The rural area of municipal Irauçuba, some 146 kilometres from Fortaleza, is utterly desolate. Abandoned houses, others destroyed and hardly an animal to be seen grazing. Most of the residents have grown tired of waiting in vain. There is no longer any guarantee that the impoverished soil will be able to sustain the people who have always lived from the land. The only solution was to move away from the land and into the city. This is the reality of desertification. Irauçuba illustrates one of the most serious cases of desertification in the semiarid Northeast.

Even the most resistant are now giving in. " It’s just plain stubborn to carry on living in this drought. It’s so sad to see everything abandoned – it only makes me want to leave sooner myself", says farmer José Rodrigues Silva, a 62-year-old bachelor. He is the last resident in Capim Açu, in the rural part of the municipal area. With his bags packed, José Rodrigues only needs to find a place to stay in town. "I’m going to live with my relatives. This farm used to be a lively place. Now it’s just a waste of time " he says resignedly. It is easy to understand why the town’s population has almost doubled in the past two years.

"Even Incra refuses to settle here, alleging that it is too dry. They say there isn’t enough water for cultivation, so it’s pointless to mark boundaries between different plots of land", declared the president of the Union of Rural Workers in Irauçuba, Francisco Edvar Ávila Rodrigues. Things do not get better in the rainy season either: the rains wash land down from the mountains to the soil and create a huge sandbank.

Poverty in the countryside has led to the establishment of a new part of town, inhabited mainly by those who have fled from the rural areas. Now these residents face other kinds of difficulty. Without basic sanitation, raw sewage flows openly down the streets and many people have caught illnesses such as scabies and leprosy.

When everything is lacking, people turn to the skies and hope to get some money to buy food with. Recently the "flying dove" or Arribaça, a typical bird from the Sertão region, which still resists desertification, has become one of the main sources of income in the town. The bird is considered to be almost a miracle. Divine help for those who have nowhere left to turn to. "If it wasn’t for this bird, we would all be going hungry. The land has been useless for agriculture for a long time now", says Francisco Milton Teixeira, 39, who spends his days in the bush hunting the birds.

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