An unprecedented drought associated with El Niño is destroying crops and killing herds across Central America's Dry Corridor, a strip of land that crosses parts of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. One of the measures used to track Pacific Ocean warming indicates the current El Niño is the strongest since 1900, according to the UK Met Office, in a report by BBC News Brasil republished by Brazilian outlets Folha de S.Paulo and G1.
In the community of Las Chácaras, in the Department of Choluteca in southern Honduras, 61-year-old farmer Juan Estanislao Muñoz says he has never seen anything like it. "I am 61 years old and never, in my life, have I seen a drought like this. There will be no harvest, there will be nothing," he told the BBC. "I have a cow, but now she is not eating grass, she is eating dirt, leaves... Cattle here are dying of thirst and hunger."
The Dry Corridor is home to more than 10 million people. Over 70% of its rural population lives in poverty and more than one million children suffer stunted growth caused by malnutrition, according to the UN. Millions of families depend on subsistence farming, planting corn and beans in two cycles a year, the first from May to August and the second from August to December. The first 2026 harvest has already been lost in several communities, and the second depends on rains that have not arrived.
The hunger numbers
Lena Savelli, the UN World Food Programme's regional director for Latin America, visited Choluteca and described to the BBC a river that once supplied entire families and is now "simply a path full of dirt and stones". In Honduras alone, the number of food-insecure people could rise from 1.4 million to 1.9 million because of the drought, an increase of about 500,000 people. Across Central America, the WFP estimates 4.2 million people could fall into food insecurity because of El Niño. In Latin America and the Caribbean, at least 16 million more people could lack sufficient food and, globally, the phenomenon could push the number of people in acute food insecurity from 225 million to 274 million.
In coordination with Central American governments, the WFP has been distributing anticipatory aid since March to more than 400,000 people in the Dry Corridor, with cash payments equivalent to US$150 a month and bags of food. The goal is to keep families from going into debt, cutting meals to a minimum or selling their cattle. "Now that the drought is hitting hard, we are providing cash assistance to more than 470,000 affected people in Central America, to cover their most urgent needs," Savelli said.
El Niño is a natural oscillation that occurs every two to seven years, warms the surface of a vast stretch of the Pacific and alters wind and rainfall patterns around the planet. Combined with climate change, the phenomenon is worsening water scarcity in an already vulnerable region. In Guatemala, concern over the lack of rain led residents of Santo Domingo Xenacoj, in the Department of Sacatepéquez, to hold a procession in August to pray for rain.