Cane cutter Evaristo Pérez, 22, on the La Isla plantation in the municipality of San Juan Opico in El Salvador. He used to be a child worker in the sugar cane fields in El Salvador, where child labour has been practically eradicated thanks to a policy of “zero tolerance” in the sugar industry. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala and Claudia Ávalos
SAN JUAN OPICO, El Salvador , Apr 6 2015 (IPS)

The participation of children and teenagers in the sugar cane harvest, a dangerous agricultural activity, will soon be a thing of the past in El Salvador, where the practice drew international attention 10 years ago.

“Before, when I was a kid, my brothers would take me along to help them cut sugar cane, it wasn’t a problem. But now things have changed,” Evaristo Pérez, a day labourer, told IPS during a break from his work in the sugar cane field under a blistering sun on the La Isla plantation in San Juan Opico, a municipality in the department of La Libertad in western El Salvador.

“I had to turn 18 before I could start working as a cane cutter,” added 22-year-old Pérez, standing next to a group of two dozen other cane cutters covered in dirt and sweat. He admitted that working in the sugar cane fields as a boy was “really tough.”

Child labour in activities described by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as dangerous or unhealthy has long been rife in El Salvador. That includes cutting sugar cane, hazardous because of the sharp machetes used, as well as the practice of burning sugar cane ahead of the harvest to facilitate the work, which produces ashes to which the cutters are exposed.

The severe poverty suffered by many rural families kept child labour alive, despite the risky work and heavy, long workdays.

A sugar cane cutter earns around 200 dollars a month, said workers interviewed by IPS.

“At the bottom of this cultural and economic phenomenon lie poverty and the lack of opportunities in the countryside,” said Julio César Arroyo, executive director of the El Salvador sugar industry association (AAES), which groups the six privately owned sugar mills that process the country’s sugar cane.

In this Central American country of 6.3 million people, 38 percent of the population lives in rural areas, where 36 percent of the households are poor, above the national average of 29.6 percent, according to official statistics from 2013.

The problem of child labour in the sugar cane harvest in El Salvador was thrust to the forefront in June 2004 when the Washington-based Human Rights Watch published the report “Turning a Blind Eye: Hazardous Child Labor in El Salvador’s Sugarcane Cultivation”.

The report triggered a strong reaction by human rights groups as well as international buyers of El Salvador’s sugar. Canada, the second-biggest market after the United States, threatened to stop buying sugar from this country.

The position taken by Canada “was worrisome because it could have caused a domino effect,” leaving thousands of rural workers without an income, Arroyo told IPS.

Due to the Human Rights Watch report on child labour and the resulting pressure, sugar cane producers, sugar mills and the government, grouped together in the Salvadoran Sugar Industry Council (CoNSaa), jointly adopted a code of conduct in 2006.

They stepped up the process a year later with the inclusion of a clause declaring “zero tolerance” of child labour.

They also implemented measures to oversee compliance with the clause, by means of ongoing monitoring by the Labour Ministry, inspectors on plantations and a special external auditor.

A significant improvement was seen. According to the AAES, the number of children working on sugar cane plantations fell from 12,000 in 2004 to 3,470 in 2009, a 72 percent drop. During the 2013-2014 harvest, only 700 children under 18 were reported – a 92 percent drop in 10 years.

“We’ll be satisfied once the problem has been fully eradicated, but great progress has definitely been made,” Arroyo said.

Another positive factor has been that poor rural families have gradually understood that it is important to keep children and teenagers out of the sugar cane fields.

Pablo Antonio Merino, the foreman at the La Isla plantation, told IPS that he knows very well that he can’t hire minors to cut sugar cane, even if they ask him for work.

“They’re not going to find a single minor among my workers,” said the 63-year-old Merino. “Sometimes kids come to my house to ask me to do them a favour and hire them, but when I see how young they are, I tell them no, that I don’t want trouble.”

But there is still resistance to the change.

Another worker, David Flores, 53, told IPS that the ban on child labour in the industry causes problems by leaving adolescents with nothing to do, which leads them down “the wrong path” – a reference to the youth gangs that are rife in this country.

El Salvador is caught up in a wave of violent crime. In 2014 the homicide rate was 63 per 100,000 population, compared to a global average homicide rate of 6.2 per 100,000 population in 2012, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Many of the murders are committed by gangs.

“It has hurt the country to take work away from young people, because they end up as vagrants,” Flores argued.

But Ludin Chávez, the director in El Salvador of the international organisation Save the Children, told IPS that child labour must be eradicated because children grow up in an environment where exploitative conditions are seen as normal.

“They see it as natural that other people exploit them, and that they can never defend their rights; we see this as a dangerous vicious circle,” she said.

