Climate change to hit Central America's food crops

Megan Rowling in AlertNet: Climate change is expected to reduce maize and bean harvests across Central America, leading to economic losses of more than $120 million a year by the 2020s and threatening the incomes of around 1 million small farmers, says a new scientific study.

Researchers from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) examined how the region's two most important food crops would be affected by higher temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

"Even with our most conservative estimates, it's clear that climate change could transform the agricultural landscape across Central America," Anton Eitzinger, a CIAT climate scientist and lead author of the report, said in a statement. "Conditions are already tough there; it's one of the poorest and most vulnerable parts of Latin America."

In some parts of El Salvador and Honduras that have poor soil, where much farming takes place, maize production could drop by around 30 percent by the 2020s, and on poor soils in Guatemala and Nicaragua, it could fall by around 11 percent, the study warns.

For beans, Honduras will be the worst affected by 2020, with a production decline of 15 percent, followed by El Salvador at 8 percent, Nicaragua at 6 percent, and Guatemala at 4 percent, the study says. In all four countries, bean production is expected to fall by up to 25 percent by 2050.

But in financial terms, the estimated annual losses for maize are five times higher than for beans, topping $100 million. The combined figure for both crops - close to $123 million - equals around 30 percent of their current values....

A sorghum field in El Salvador, shot by Ll1324, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication