IN THE school playground in Los Tomes a lone child, José Ossandón, plays with his emboque, a ball-and-cup game. The eight-year-old is the school’s only pupil. His teacher, Nilda Jimena Gallardo, herself a former pupil, says that enrolment has dropped from 65 when she started teaching 43 years ago. Drought has driven families away, she says. “Only the old remain.”
Los Tomes is an agricultural co-operative, one of 178 in Chile’s Coquimbo region. Nineteen comuneros try to grow wheat and raise sheep and goats on 2,800 hectares of semi-arid land. A decade-long drought has made that harder. Farmers’ children moved away to take jobs in cities or at copper mines.
Hope for Los Tomes comes in the form of three 60-square-metre nets - atrapanieblas - that capture droplets from the fog that comes from the sea 4km away.The banner-like nets can harvest 650 litres of water a day.
“We’re content: it has produced the results we wanted,” says José Ossandón, the child’s father and the president of the co-operative.
Chile has been investigating fog capture since the 1950s. Earlier attempts to turn the mist into usable water failed.
The project at Los Tomes is part of an attempt to revive fog capture. A government development fund will put up cash.
At Majada Blanca, a goat-herding community north of Los Tomes, three 150-square-metre fog catchers feed a plantation of young olive trees. When the trees mature they will produce 750 litres of organic olive oil a year, which the comuneros will be able to sell for about $12,000.
“We’ll be pioneers in the production of quality olive oil made with fog water,” says one of them, Ricardo Álvarez. A privately owned brewery in Peña Blanca was quick to spot fog water’s marketing appeal. It is the main ingredient of its artisanal beer, called Atrapaniebla.
It makes a profit, but most fog-harvesting projects require subsidies in their early stages. The development fund paid 5.6m pesos apiece to put up the structures at Majada Blanca. When the nets wear out, the villagers will have to replace them at a cost of 100,000 pesos each. Coquimbo has more than 40,000 hectares of land with the right conditions for putting up fog-catchers. If fully exploited, the region could harvest 1,400 litres a second, enough to supply all its drinking water.
That might lure back educated young people from the cities.
From The Economist (edited)
