Chihuahua: Where the rain doesn't fall any more

Simeon Tegel in the Indepenent (UK): ...No rain means no pasture and here in Chihuahua, an estimated 350,000 cows have died in the past 12 months, costing ranchers around 2.4bn pesos (£110m). Only the vultures, it seems, are happy.

...Although famous for its desert, much of Chihuahua, the size of Belgium and Mexico's largest state, is covered by vast pine forests and extensive, scrubby savannah, which has been used to rear livestock since the conquering Spaniards first arrived in the mid-16th Century.

Traditionally, it did rain here. Not much, but enough to produce meat as well as corn, beans and even wheat for the rest of Mexico. But not any more. In the seven decades to 2010, average annual precipitation was 39cm in Chihuahua. In 2011, it rained only 26cm and so far this year, it has not rained at all. "Parts of northern Mexico are now in permanent drought. In other words, the climate has already changed," says Carlos Gay, an atmospheric physicist and head of the climate change programme at Latin America's largest university, Mexico City's UNAM.

"There is no doubt that this drought is the result of climate change. When you look at a single event, you cannot say so, but when you look at the bigger pattern it becomes very clear."

The region's arable farmers are also facing ruin. In a normal year, Chihuahua produces 100,000 metric tons of corn. In 2011, the entire state harvested only 500 tons. In the process, farmers have racked up losses of 897m pesos (£41m)....

The Zona del Silencio in northern Mexico, shot by Cryptocône, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license