By Paul Jeffrey

Choluteca, Honduras - When it finally started raining in southern Honduras in late August, Alejandro Fuentes walked through the stubble of his failed corn crop, poking the ground with a sharpened stick and dropping in his last seeds of corn and beans. His eight-year old son followed behind, listless, his hair discolored by malnutrition, like many children here showing signs of a long drought. Fuentes said he prayed with each seed he dropped, asking God to let the rains continue. Asked what would happen if the rains stopped again, he just looked at the ground. He had no answer.

Across a wide swath of misery that stretches from Guatemala to Nicaragua, more than 1.5 million people are suffering the effects of too little rain. The rainy season, which usually begins in May, turned traitorous this year, leaving some areas with not a drop of rain for more than seven weeks. Peasant farmers, who depend on the rain to nourish their small fields of corn and beans, had barely survived a mild drought last year. This summer they watched in despair as their crops withered and their children went hungry.

When it finally started raining in late August, it was too late for many. Fields quickly turned green but the cupboards of the poor remained bare. Fuentes and his neighbors in the village of El Triunfo took the few seeds they could get and sowed them, hoping as only the poor can that the rains would continue until they can harvest anew in late November.

According to Lidia Avilez, a Catholic immigration worker here, the coping mechanisms employed by the poor to withstand the drought have reached their limit. “They’ve slowly sold off their small animals and anything else of value in order to buy food,” she says. “If they don’t get a decent harvest with this next corn crop, many are going to migrate north to the United States. People don’t want to die of hunger.”

The tragedy that has brought tens of thousands of Central America’s poor to the point where they’ll have to choose between death or immigration is a disaster that could have been foreseen. It’s not simply the lack of rain that has caused the suffering. A variety of factors have swirled together to manufacture the despair that Fuentes and his neighbors are experiencing today.

Among them was a decision by far-off European bankers, who a decade ago decided to help Vietnam compete in the global market by growing coffee. As a result, Vietnam is today the world’s second largest producer of coffee and the resulting glut has pushed prices so low that coffee producers here can’t earn enough to stay solvent. The price of a hundred pound bag of coffee, which sold for $140 two years ago, today barely brings $50. Yet it costs a grower more than $80 to produce those hundred pounds of beans, so many coffee growers–especially smaller, less efficient farms–have shut down operations rather than lose money. Governments, like those of Nicaragua and Honduras where coffee is the biggest earner of hard currency, have tried tempting growers with subsidies, but the programs have had little impact.

That means Fuentes and his family, who for years have spent two or three winter months harvesting coffee in the cool highlands, have no way to earn cash. They only earned $3 a day picking coffee in the good times, but that income got them through bad crop years. This year, they’re caught in a double whammy. There’s no food to harvest. And there’s no money to buy food in the stores. The result is a literal famine.

The lack of agrarian policies that would favor small farmers has also contributed to the drought. Under pressure from international lenders to pay off huge foreign debts, regional leaders have pampered agro-exporters, leaving small farmers without good land, credit, or technical assistance. Pushed off valuable farmland so that corporate growers could produce pineapples and bananas for foreign consumers, peasant farmers slowly moved up the hillsides, chopping down trees to plant their small harvests in the thin soil. This deforestation makes flooding worse, as when Hurricane Mitch rammed through Honduras in 1998, because the water runs quickly off the denuded slopes. It also makes droughts worse, because the trees helped maintain water in the creeks and rivers even during dry spells.

Water is becoming harder to come by, and throughout the region violent conflicts are breaking out over who controls the diminishing resource. “Peasant groups that have struggled for decades for land are coming to see that land without water is land without life. So they’re today demanding both land and water. The two must be linked,” says Norma Elisa Mejia, program director of the Christian Commission for Development in Honduras. Yet when poor peasants start demanding water as well, it often exacerbates conflicts with wealthy landowners who happen to also control most water sources.

This is an election year in Honduras, which is fortunate in some ways for the poor because politicians are making high profile trips to deliver food to rural communities. Were they not vying for votes, they probably wouldn’t bother. Because the drought has little impact on elites in the cities, they wouldn’t even have noticed were it not for conscientious journalists who put people starving to death on the front pages of local papers.

In neighboring Nicaragua, where there’s also an election campaign underway, President Arnoldo Aleman denied for a long time that the drought was a problem, then finally claimed that hunger only existed in municipalities run by his party’s main opponents, the Sandinistas.

The failure to seriously address the systemic problems that have created the drought have effectively condemned the rural poor to living in an environment where “hunger has become chronic, a permanent condition that just gets worse in certain periods,” according to German Calix, coordinator of Caritas--the Catholic church’s social ministry in Honduras.

The drought also raises urgent questions about the effectiveness of development programs carried out by non-governmental organizations. “There are days when it feels like we’re just rowing upstream,” admits Douglas Ryan, the director of Catholic Relief Service’s programs here.

Catholic officials in hard-hit southern Honduras are refusing to hand out food, even though the government asked them to help. They insist it’s the government’s job. “We’re not the hired help of the politicians. They just wanted us involved so they could close their eyes to the real situation,” says Raul Corriveau, the bishop of Choluteca.

Instead, the church has supported community organizing efforts, in many cases revitalizing local emergency committees it set up after Hurricane Mitch. These groups assure that government officials get accurate information, and then get pressured to respond.

“One of the challenges for us is how to respond to the crisis without getting caught up in paternalism,” says Alejandro Mendoza, the Caritas director in Choluteca. “We’re placing all our bets on the process of local organizing. In the long run, that’s going to make the most difference.”

Appeals for assistance by the United Nation’s World Food Program (WFP) have been largely ignored by the international community. Pedro Jimenez, an economist who monitors food security in Honduras for the WFP, contrasts this to the outpouring of aid following Hurricane Mitch.

“Mitch was photogenic, and the destruction of bridges and buildings captured people’s attention,” says Jimenez. “But the drought is a silent disaster, affecting people hidden away in the countryside. Even though the poor are more affected by the drought than by the hurricane, the donors are not responding, and thus are condemning the poor to a slow death.”

Jimenez recalls the billions of dollars that poured into Central America following Mitch, most of which was used to repair roads and other elements of the economic infrastructure. “Where is the money today to repair the systemic problems that cause the drought? If there’s another hurricane next month, the international community will respond strongly. Yet a poor family left starving by the drought could wait ten years and not receive anything.”

-end-