Last year, Missouri faced “the most expansive drought in the United States in more than half a century,” says Reuters.
A drought that hurt soybean and corn crops, killed 25 people, and ultimately brought Governor Jay Nixon to declare a state of emergency due to the prolonged high temperatures.
However, Missouri’s drought complications are long behind us now, and instead, Costa Rica is battling a harmful dry season.
With almost half of 2013 behind us, Missouri is seeing a heavy, but much needed, amount of rainfall throughout the state.
The water helped restore Missouri’s agricultural to a productive state, but poses the threat of flooding. This makes things tough for farmers who can’t grow much food if their fields are muddied with too much water.
Our troubles would likely be seen as a blessing to Costa Ricans though.
The weather there has been unseasonably dry all year so access to water is substantially lower compared to previous drought years.
In the agriculturally based nation, water is essential to maintaining reservoirs, growing crops, and most obvious, sustaining the lives of its citizens.
Lindsay Fendt from the TicoTimes.net online newspaper writes:
“When the water went off in March, it was for a few hours at a time. Then, a few weeks later, it shut off for eight hours every day, then for 16 hours. Now, in May, San Isidro de Heredia residents are lucky if they get any water at all.
20,000 people are affected by water rationing efforts throughout Costa Rica.
Due to Heredia’s reliance on water reservoirs, the public services company there has cut the province’s water intake down from about 196 liters per second, to 20-30 liters per second—an 85 to 90 percent decrease in usage.
In other areas, residents are on the verge of protesting. The community of San Isidro receives water maybe once a day, and “sometimes, it isn’t even potable,” says Laura Astua, a local victim of the country’s severe rationing.
The lack of water resources is also affecting the environment by heightening the conditions for acid rain to accumulate. This makes the air unsafe for humans and animals to breathe and kills the country’s crops and other plants.
Missouri’s drought of 2012 would probably be preferred over Costa Rica’s current conditions. Hopefully, their weather will follow suit to ours and bring plenty of rainfall in the coming months.
Globalization and Digital Technology 