Other forms of hazardous child labour are shellfish harvesting in the mangroves, the production of fire crackers in sweatshops, and domestic service, she added.

The 2013 household survey found that 144,168 children and adolescents between the ages of five and 17 were involved in child labour – a nearly 12 percent reduction from 2012.

Since 2009, when the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) came to power, the government outlined a plan to eradicate the worst forms of child labour this year, with a goal to totally eliminate it by 2020, in a joint effort with a wide range of economic and social sectors.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Tito Kilizapa in his workshop in Izalco in western El Salvador. The 74-year-old indigenous craftsman makes and plays the marimba, a percussion instrument that was popular in Central America in the 19th century and which he is trying to revive among children in the area. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala and Claudia Ávalos
IZALCO, El Salvador , Mar 5 2015 (IPS)

Nearly three years after the rights of El Salvador’s indigenous people were recognised in the constitution, there are still no public policies and laws to translate that historic achievement into reality.

In June 2014 the single-chamber legislature ratified a constitutional reform passed in April 2012 which acknowledged new rights of native peoples in this Central American nation. But the leaders of indigenous communities and organisations told IPS they were worried it would all remain on paper.

“There have been changes full of good intentions, but the good intentions need a little orientation,” Betty Pérez, the head of the Salvadoran National Indigenous Coordinating Council (CCNIS), told Tierramérica.

The reform of article 63 of the constitution states that “El Salvador recognises indigenous peoples and will adopt policies aimed at maintaining and developing their ethnic and cultural identity, worldview, values and spirituality.”

These cover a wide range of areas, such as respect for indigenous peoples’ medicinal practices and their collective rights to land. And according to lawmakers of different stripes, the constitutional amendment pays a historic debt to the country’s native people and helps pull them out of the invisibility to which they had been condemned.

Pérez said a process of dialogue is underway between indigenous organisations and communities and the different government ministries involved, with a view to designing public policies, but that little headway has been made because “there is no unified vision and each group is following its own logic.”“If the reform does not establish mechanisms to give it life, if the legislators do not approve the necessary secondary laws, it’s going to be left as dead letter in the constitution.” -- Supreme Court Justice Florentín Meléndez

The CCNIS is pressing for the country to ratify the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries. But no date has been set for the legislature to ratify the legal instrument, which protects indigenous rights.

Pérez spoke with IPS during the commemoration of the 1932 indigenous uprising, held in this municipality of 74,000 people 65 km west of San Salvador, which was the epicentre of the revolt.

The rebellion in Izalco, demanding better conditions for native people, was brutally repressed by the dictatorship of Maximiliano Martínez (1931-1944), leaving between 30,000 and 40,000 dead.

El Salvador’s indigenous people were ignored and invisible for decades, under the argument that after the massacre, they blended in with the ‘mestiza’ or mixed-race population, abandoning their languages and traditional dress, to avoid persecution under successive military regimes, which accused them of being communists.

For that reason there is little documentation or up-to-date figures on their socioeconomic circumstances in this impoverished country of 6.3 million people.

According to the Perfil de los Pueblos Indígenas de El Salvador, a report on the country’s indigenous people available only in Spanish and jointly produced by the World Bank, the Salvadoran government and indigenous organisations, approximately 10 percent of the country’s population is Amerindian, divided into three major groups: the Nahua/Pipil in the centre and west of the country; the Lenca in the east; and the Cacaopera in the north.

The study, published in 2003, reports that most of the country’s native people depend on subsistence agriculture on leased land, while others work as hired rural labour. A large number of communities also make and sell traditional crafts.

Native organisations and experts say that implementing or applying the constitutional amendment requires the adoption of an integral policy with an inclusive focus and respect for the world vision of each native group, in education, health, environment, labour, community development, and land titling.

The health system, for example, must have an “intercultural” focus making it possible for native people to receive adequate health services that are respectful of their culture, said a 2013 report by then United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya, who visited the country in 2012.

That kind of focus would make it possible to recognise traditional practices such as the healing carried out by 88-year-old Rosalío Turush in Izalco – known as Itzalku in the Náhuat language.

The elderly native healer learned to use herbs from her ancestors, and to ease pain with massage in the case of broken bones or sprains.

“Back then, since medicine was hard to come by, people turned to plants,” Turush told Tierramérica. “For example, to cure dysentery, there is a plant called ‘trencillo’.”

“Now people mainly come for me to give them a massage to relieve a pulled muscle, a broken bone, because I’ve still got the touch,” she added.

In order to put the constitutional reform into practice, “secondary laws” to regulate the new rights must be passed. But almost no progress in this direction has been made in the legislature.

“If the reform does not establish mechanisms to give it life, if the legislators do not approve the necessary secondary laws, it’s going to be left as dead letter in the constitution,” said Supreme Court Justice Florentín Meléndez during the commemoration of the massacre here in Izalco.

