Drought adds to woes in hard-hit Central America

Social justice news
September 2001

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Bush stem cell decision condemned
Drought adds to woes in hard-hit Central America
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New report says "three strikes" strikes out
Report warns of slowing progress on child hunger

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Drought adds to woes in hard-hit Central America
Civil war, death squads, earthquakes, and Hurricane Mitch have all done their best to batter the lives of Central Americans in recent years. Now a summer of drought and the collapse of the the global coffee market have teamed up to add to the misery.

To contribute to relief efforts related to the Central American drought, send donations marked "Central American Drought" to:
Catholic Relief Services
P.O. Box 17090
Baltimore, MD 21203-7090
Or call 1-800-724-2530.

To learn more about the drought or make ona online donation, visit Catholic Relief Services.

Hundreds of thousands of people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua face hunger due to a severe drought that has plagued the region for nearly three months. The loss of this season's crops, magnified by the loss of income in months past because of declining coffee prices and a glut on the market caused by commodity dumping from Vietnam and Indonesia, threatens more than 150,000 families, most of whom are subsistence farmers.

The drought has left almost 1.5 million of the poorest farmers in Central America with no crops to sell or food to eat. From Nicaragua to Guatemala, the New York Times reports, many of the region's poorest people have been reduced to scavenging for mangoes and bananas after seeing the bean and corn fields they planted months ago reduced to a crunchy tan carpet of withered stalks and wrinkled leaves.

"With the loss of this year's crop, many farmers are forced to eat grains that had been set aside for use as seed to be planted for the next growing season," said Phil Gelman, Catholic Relief Services Emergency Technical Advisor for Latin America. "At the same time, many migrant agricultural workers are going hungry now because there is no work. No jobs means no income, and no income means no purchasing power."

Drought conditions have come at a particularly bad time as the region has already suuffered from a decline in international coffee prices by 25 to 40 percent since October 2000. Coffee-industry jobs and the village life that is sustained by them are quickly diminishing. Particularly hard hit is Nicaragua where thousands of coffee workers have abandoned their villages in the countryside and fled to Nicaragua's cities where they have been begging for food handouts and demonstrating for assistance.

Virtually no rain has fallen in Central America during the summer months. While the drought has affected families throughout the region, including in Guatemala, the hardest hit areas are in the lowlands of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. An estimated 20,000 families in El Salvador have reported that 100 percent of their crops have been lost, and more than 55,000 families in Honduras and Nicaragua have reported losing 30 to 100 percent of crops.

Although the long-awaited rainy season has finally begun, there is no assurance that it will be enough to sustain the year's second planting season, which began a few weeks ago. Already crippled by debt from the failed harvest, farmers have neither the cash nor the credit to buy the fertilizers and pesticides they need to coax their crops from the overworked soil. Officials estimate that more than 700,000 people have lost at least half of their crops.

There are already reports of a desperate migration northward in search of work in neighboring countries or the elusive salvation of the United States. The governments of the region have said little. While Honduras has declared an emergency, other countries have tried to minimize the severity of the problem. The mixed and delayed responses, as well as a continued dependence on emergency food aid, point to a persistent inability of the region's leaders to prepare for disasters and to provide water, financing and social services for the many peasants who live on the edge.

The United States, mostly through the Agency for International Development, is providing 4,800 tons of food, a month's supply for about 365,000 people. But the shipment will not arrive for weeks, forcing aid officials to shift reserves from current feeding programs.

Aid officials also said that in some countries, politics had taken precedence over human need. In El Salvador, they said, the government lagged in declaring a modified state of emergency, apparently out of fear that it would drive up interest rates on foreign loans. In Nicaragua, where campaigning is under way for the presidential election in November, the outgoing president, Arnoldo Alemán, suggested that the drought was God's punishment against his Sandinista political opponents.

Because a large proportion of the region affected by the drought are those populated almost exclusively by small subsistence farmers, the overall production loss figures mask the impact of the drought on more than 150,000 families. Subsistence farmers have little savings or other means of employment to support themselves during periods of natural disaster, such as drought. Many families have resorted to selling their farming tools as an immediate source of income, which will inhibit their ability to plant successfully in the next season.

In addition to providing immediate food aid, Catholic Relief Services is putting together a project that will provide capital in the form of seeds and credit to farmers affected by the drought, to prepare for the next growing season.

"The seed distribution is extremely time-sensitive," Gelman said. "If planting is too late, there will not be enough time, assuming the region receives adequate rainfall, for crops to mature."

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