By Eric Green, Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- Officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are in Central America assessing a reported food shortage caused by prolonged drought.
The United Nations is calling the crisis the worst to hit the region since Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Some 610,000 people are reported to be short of food, a figure which could reach one million, according to the U.N. World Food Program (WFP). The agency said Honduras and Nicaragua were the countries most affected, followed to a lesser extent by El Salvador and Guatemala. A WFP official interviewed from Managua said her agency was hoping donor governments and non-governmental organizations could provide at least $2 million in immediate food aid.
USDA has several officials in the region, and USAID sent a food aid expert to Managua July 30 to assess the situation and to determine whether it warrants a U.S. role, an agency official said. However, the official said U.S. embassy personnel say that reports of people "starving" in Central America are incorrect. The issue, this official said, is whether people do not have adequate food supplies or simply do not have sufficient money to buy food.
That determination is being made by the USAID food expert in Managua, the official said, who added that it remains undecided whether USAID's Office of Food for Peace will make a contribution to the WFP to remedy the current situation. That office, through funding provided by U.S. Public Law 480, makes commodity donations to cooperating sponsors such as private voluntary organizations, cooperatives, and international organizations to address the needs of food security.
The official also added that USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance will not get involved unless U.S. embassy personnel in the field declare the food situation in Central America to be an official disaster. That office has been involved in such projects as the $11 million Central American Mitigation Initiative. That initiative works to reduce the impact of natural disasters by building the national capacity in Central American countries to forecast, monitor, and mitigate disasters, such as the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch in October 1998.
Providing a country-by-country breakdown of data, the WFP said that 280,000 people are severely affected by the drought in Honduras, about 187,600 in Nicaragua, 100,000 in El Salvador, and a lesser number in Guatemala. The agency said the drought is also causing a near collapse of the region's coffee market, making daily life extremely difficult for the poorest people in the region.
In Nicaragua, the WFP said many farmers have lost almost 100 percent of maize, their staple food, and face food shortages until December unless they are helped. Thousands of farmers and their families in the very poor northern part of the country are suffering from the loss of employment opportunities at coffee plantations because of the reduction in international coffee prices and the debt problem of Nicaraguan coffee producers.
In Honduras, the WFP said the government declared on July 23 a national food emergency in the southern, central, and western parts of the country. Thousands of small farmers have lost their crops as a result of a lack of rainfall in these areas, which is seriously affecting the ability of many people to cover their most basic food needs.
In El Salvador, drought is severely affecting four departments in the eastern and part of the northwestern area of the country, WFP said. Reports show crop losses of up to 100 percent in the east, with losses ranging between 40 and 50 percent in the northwest. The government was considering declaring a state of emergency in those areas, WFP said.
Reports from Guatemala say that precipitation over the entire country is 60 percent lower than normal, and that farmers have lost over $19 million due to the drought. Lack of rain is affecting basic grain crops, placing small and medium-sized farms at serious risk, WFP said.
WFP said its emergency food aid assessment teams are working in the four countries to ascertain the extent of the drought's impact on rural families. Meanwhile, WFP is making use of in-country food reserves to address what appear to be the most urgent food needs in the hardest-hit areas.
(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)