Meléndez also referred to the touchy issue of indigenous communities’ access to collective land ownership – which was already in the constitution but was never regulated to put it into practice.

“Communal property is already recognised, the only thing that is needed is for the lawmakers to continue moving towards concrete fulfillment of those rights, not just on paper but in real life,” he added.

In the late 19th century, the communal land of the country’s indigenous peoples was taken from them by coffee plantation owners.

The landowners turned tens of thousands of indigenous people and peasant farmers into casual labourers who lived in the most abject poverty on the coffee plantations, sowing the seed of social discontent which, decades later, was one of the causes of the 1980-1992 civil war that left 80,000 people – mainly civilians – dead.

The 1932 uprising also protested the theft of indigenous land.

“That’s where the 1932 massacre came from, because the landowners, if someone didn’t sell them their land, stole it at gunpoint,” Tito Kilizapa, a 74-year-old indigenous craftsman and musician from Izalpo, told Tierramérica.

Pérez, with the CCNIS, pointed out that the constitutional reform was delayed for a decade because of opposition from powerful economic groups, which feared the expropriation of communal land taken from indigenous communities in the 19th century, or other measures that would hurt their own interests.

These groups are also trying to block the approval of the secondary laws needed to implement the constitutional amendment, especially with respect to indigenous access to land.

“We are immersed in a capitalist system, we have groups of power…there are economic and political elements that keep the government from carrying out these processes of change,” Pérez said.

Gustavo Pineda, national director of indigenous affairs in the Secretariat of Culture, told Tierramérica that “these are all processes; changing the situation for indigenous peoples is a long, uphill process.”

The government official said “native peoples have been systematically neglected and ignored for a long time – we’re talking about centuries.”

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Amanda Menjívar is moved by the sight of the 16 sewing machines donated to help a group of local women set up a sewing centre to get over the devastating effects of the disaster caused by Hurricane Ida in the Salvadoran town of Verapaz.

“We want to earn an income to help us get over the losses we suffered from those rains,” Menjívar, 26, told IPS. She is leading the project, which is just getting off the ground.

When Ida smashed through Central America in November 2009, it hit El Salvador particularly hard, leaving a death toll of 200 and causing 239 million dollars in material losses, equivalent to 1.1 percent of GDP, according to official estimates.

Verapaz, a town of 7,000 in the central department (province) of San Vicente, 56 km east of San Salvador, is a symbol of the tragedy caused by the hurricane in this impoverished country of 6.1 million people, the smallest in Central America.

The intense rainfall caused a mudslide from the slopes of the Chichontepec volcano, which buried much of the town.

A total of 355 mm of rain fell in just four hours – five times the average for the entire month of November. Local and international experts agreed at the time that the unusually heavy rainfall was an effect of climate change.

Three years later, the local population is still working to get over the impact of the catastrophe, which claimed 13 lives in Verapaz and destroyed much of the town’s infrastructure.

Three members of the Verapaz egg farm cooperative and one proud daughter show IPS their hens. Credit:Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“We want to get contracts from the government to make school uniforms, but we are not going to limit ourselves to that,” said Menjívar, excited as she talked about the workshop, which she hopes will grow quickly once it begins to operate.

The sewing machines were donated by Angels in Flight, a group of flight attendants working for JetBlue, a low-cost U.S. airline.

But Menjívar also had complaints: “It’s a pity that our efforts are not really recognised, because of the persistent idea that women are incapable of pulling ahead, when we actually carry much of the burden of dealing with all of these climate changes.”

The work carried out by local women’s associations and collectives to adapt to the challenges posed by climate change is not always acknowledged by the government or by society at large.

“Women’s contribution to the struggle to adapt to climate change and achieve climate justice is largely invisibilised,” César Artiga, the president of the Asociación Nueva Vida, a local organisation that is part of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), told IPS.

He said Salvadoran society, and especially key actors like the government and media, were not aware of the repercussions of climate change on people’s day-to-day lives.

Artiga also argued that the media are partly responsible for the invisibility of women’s work, because they still do not include issues like women, climate change and climate justice in their coverage.

To illustrate, he cited a public hearing held in December 2011, where rural women talked about the problems they faced as a result of global warming, and the efforts they were making to adapt to and mitigate the phenomenon.

Not only were government institutions absent from the hearing, but it received little media coverage, “despite the fact that El Salvador is at high risk from climate change,” Artiga said.

In fact, a 2010 report by the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) ranked El Salvador as the most vulnerable country in the world, with 95 percent of the population at risk of natural disasters.

“Let’s be realistic – it’s very difficult for reporters to put these (new) issues (gender and climate change) high up on the news agenda,” Nery Mabel Reyes, the president of El Salvador’s association of journalists, told IPS.

