Central America drought turning into humanitarian crisis

UN News Centre: A prolonged drought in Central America is turning into a humanitarian crisis for nearly two and a half million people affected by food insecurity in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned today. Briefing the press in Geneva today, OCHA’s Jens Laerke said most of those affected are subsistence farmers, farm labourers and low-income families.

In Honduras and Guatemala, up to 75 per cent of maize and bean crop has been lost and thousands of cattle had died. In the coming months, food insecurity is expected to get worse as families deplete their food stocks.

In Guatemala, the Government declared a state of public calamity in 16 departments in August and by October, 30,000 families had finished their food stocks. Those families were today in deep distress, said Mr. Laerke.

In the so-called “dry corridor” in eastern Guatemala, a joint Government/UN/NGO (non-governmental organization) assessment found that one in four households suffered from moderate or severe malnutrition. Children under five, pregnant women and female-headed households are most vulnerable, said Mr. Laerke.

In Honduras the Government had declared a state of emergency in the drought affected western areas, as crop loss had reached up to 75 per cent. Assessments also found high levels of malnutrition in children under five. An emergency assessment in September found that nearly 20,000 children were malnourished as a consequence of the long drought, said Mr. Laerke.

In El Salvador, the Ministry of Environment and Natural resources had reported that the country was experiencing its worst drought since 1977. The authorities said that in hotspot areas in the eastern part of the country, more than 80 per cent of farmers reported that they have lost all of their crops....

The Guatemalan highlands, shot by Pati Gaitan Pati Gaitan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Disaster-prone Central America shows it means business on climate legislation

Nelson Renteria at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: In El Salvador’s Chalatenango hills, hit hard by civil war in the 1980s between the army and Marxist insurgents, many trees were damaged or destroyed in the hail of bombs and bullets.

After the conflict ended in 1992, the inhabitants of Montañona, a small town 98 km north of San Salvador, began mobilising to restore the 21 hectares they owned, and to protect the surrounding forest landscape of more than 1,400 hectares.    

These days, however, the local vegetation has a new enemy: ranchers. Some are starting fires on hillsides to clear the land so they can grow grass there to feed cattle. Sometimes the fires burn out of control, affecting wooded parkland.

For that reason, Juan Calderon, a 50-year-old ex-guerilla who is now a forest ranger, walks every day into the pine woods to make sure no one is cutting down trees or lighting fires there. “This (conservation) project is effective - it is the best, because before many people were coming into the woods to fell trees, hunt or do whatever, but now it is not possible,” Calderon told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The Montañona reserve is the biggest in the northern department of Chalatenango. Not only does it help keep the air clean and healthy, but the 70 water sources in its river basin supply at least 70,000 families in nearby urban areas....

Dawn at Cerro El Pital, highest point in El Salvador. Shot by ElmerGuevara, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Climate-hit Salvadoran farmers return to indigenous agriculture

Nelson Renteria in Thomson Reuters Foundation: In this small town, deep in the hills of El Salvador, farmers have become increasingly worried over the last five years as they see their crops of corn, beans and vegetables affected by heavy storms, droughts and hot spells.

To ease the problem, they are going back to school, to learn how to use indigenous agriculture to protect their livelihoods from climate change. Pablo Perez, a 45-year-old farmer in Ishuatan, a small town 50 km (30 miles) west of San Salvador, said new kinds of fungus and pests in his crop are just one of his worries as the weather shifts.

 “We are seeing that the effects of climate change are stronger, not only with drought, but pests are proliferating too,” he said.

Maria de los Angeles, a farmer and mother of three, belongs to a women’s farming cooperative in Ishuatan that has adopted traditional approaches to farming, including the use of native seeds and organic fertiliser. These are promoted by the Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES), a non-governmental organisation that has opened schools to teach indigenous agriculture in the west of the country.

De los Angeles explained that traditional farming practices are more economical and healthy, even though the yields are not large....

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

El Salvador mining ban could establish a vital water security precedent

Meera Karunananthan in the Povertymatters blog in the Guardian (UK): Five hundred scientists meeting in Bonn last month warned that 9 billion people would face the consequences of severe water shortages within a generation or two, but did not point the finger at industries devastating fresh water supplies.

