Rain is one of the main factors driving this process. Because the landscape is already vulnerable, intense bursts of rainfall and the resulting flash floods carry away nutrients from the soil, doing even more damage to the earth and worsening the erosion. “Here, the force of the water has an erosive effect on the soil, which we call hydric erosion,” says Dalton Macambira, a professor at the Federal University of Piauí. The climate, the contour of the land and the soil in Gilbués all naturally tend to degrade, but it’s the human activity in the region — especially deforestation for cattle pasture and for timber — that has accelerated the desertification process. And yet, the people here manage to produce life.t wasn’t always possible to do quality farming in Gilbués. It was through a Ministry of Environment project aimed at combating desertification that Washington and other local farmers gained access to the modern technology and tools they needed to manage the soil and develop their farming. The ministry’s Research Center for the Recuperation of Degraded Land and Combat of Desertification (Nuperade) turned its focus to Gilbués in 2006, when a pioneering partnership was created between farmers, specialists and researchers. This municipality was the only place where the program was implemented. It continued until 2016, hosting studies and tests on ways to control degradation and recuperate already degraded areas. The initiative involved projects from the PAN-Brasil, the national action program to tackle desertification and drought. “We have improved 1,000% since 2006,” Washington says. “Everything I do here, I learned at Nuperade. And I have been improving on that knowledge ever since. We began here in Gilbués producing 20 bags of corn per hectare. Today we produce 120. Today I can say we are one of the most productive cities in the state of Piauí.” No one knows just why Nuperade was shut down. That same year, 2016, then-president Dilma Rousseff was impeached and the heads of some ministries were replaced. That included Izabella Teixeira, the environment minister since 2011, who was replaced by Sarney Filho. According to Gilbués City Hall adviser José Marlos, there are some prospects for starting up activities at Nuperade headquarters again, located in the rural area of the municipality. These might include projects such as biofertilizer production, and visits by student members of the NGO S.O.S. Gilbués to learn about the experiments conducted here in the past. We visited the headquarters, which was shuttered and looked abandoned. There were animals inside the property.