As Climate Changes, Central America Lags on Improving Food Security
Women in a field, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, Sept. 12, 2006 (photo by Flickr user erik2481 licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license).While poverty and violence have pushed thousands of Central Americans to take the long and dangerous trek to the United States, the embattled region now faces another challenge: Droughts and torrential rains have all but ruined the harvests of hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. And even though climate extremes were exacerbated in recent years by temporary weather phenomena, ill-prepared governments and climate change have put food security in the region permanently at risk.
This summer, the most severe drought in over four decades hit the so-called Dry Corridor, a subtropical highland area stretching from Guatemala to the western fringes of Costa Rica. Not a drop of rain has fallen there between July and September. In Guatemala alone, some 300,000 farming families have lost 70-100 percent of their crops. In El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, the production of corn, a staple product, has fallen by over 10 percent. All in all, an estimated 3 million Central Americans are struggling to feed themselves. Without aid, many of them will run out of food by the end of the year.
"This is a national disaster," says Waldemar Monroy, a regional coordinator of Guatemala's Ministry of Agriculture in the eastern province of Chiquimula. "Farmers have always lost their crops during the dry season, but never in my lifetime have I seen it happen on such a scale."
The Dry Corridor is no stranger to extreme weather conditions. It owes its name to cyclical dry periods known as "caniculas" that historically last between January and April. In recent years, however, the impact of climate change has stretched them well into June. This was even further worsened by the most recent El Nino, a climatological phenomenon that occurs every few years when a large band of warm water gathers in the Pacific Ocean, causing extreme changes to weather patterns in North and South America.
The drought finally ended last month, but things didn't improve: Torrential rains took its place, worsening the already dire farming conditions in the region and further jeopardizing the livelihood of local farmers. The Dry Corridor is mostly inhabited by impoverished dirt farmers, often of indigenous descent, who work their small plots of land the same way their ancestors did centuries ago. Normally, they harvest twice a year—corn in summer, beans several months later.
After this year's drought destroyed the corn harvest, the ensuing rains did their damage, washing away the dry soil amid an already existing shortage of seeds caused by less severe droughts in previous years. Farmers do not have the resources to absorb such damage, whether with modern technologies or by buying more seeds and fertilizer. Moreover, their livestock suffers from the shortage of food as well, decreasing milk and meat production and causing food prices to skyrocket.
To make matters even worse, the drought has reactivated the roya, a fungus that wreaked havoc on coffee plantations in the Pacific coastal regions of El Salvador and Guatemala over the past two years. Coffee production traditionally provides income for day laborers when they are not working their fields, but jobs on the coffee plantations are now scarce. From corn to coffee, the drought and rains have created a dangerous vicious cycle.
Despite having faced droughts repeatedly in recent years, governments in Central America appear ill-equipped to deal with the situation. Only Guatemala declared a national emergency on Aug. 25. But Elmer Lopez, the country's minister of agriculture, said his government had stocked up on emergency aid for just 70,000 families, less than a third of those in actual need. Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, meanwhile, lack trained personnel and guidelines to combat looming hunger, while international aid organizations struggle to assess the damage.
"The governments of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua have provided only minimal assistance," says Tialda Veldman, regional coordinator for Cordaid, an NGO active from Guatemala to Nicaragua. "They have not declared a national emergency and there is insufficient official information available about how many crops were lost and how many families were affected. This makes it harder to set up relief operations."
The authorities in Central America are fighting the problem mostly by providing hungry farmers with emergency food aid, but critics say such measures only alleviate symptoms and do little to improve food security in the region. Even as farmers are prevented from going hungry, they remain unable to make the necessary improvements to allow their lands to face future droughts and rains. But experts warn that this year's extreme weather appears to only be the harbinger of permanently worsening weather conditions as a result of climate change, and governments in Central America appear to be both unable and insufficiently prepared to deal with them.
"On a global scale, Central America's isthmus is especially vulnerable to climate change due to its unique geography," says Gustavo Garcia, who heads the Guatemalan division of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. "Combine that with the lack of modern farming methods and subsequent exhaustion of fertile soil, and you have a problem I expect to only become worse in years to come."
Governments are attempting to find solutions. In Guatemala and Honduras, officials say they are now helping farmers to make their plots more resistant to droughts by building irrigation systems, and to torrential rains by teaching them how to construct terraces. But according to aid organizations, those efforts suffer from a lack of necessary funds. The clock is ticking: According to the Famine Early Warnings Systems Network (FEWS), a think tank analyzing global food security, the next famine may start as soon February 2015. Without significant improvements to development efforts in Central America, from better land management to aid distribution, the region could find itself adding famine to the list of its ills. And that could ultimately only drive more people to seek a better life up north.
Jan-Albert Hootsen is a foreign correspondent based in Mexico City. He reports on Latin American issues for Vocativ and a number of Dutch publications, and his work has also appeared in the Globe & Mail, World Politics Review and GlobalPost.
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