Climate Change Driven Crop Failure in Central America
Crop Failure & Food Insecurity in the Dry Corridor: Causes & Consequences [Bond McGillivray & David Salisbury, University of Richmond]
The Central American Dry Corridor is a tropical dry forest region extending from southern Mexico down to Panama. The official boundaries of this region are defined by the 'orange' coloration in the map above, including parts of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. However, this region is loosely demarcated, and its local climate change effects are still felt by much of Central America. (Photo: Lauren di Matteo)
The Bottom Line:
Climate change is rapidly accelerating food insecurity in the Dry Corridor of Central America and most of its local municipalities are unable to effectively combat its impacts.
Figure 1: Vulnerability index heatmap of the Central American Dry Corridor taken from Bouroncle et al. (2017). Higher VI regions (in light-gray) are the most vulnerable to climate change, while lower VI regions (in dark-gray) are the least vulnerable to climate change. Red numerical labels note case areas of interest.
The figure shows us that climate change vulnerability is a widespread problem throughout all of the Dry Corridor.
Some areas are doing better than others.
- Coastal regions marked by the red "1" are large urban population centers which are able to better sustain themselves through industrial agriculture and trade.
- Central regions marked by the red "2" are much more rural and disconnected, and are at the mercy of unpredictable and extreme weather.
- Central regions marked by the red "3" and higher-elevation regions marked by the red "4"" are somewhere in between -- they still must rely on their own agricultural production, but they are not as vulnerable to unfavorable weather.
Highly vulnerable regions typically experience low economic development, low industrial diversification, and disconnected communities (Jat et al., 2016). These regions are in imminent danger of famine and social deterioration.
So what causes this vulnerability?
Unpredictable and extreme weather patterns are the most influential factor of crop failure.
The Dry Corridor, as is the case for most of Central America, is a tropical dry forest that is warm and rainy year-round, but also experiences long dry seasons.
Farmers relying on this consistent pattern and seasonality are witnessing increasingly unusual activity each year.
But why?
Photo to the left: Satellite imagery of the Dry Corridor (Photo taken using Google Earth)
Meet the ENSO Model -- the primary subject of climate change in the Dry Corridor:
Average annual temperature and rainfall and the starting date of rainy and dry seasons are primarily driven by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a cyclical climate pattern that fluctuates between periods of warming (El Niño) and cooling (La Niña) in the eastern Pacific Ocean (US Department of Commerce & NOAA, 2016).
- This means that the Dry Corridor's weather naturally switches from warm and rainy, and cool and dry, in regular cycles.
- According to the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an international food-security research agency with a strategic focus on the future of the Dry Corridor, the effects of global warming have been increasing the frequency and magnitude of these ENSO cycle inversions (Marengo et al., 2014) (Looney, 2019).
- Thus, periods of drought will be more severe, periods of heavy rainfall will be more intense, and these periods will start or end too late or too early into an agricultural season.
Photo to the left: ENSO model courtesy of NOAA (2016)
Excessive rainfall and extreme drought are both disastrous to crops.
A flooded field in northern Guatemala (Photo: American Geosciences Institute)
- In 2018, a delayed start to the rainy season (dry spell) ruined up to 70 percent of subsistence farmers’ first harvest, while the intense rainfall that followed (flooding) ruined up to 50 percent of the second harvest (FAO, 2019).
- The FAO predicts that increasing temperatures combined with more unpredictable rainfall is expected to reduce maize, bean, wheat, and rice yields in the Dry Corridor by up to 10% by 2030 (FAO, 2019).
Photo to the left: Dried out maize field in Honduras (Photo credit: Neil Palmer / Flickr.com)
The frequency and intensity of violent storms may also be increasing with climate change (Looney, 2019).
These storms are capable of damaging fields at the very least and utterly destroying arable land at the very worst.
An impending coastal storm in El Salvador (Photo: Michael Hiemstra)
A field destroyed by flooding from a recent storm in southern Mexico (Photo: Marilyn Chung/The Desert Sun)
Photo to the left: Severe storm in South America (Photo: Nature, 2018)
Another factor of climate change driven crop failure is land degradation.
Farmland that has become desertified in Southern Mexico (Photo: Nature, 2018)
Climate change places immense stress on soil via storm-based damage, flooding, erosion, and moisture evaporation (Olsson & Barbosa et al., 2019).
This yearly-repeated stress in farmlands of high usage, such as those in the Dry Corridor, results in a depletion of carbon organic soil and terrestrial biodiversity, leading to desertification (Olsson & Barbosa et al., 2019).
A third factor of climate change driven crop failure is the increased spread of invasive pests.
Coffee crop infected with coffee rust disease (Photo: Peter Cho / Shutterstock.com)
Rising temperatures also increase the spread of crop-based diseases which thrive and proliferate better in warmer environments, such as coffee leaf rust disease (Cilas, Goebel, & Avelino, 2016; Rosenzweig et al., 2001; Avelino et al., 2015).
For example, unusually high levels of coffee leaf rust infection between 2012-2013 led to a 16% decrease in Dry Corridor coffee production (Avelino et al., 2015; Hannah et al., 2017).
Economic Impacts
The economic impacts of crop failure are extensive and ongoing.
Shrinking crop yields and familial income is the painful daily reality for the people of the Dry Corridor.
But in order to best understand how these effects are felt, we must compare agricultural operations on different scales.
Photo to the right: Honduran farmer (Photo: Neil Palmer / Flickr.com)
Smallholders run the majority of land.
The most fundamental and prevalent ‘unit’ of agricultural production in the Dry Corridor is the smallholder, a person or family who owns or manages an agricultural holding smaller than a farm.
A smallholder estate in Nicaragua (Photo: Neil Palmer)
Smallholder family enjoying some coffee (Photo: Neil Palmer)
Almost all smallholders are subsistence farmers who farm rainfed food crops to have a means to provide for themselves and survive.
Moreover, they are typically joint producer-consumers, meaning that if they cannot produce sufficient food in a season due to extreme weather, they must engage in trade within local farming networks or supplement their production from external market sources (Marín-González et al., 2018).
Beans ready to be traded at the market (Photo: Neil Palmer)
Nicaraguan farmer drying his arabica crop (Photo: Neil Palmer)
However, without a surplus of crops in the market, smallholders will have great difficulty searching for more food through trading (Marín-González et al., 2018).
This deficit results in widespread food insecurity and poverty.
An estimated 3.5 million people living in the Dry Corridor need humanitarian assistance, 1.6 million of which are food insecure (FAO, 2016).
It is clear that smallholders bear unsustainable economic hardship due to crop failure from climate change.
Moving up in scale...
If we look beyond the subsistence economy, at the agricultural industry as a whole, the situation does not look much better.
Loss of production figures from The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food put this into perspective:
- In just one harvesting season in 2016 in Guatemala, 200,200 metric tons of maize and black beans were lost (representing an economic loss of $133.1 million) (FAO, 2016).
- In Honduras, crop losses exceeded 60% of all maize production and 80% of all bean production for smallholders (FAO, 2016).
- For El Salvador in 2015, crop failure resulted in economic losses (including capital investment losses) nearing $100 million (FAO, 2016).
Workers operating watering pipelines (Photo: César Rodríguez)
Perhaps the most-telling data is that agricultural contributions to GDP in the Dry Corridor in 2016 range from 2.7% to 13.5% across countries, which is an already diminished percent compared to the previous decade (Donatti et al., 2019) (Marín-González et al., 2018) (PRESANCA & FAO, 2011).
A reason for this relatively small figure given the massive agricultural industry is the reliance of smallholders on the subsistence economy, which is invisible to GDP calculations.
- As more and more families experience crop production deficits and are unable to trade, economic growth will continue to decline in these countries.
- Slower economic growth means that agricultural jobs will also continue to decline, leading to loss of livelihood and further downsizing of smallholder communities.
The result is a vicious cycle that has serious consequences on the social cohesiveness of Dry Corridor nations.
Photo to the right: Honduran farmer drying coffee crop on a rooftop (Photo: César Rodríguez)
Social impacts
Migrant Yoselin Dias, 9, from Honduras, awaits in Matehuala, Mexico with her mother for the next step on their journey toward the United States (Wernick, 2019; Photo: Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)
PODCAST (10 Minutes): John Sutter, an investigative reporter for CNN, discusses year-after-year crop failure as the primary driving factor of Central American migration (Wernick, 2019).
Economic geography and connectivity directly influence the social cohesiveness, happiness, and health of Central American nations.
Typical rural farming communities are not well connected, especially not with urban areas, resulting in large swaths of marginal landscapes throughout the Dry Corridor.
In Honduras & Guatemala, the rural population reaches 50% (FAO, 2017). Nearly 60% of the people in the Dry Corridor live in poverty (CABEI, 2019). As a result, rural communities have limited capacity to adapt to the impacts of climate change, imposing a number of social challenges (CABEI, 2019).
When food reserves become depleted, families tend to adopt emergency coping strategies.
According to FAO, WFP, and local governments, up to 82 percent of impoverished families in the Dry Corridor have reported selling their farming tools and animals to purchase food and resort to skipping meals or consuming lower quality food to save money (FAO, 2019).
Due to the these survival strategies, approximately 10% of the population suffers from malnutrition and decreased dietary diversity, especially in children under 5 (FAO, 2017)(FAO, 2019).
Fig. 2: Regions of acute food insecurity in the Dry Corridor and Haiti (FEWS NET, 2015)
Fig. 2 shows some of these critical population regions (FEWS NET, 2015).
Lastly, many families report not receiving adequate support from social assistance programs, with many more migrating to cities to seek new work opportunities or leaving the country altogether (Marín-González et al., 2018).
This graphic demonstrates how commonly no food is stated as the reason for migration out of the Dry Corridor (Wernick, 2019)
The effects of crop failure are not just limited to the Dry Corridor...
Northeast Brazil and parts of the Andean region are other areas experiencing decreasing annual rainfall and increasing annual temperatures (Schubert, 2014). The Brazilian state Mato Grosso, responsible for supplying roughly 10% of the world’s soybeans, could see a 9-13% drop in soy and corn production with an increase of only 1 degree Celsius (Follador, 2016).
Figure 3: Impact of different climate change scenarios on suitable areas for crops, compared between Brazilian macroregions. The overall trend is that crop suitability for nearly every type of crop is decreasing annually (Follador, 2016).
More generally, one model predicts annual Brazilian food production losses ranging between 3.6% and 5% in 2050, while another predicts production losses of up to 13% by 2026 (Follador, 2016).
Figure 4: Cow skull as a result of recent severe drought in Valparaíso, Chile (Fleitas, 2019) (AFP Photo/MARTIN BERNETTI).
In Chile, a severe drought forced President Sebastian Pinera to declare the central Valparaíso region a disaster zone back in mid-September (Fleitas, 2019).
This problem spans throughout the Americas.
Solutions, Adaptive Capacity
In order to minimize the effects of climate change induced food insecurity, nations must mitigate vulnerability by leveraging their adaptive capacity.
Adaptive capacity is a measure of how effectively a region of land can respond to and offset climate change consequences. This is determined by many indicators such as natural resources, water access, geographic diversity, regional specificity, infrastructural development, trade partnerships, and poverty level.
Fig. 5 illustrates this below.
Figure 5: Adaptive capacity levels and indicator strengths between municipalities of a) Guatemala, b) El Salvador, c) Honduras, and d) Nicaragua. Areas of highest adaptive capacity are marked in blue, lowest adaptive capacity in red, and medium adaptive capacity in yellow. Indicator types represent variables of vulnerability where different theoretical vulnerability models (I-V) produced different effect sizes (-0.5-2) according to cluster analysis. Indicator types are shown using a gray-scale continuum and are labeled under the indicators legend (Bouroncle et al., 2017).
When it comes to rampant drought in the Dry Corridor, the most effective adaptation strategies must address water usage.
Figure 6: The map on the left indicates population distribution along the Dry Corridor. Denser regions are darker green. The map on the right indicates the regions where diminished water access would be felt the greatest, marked by darker red. This figure demonstrates that the low-density rural communities are most vulnerable to changes in water access (CABEI, 2019).
The FAO & WFP strongly encourages subsistence farmers to consider alternative cropping strategies: replacing water-dependent crops with sorghum, or in even drier zones, sowing short-cycle crops with the first rain cycle (FAO, 2019).
Another solution, climate-smart-agriculture (CSA), is a popular model for addressing water usage and crop efficiency.
CSA practices and technologies alleviate food insecurity by engaging a set of strategies that optimize a region’s agricultural resources and production.
Examples of CSA practices are microirrigation, crop-flexible planting, and agroforestry with hedgerows (Jat et al., 2016).
Fig. 7 below represents a powerful CSA model taken from Sain et al. (2017).
Figure 7: An example CSA model using eight empirically-supported practices. Some practices such as "conservation tillage with mulch" help to conserve water while others such as "crop rotation (bean/maize)" help keep soil healthy and nutrient-rich (Sain et al., 2017).
While CSA practices are robust and beneficial, around half generally require between 1–2 years for profit potentials to appear, with the slower half requiring between 4–9 years (Sain et al., 2017).
More research is needed to more successfully integrate social, economic, and environmental advantages into solution models.
References
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Bouroncle, C., Imbach, P., Rodríguez-Sánchez, B., Medellín, C., Martinez-Valle, A., & Läderach, P. (2017). Mapping climate change adaptive capacity and vulnerability of smallholder agricultural livelihoods in Central America: ranking and descriptive approaches to support adaptation strategies. Climatic Change, 141(1), 123–137. doi: 10.1007/s10584-016-1792-0
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Photo Credits
(Michael Hiemstra)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciat/7034002393/in/photostream/
(Neil Palmer)
(César Rodríguez)
https://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-photo-robusta-coffee-trees-have-rust-disease-in-the-garden-coffee-plantation-770932852.jpg
(Peter Cho)
Figure References
Figure 1: Bouroncle, C., Imbach, P., Rodríguez-Sánchez, B., Medellín, C., Martinez-Valle, A., & Läderach, P. (2017). Mapping climate change adaptive capacity and vulnerability of smallholder agricultural livelihoods in Central America: ranking and descriptive approaches to support adaptation strategies. Climatic Change, 141(1), 123–137. doi: 10.1007/s10584-016-1792-0
Figure 2: FEWS NET. (2015, October 16). Drought threatens 3.5 million people in absence of assistance. Retrieved from http://fews.net/central-america-and-caribbean/alert/october-16-2015.
Figure 3: Follador, Marco. (2016). Potential impacts of climate change on Brazilian agriculture and economy. 10.13140/RG.2.2.17781.99040.
Figure 4: Fleitas, G. (2019, October 4). Chile's drought killing thousands of farm animals. Retrieved from https://news.yahoo.com/chiles-drought-killing-thousands-farm-animals-012909405.html .
Figure 5: Bouroncle, C., Imbach, P., Rodríguez-Sánchez, B., Medellín, C., Martinez-Valle, A., & Läderach, P. (2017). Mapping climate change adaptive capacity and vulnerability of smallholder agricultural livelihoods in Central America: ranking and descriptive approaches to support adaptation strategies. Climatic Change, 141(1), 123–137. doi: 10.1007/s10584-016-1792-0
Figure 6: Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI). (2019, March 15). PDF.
Figure 7: Sain, G., Loboguerrero, A. M., Corner-Dolloff, C., Lizarazo, M., Nowak, A., Martínez-Barón, D., & Andrieu, N. (2017). Costs and benefits of climate-smart agriculture: The case of the Dry Corridor in Guatemala. Agricultural Systems, 151, 163–173. doi: 10.1016/j.agsy.2016.05.004