Meanwhile, a battle against a metal mining industry that has ravaged freshwater supplies in El Salvador shows just how difficult it is for a developing country to build economic alternatives for a water-secure future. Two mining companies are dragging El Salvador through a costly legal challenge at an international trade tribunal for attempting to protect limited water supplies by refusing permits for their operations.

With 90% of its surface water heavily contaminated and a quarter of its rural population lacking access to safe drinking water, El Salvador is embroiled in a clean water crisis. More than two-thirds of the population rely on the Lempa river basin for drinking water – the same number that would be threatened by water-intensive and water-contaminating metal mining projects were El Salvador to reopen its doors to the industry.

In 2008, after strong public pressure to protect water from mining, Antonio Saca, El Salvador's president at the time, declared he would not issue any new mining permits. There are no active metal-mining operations in the mineral-rich country, which a majority of Salvadorans would like to become the first in the world to prohibit metal mining permanently. A bill to ban the industry has the support of more than 62% of the population and was initially backed by the ruling FMLN party....

Central America learning value of disaster prevention

Danilo Valladares the Eurasia Review via Tierramerica: The growing frequency of weather-related disasters in Central America has led to greater organizational efforts for risk management and emergency response. But during the most recent storm in the region, the fruits of these efforts were still not visible.

The latest tragedy to strike Central America was Tropical Depression 12-E: at the time of writing, a total of 91 fatalities had been recorded, while more than a million people suffered some form of losses and damages in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Guatemala. And this does not include the damages to agriculture and infrastructure, which will take more time to assess. The storm reached the region on Oct. 12, and since then there has been an endless series of emergency situations created by flooded rivers, landslides and collapsing buildings.

The governments of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua declared a “state of calamity” to gain speedier access to funds for emergency relief work. According to Williams De León of the Volunteer Firefighters of Guatemala, the fear instilled by deadly Hurricane Mitch (1998) and greater inter-institutional coordination has led to a change of attitude toward disaster risks.

“A lot of people realized that Guatemala is very vulnerable to the climate and now they are more organized,” he told Tierramérica.

Since 2004, disaster committees have been created at the regional, departmental (provincial) and local levels, with representatives of all levels of government, the private sector and civil society groups involved in emergency relief and prevention.A 2010 standard established basic criteria for construction, and in July safety standards were established for public buildings....

A 2004 flood in Honduras, shot by ZackClark, Wikimedia Commons

Central America floods and landslides 'leave 80 dead'

BBC: The number of people killed by a week of torrential rains, triggering floods and landslides across Central America, has reached at least 80, officials say. El Salvador is the worst-affected, with 32 people killed, mostly buried in their houses by mudslides.

The number of dead in Guatemala has risen to 28, while the total rose to 13 in Honduras, and eight people have died in Nicaragua. Rain generated by a tropical depression continues to fall across the region. International highways have been washed out, villages isolated and thousands of families have lost homes and crops.

The United Nations has classified Central America as one of the parts of the world most affected by climate change. The UN estimates that more than 100,000 people have been affected by the flooding....

Central America map by Wiz9999, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Putting people over money in El Salvador

Dahr Jamail in Al-Jazeera.net: While debate about whether climate change is real or not continues in the US, the world's leading producer of CO2 emissions per capita, those already living with the effects, like Jose Domingo Cruz in El Salvador, don't have time to debate.

"Our storms are increasing in number and intensity," Cruz, a member of his community Civil Protection Committee that responds to community needs during natural disasters, told Al Jazeera while standing on a levy that ruptured during Tropical Storm Agatha last year. "All of us attribute this to climate change."

…Against the backdrop of these dire predictions, the people are, however, forming a movement that is learning to protect and sustain itself in the increasingly chaotic world of global climate change and its severe ramifications on people, the environment, and local economies.

