Drought/9-11 slowdown add to Central America's woes

Social justice news
January 2002

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Drought/9-11 slowdown add to Central America's woes
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Drought/9-11 slowdown add to Central America's woes
Central America's subsistence farmers are struggling to cope with the consequences of a serious drought—the latest in a long line of natural disasters that have exhausted their food reserves—even as a global economic slowdown triggered by the Spetember 11 terrorist attacks in the United States contributes to the region's difficulties.

UN officials fear as many as 700,000 people in Central America may be threatened with starvation, including 100,000 children, unless a rapid response is formulated in the coming weeks.

As many as 2.4 million people are facing food shortages and hunger in the region, the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) said. "We must do everything possible to ensure that 100,000 children at nutritional risk do not die of hunger," Francisco Roque Castro, the WFP's Latin America regional director said at a December news conference in the Nicaraguan capital Managua.

He said the international economic slowdown, made worse by the September 11 attacks in the United States, further weakened Central American nations' ability to feed their poorest.

``The impact of all these natural phenomena, the loss of jobs due to the international drop in coffee prices and the shrinking family remittances sent after the events of September 11, among other causes, are making Central America a zone of high food risk,'' Roque Castro said.

WFP is currently distributing food aid to the 366,000 most severely affected drought victims, but officials say they need at least another 6,600 tons to put a long-term plan into place to help disaster-prone rural communities recover more quickly when the next crisis strikes.

The drought is the latest in a long line of natural and man-made disasters to hit the volcano-lined countries of northern Central America. After Hurricane Mitch, which killed 9,000 people in Nicaragua and Honduras in 1998, two major earthquakes in El Salvador earlier this year, the latest disaster—for some farmers, the fifth drought in five years—has pushed communities already struggling to survive over the brink.

With hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers still relying on food aid to survive Central America's latest drought, the United Nation's World Food Program has called for long-term planning to help vulnerable community's better cope with the region's frequent natural disasters.

The failure of rains in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador has left corn and bean harvests in ruins and triggered food shortages among an estimated 1.5 million peasants. "An emergency response alone is just not sufficient because in Central America there's usually another disaster around the corner," says Deborah Hines, WFP senior regional programme adviser for Latin America and the Caribbean.

"Many of these people have been struggling to cope for four or five years," adds Judith Thimke, WFP officer in charge of Latin America and the Caribbean, "there's no more leeway left."

Subsistence peasants in the drought-affected areas of Central America traditionally keep back some of their produce to get them through the dry season. This year, many have already used up all their resources. To make matters worse, low prices for coffee and banana exports have left farmers unable to replenish supplies while recent flooding in Nicaragua and Honduras has further limited government resources. According to Thimke, some families are now surviving on one meal per day, with the worst-affected reduced to eating animal feed or foraging for roots.

Unfortunately, there may be worse to come:

El Salvador: some villages have totally lost their maize crops for the second time this year. Preliminary reports from a Food Needs Assessment, being conducted by WFP, non-governmental organisations and the government, suggest families in the worst-affected areas are likely to remain food insecure until the next harvest in August 2002.
Guatemala: many families did not plant for the second yearly planting season either because of a lack of seeds or for fear of losing their crops again. Those that did face a dry, cold December and January. It is expected that 3,500 families will receive WFP assistance in February in addition to the current caseload of 20,000 families.
Nicaragua: a joint USAID/WFP assessment of drought-affected families (see box) recently presented to donors warned of a real threat of food insecurity over the coming months. WFP completed its drought-related intervention last week. Over the past three months, the Agency has provided supplementary feeding to 59,500 school children while 45,415 people who lost half their maize crop, participated in WFP food-for-work activities.
Honduras: the country continues to require WFP food aid for two emergency situations: droughts and floods caused by tropical storm Michelle.

Over the past three months, WFP has drawn on a pre-existing protracted relief and recovery operation, launched in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, to provide drought victims with emergency food assistance. However, the Agency believes it is time to move beyond emergency relief with national governments investing in better infrastructure health care and education to remove a Central American dichotomy which often sees crops withering and dying within five miles of a river. "We need to overcome the current disaster and prepare for the next one," says Hines, "We want to ensure people have enough to eat today but also give them the ability to bounce back tomorrow."

For more information:
World Food Program
Drought in Central America (Catholic Relief Services)

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