El AGUACATE, Nicaragua — As Olman Fuzez turned over a bucket of millet, an old fan on full blast separated out small leaves and rocks. Nearby stood a small rusty silo that once stored maize. “It has been empty for three years,” said Fuzez. “We didn´t eat millet before, but now we have no choice.”
For two years straight, Fuzez has lost his entire corn crop due to a prolonged drought. For dinner his extended family of six will eat millet tortillas with a small portion of beans — they have enough beans to last only three more months, and not enough money to buy seeds for the next planting season.
Like the Fuzez family, hundreds of thousands of small farmers in Central America are facing a food crisis. They live in the Dry Corridor of Central America, which stretches from the low areas of the Pacific through the foothills of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and parts of Costa Rica.
As its name implies, the area tends to have a deficit of rainfall. But the last few years have been particularly dry as a result of El Niño, a weather phenomenon related to the abnormal warming of surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Late last year, NASA warned that the El Niño phenomenon would continue into 2016, threatening to become the worst year on record.
Small farmers in Central America harvest their crops at the end of two planting seasons, the first between May and August and the second from September to December. For 2015, the World Food Organization estimated that corn production from the first planting season would drop 8 percent, adding to an already dire situation given crop losses the previous year.
In Guatemala, 80 percent of the first season crops in the Dry Corridor were lost, affecting 154,000 families. El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua reported corn production dropoffs in excess of 60 percent.
The Sandinista government of Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega is sending 40,000 packages of food aid to the affected areas within his country, but civil society organizations such as Caritas, a Catholic relief organization, have said it isn’t enough. They want the government to elevate the situation to a national emergency. Caritas Nicaragua issued an international call to action to raise funds to help the poorest families.
“Sixty-five percent of small farmers are affected,” explained Agustin Alvarado, coordinator of emergencies and risk management for Caritas Nicaragua. “They produce most of our food but are not being adequately attended to.”
“The government is minimizing the situation,” he added. “What is going to happen to these people?”
Centro Humboldt, a Managua-based environmental NGO that has 92 monitoring stations in the Dry Corridor, says annual rainfall there averaged 1.3 meters before the latest El Niño phenomenon, but has dropped to 0.5 meters since 2013.
“It is no longer raining in the first months of the year,” said Abel Garcia, who heads the organization’s risk assessment office. “Between July and August, it normally rains at least 11 days, but last year it rained only three.”
To make matters worse, the rains have become more irregular; making it difficult for farmers to know when to sow their seeds.
“It rains too little or too much all at once,” Garcia said. This causes the topsoil to erode, which forces farmers to spend more on fertilizers or risk losing their crops altogether.
“This year has been terrible,” said Rosa Maria Urroz, who lives in the small rural community of Lechecuagos, just 57 miles northwest of Managua. She said it’s the worst drought she has lived through in her 38 years, and that blinding dust clouds are increasingly common
“There is so much dust, we can’t see anything,” she said, adding that her family is more susceptible to respiratory illnesses.
Since they don’t own land, the family rents about 20 acres to plant sesame, which they sell at the end of each planting season. Their livelihood depends on their ability to reinvest their earnings into other activities, like buying and selling animals.
“Before I used to kill a pig every Saturday to sell the meat, and now I don’t have money to buy animals,” Urroz said. She estimates her family lost 80 percent of the crops they planted last year.
They used to also harvest the tamarind pods that grow in their backyard, but the drought eliminated that crop as well.
This year they will diversify their crops by planting squash along with the sesame. “In the western part of the country we can no longer plant corn,” she said. “We are planting plants more resistant to the drought, such as squash, but there is so much of it that prices have dropped.”
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