By Elizabeth Scambler, MCC Latin America’s Disaster Management Coordinator, based in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Central America is seeing one of the worst droughts in decades. Images in the media are filled with stunted corn crops, parched land, and starving cattle. The El Niño affect has meant that rains came late and insufficiently.
In some communities in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the first planting season of corn and beans was lost entirely. In a region where subsistence farmers depend on their harvest for both their family’s food and for income, this means that many families don’t have enough to eat until they can produce the next harvest. When famers lose one harvest, they often also lose the seed they would normally save to plant in the next growing season. We also have already seen the price of basic grains rise exponentially as the region is having to import beans from countries such as Ethiopia. Some are anticipating that Central America will require the highest levels of humanitarian assistance since Hurricane Mitch in 1998 in order to avoid a full on food crisis.
I work as MCC’s disaster management coordinator in the region. As much as MCC’s program is working at addressing the root causes of poverty and supporting long term development initiatives, I am often supporting our partners in short-term humanitarian assistance projects. Given the very short-term nature of supporting communities with food, I often have mixed feelings about it. However, I have come to see food assistance as another valuable tool in the empowerment of communities; when paired with our partners’ long term vision for greater food security, it can provide a safety net to bridge a short term need and help families avoid more drastic responses such as migration, another phenomenon affecting Central America.
For the community of Pitahaya in Guatemala, this is the third year they have experienced drought. Since last year, MCC together with our partner, COSECHA Guatemala, and a group of women from the community, we have been supporting families with corn, beans, oil, and MCC canned meat as well as seed inputs. Because of the rains not coming as usual, the seeds MCC provided earlier this year unfortunately failed to produce a harvest. As such, families are relying heavily on the food rations; without this safety net, the food consumption of these families would be even more reduced. Throughout this process, we have also seen a group of women became further empowered to lead their community through difficult times; they even scaled up a kitchen garden initiative to encourage families to supplement their diet with fresh herbs and vegetables.
In Nicaragua the effects of the drought are talked about constantly. Crops have failed, cattle are starving, and the price of beans gone up by 130%. Many Anabaptist churches in the region are located in rural farming communities and are reaching out to MCC for support. Together with the Anabaptist emergency commission (CAE), MCC will be providing seed as well as MCC canned meat to families who lost their crops. Throughout the process, the CAE will be mobilizing Anabaptist churches in four departments of Nicaragua to reach out in solidarity to their communities.
In the department of Choluteca, southern Honduras, MCC works with CODESO, a social commission of the Brethren in Christ church. Year after year, this area is hit by repeatedly inconsistent weather patterns ranging from drought to flooding; climate change has meant that these inconsistencies are becoming more and more extreme. CODESO has been working hard to promote more long term food security strategies, including an alternative planting technique called “Conservation Agriculture.” While many communities in the area lost their crops this year, families practicing Conservation Agriculture did not! Despite this encouraging ray of hope, there are still many people who did lose their crops and are without food; CODESO has requested assistance to support the most vulnerable families in the communities where they work.
Current food insecurity is not a stand alone phenomenon in Central America. El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala are seeing a migration crisis where even children are making the dangerous journey overland to the USA as they flee high levels of violence and economic insecurity. While at a surface level the current issues seem divided between rural and urban areas, I am afraid that we will begin to see the food crisis, the situation of violence and related migration, become more and more intertwined. While the issues are complex and the needs are great, I am encouraged that MCC’s partners are working at so many different angles of the issues with both immediate and long term responses.
Here are a few resources:
+ Drought Puts Spotlight on Central American Climate Change Woes
+ Central America Battles Impact of Drought and Coffee Rust – World Food Programme
+ Will Climate Change Hasten Central American Migration to the U.S.? – Fusion
+ Food Security Outlook – September 2014
+ Central America Food Security Alert