In addition to climate change, El Salvador faces environmental issues that include deforestation, soil erosion, water pollution, and soil contaminated from decades of cotton and sugar cane production using toxic herbicides and fertilisers. El Salvador is the 2nd most deforested country in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti. Only two per cent of primary forest that existed 50 years ago remains today.

In response to increasing natural disasters related to climate change - and as an effort to promote environmental protections and sustainable living - a group known as The Mangrove Association was birthed in 1999. Members of the group are primarily subsistence farmers and fisher-folk whose livelihoods depend on the viability of local ecosystems now threatened by climate change and unsustainable farming practises like those practised by the sugar cane industry.

…In what has become a major grassroots social movement that aims to increase diversified sustainable farming, organic foods, food security, and all of this via environmentally friendly methods, many people living in this area are actually seeing their lives improve, despite the challenges. Yet, the challenges are many, and are not going away….

Fair trade coffee growers in Tacuba in the Parque Nacional El Imposible, El Salvador, shot by Adam C. Baker, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Deadly storm kills more than 140 in Central America

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: A violent weekend storm that lashed Central America killed at least 144 people, left 53 more missing and 45,000 evacuated from their homes, the Red Cross' Panama-based regional headquarters said.

"The latest reports are of 118 dead in Guatemala and 17 in Honduras, while in El Salvador the death toll as of yesterday (Sunday) stood at nine, but it may have gone higher," Red Cross Pan American Disaster Response Unit chief Paco Maldonado told AFP in Panama City.

Earlier reports put the total death toll at 118, including 92 in Guatemala, the country worst hit by the drenching storm. "Most of the fatalities were due to landslides that collapsed building and peoples' homes," said Maldonado, adding that on Tuesday his unit would start sending help to the afflicted regions. Among the dead in Guatemala were four children in a house that was swept away in a landslide, officials here said.

Tens of thousands of people were in shelters, either because their ramshackle homes had been destroyed or they were evacuated from the path of possible flooding. International aid was beginning to step up. Some aid organizers were turning to Facebook, Twitter and other Internet social networking sites to appeal for necessities to send to populations or authorities.

France said Monday it was sending humanitarian supplies, and issued a statement expressing its condolences to the affected countries. Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said six US military aircraft had been deployed from a base in Honduras….

Hurricane Ida heads toward Gulf of Mexico, floods kill 91 in El Salvador

Voice of America: A strengthened Hurricane Ida is making its way toward the Gulf of Mexico, while the death toll from floods in El Salvador has risen to 91. In its latest weather advisory Sunday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said hurricane conditions were possible in the next day or two for parts of the northern U.S. Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle.

The governor of Louisiana (Bobby Jindal) has declared a state of emergency in preparation for the storm, allowing state resources to be used in case of an emergency. Earlier in the day, the Category 2 hurricane battered the Mexican resort town of Cancun and parts of the Yucatan Peninsula, which remains under a hurricane warning.

The government of El Salvador said three days of heavy rain triggered flooding and mudslides across the country that have left at least 60 people missing and thousands more in shelters. Authorities in El Salvador blamed remnants of Hurricane Ida for some of the devastation, although forecasters hesitated to make a direct link….

Hurricane Ida's path, plotted by Cyclonebiskit using data from NASA and the National Hurricane Center

Floods, mudslides kill 91 in El Salvador as Ida rages on

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: A late-season hurricane ravaged parts of Central America Sunday as floods and landslides killed at least 91 in El Salvador and thousands were left homeless in Nicaragua. Hurricane Ida, which grew to a category two storm Sunday, was moving into the southern Gulf of Mexico but local officials said it had caused no casualties or damage to infrastructure in the popular tourist resort city of Cancun.

Forecasters at the Miami-based US National Hurricane Center said Ida had strengthened packing top wind speeds of 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour as it moved over Mexico's Caribbean coast. The tail-end of Ida coupled with a low pressure system in the Pacific caused heavy flooding in El Salvador that left 91 people dead and left some 60 others missing, civil defense officials said.

"We have to mourn the deaths of 91 people because of the rains," Interior Minister Humberto Centeno told reporters here….

Hurricane Ida hitting Nicaragua November 5, 2009, shot by NASA