: parsley, celery, chard, green beans, peas,” she said.

Some recipes are also adapted to use Moringa, an Indian tree famed for its nutritional and medicinal qualities and its ability to thrive in arid conditions.

The tree species may be new to the oasis, but residents are hoping that a mix of old and new can keep both their community and their ecosystem in good health.