Discrimination towards women and their struggle to adapt to environmental risks represents “a lack of climate justice,” Artiga said.

He explained that this concept not only referred to the fact that different regions and population groups were affected in different ways and to varying degrees by global warming, but also extended to the recognition of adaptation efforts – in this case the ones made by women.

One of the few such projects that have been picked up by the media is a successful poultry farm run by a group of women in Verapaz seeking to pick up the pieces of their lives after the disaster caused by Hurricane Ida.

Salvadorans living in the U.S. city of Los Angeles, California donated funds to buy 500 chickens to start the egg farm in August 2011. It currently supports 15 families.

The Ministry of Foreign Relations acted as liaison between the donors and the women in Verapaz, and the National Centre of Agricultural and Forestry Technology (CENTA) provided technical support and training.

The farm sells 400 eggs a day on average. The profits cover the women’s earnings of 42 dollars a month, and the rest is reinvested in things like feed and medicine for the laying hens. The women also take home eggs for their families.

“We are very motivated; we have put everything into this, looking towards the future, for the good of our families,” 44-year-old Ana Cecilia Ramírez, who is raising four children on her own, told IPS. She heads the Los Ángeles Cooperative, which runs the egg farm.

“These 42 dollars a month are really helpful. I used to do ironing and cleaning, but I was only paid five dollars. I feel motivated to keep this project going,” she said.

Rosa Lidia Ávalos, a 43-year-old mother of four, is also happy about the farm, not only because of the material benefits it offers, but because her relationship with her husband has been strengthened since he totally supports her work outside the home.

“You’ll see how my husband brings my lunch at noon,” Ávalos told IPS during the day spent with the women at the poultry farm. And at 12:00 sharp, her husband José Raúl Romero showed up with her meal.

“I completely support her, because she is full of enthusiasm, and of hope now that they were promised that the farm would be expanded, and I think the income will increase a little, and I like to see her like this,” Romero said.

Miriam Acevedo, a 37-year-old mother of three, said it was her husband who signed her up for the project.

“We feel like we have really done something,” she said. “Our biggest dream is to have two or three sheds, to have more hens and earn more money. We have to take advantage of the high demand.”

Persecution of trade unionists remains a problem in El Salvador, in spite of the fact that the country is governed by a left-wing party that advocates labour rights, union leaders say.

When Mauricio Funes won the March 2009 elections as the presidential candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a former guerrilla group-turned-political party, he promised to put an end to the harassment of labour activists that was a constant during the series of dictatorships that governed the country from 1932 to 1979 and during the subsequent right-wing governments.

But many labour leaders criticise the Funes administration for not making enough progress on union rights.

The Jul. 30, 2011 dismissal of Luis Alberto Ortega, general secretary of the Union of Legislative Assembly Workers (SITRAL), which was founded in December 2010, is one of the cases that have drawn the attention of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

Ortega, who led an occupation of the San Salvador cathedral from January to April, claims that the FMLN parliamentary group that was his employer dismissed him arbitrarily, in collusion with other political sectors, as a first step towards leaving the newly formed union without leadership.

Ortega’s job tenure remains unclear, because the Funes administration has not yet replied to questions posed by the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association, which is investigating this and other cases of alleged violations of ILO Convention 87 protecting the right of unions to organise.

“People are still fearful of organising or strengthening trade unions,” Róger Gutiérrez, a leader of the Federation of Independent Associations and Unions of El Salvador (FEASIES), which has 10 member organisations, told IPS.

During the 1980-1992 civil war, which left a death toll of 80,000, far-right death squads abducted and murdered political opponents, including many trade union activists.

Gutiérrez said the greatest advances for trade unions during the Funes government have been seen in the state employee sector, arising from a constitutional reform approved in June 2009 which gave them permission to organise unions, overruling the 2007 Supreme Court verdict declaring ILO Convention 87 to be unconstitutional.

“The greatest problems are in the private sector, where unions continue to be repressed,” Gutiérrez said, because they see them as harmful to free enterprise.

In certain business sectors, such as textile factories assembling goods for export under the duty-free “maquila” system, dismissals of trade unionists or the setting up of parallel pro-employer unions are particularly common.

Even union leaders who, as such, have immunity under the Labour Code protecting them from any kind of anti-union discrimination, have been fired.

In July 2011, executives of the Gama apparel factory decided to close down the plant after learning, local press reports said, that the Gama workers’ union (STECG) planned to initiate negotiations for a collective contract, which would have been the first of its kind in the maquila sector.

“Under the right-wing governments, persecution was commonplace and the police were even involved. But now, although it can be said that trade unions can organise, there is still harassment and persecution,” Alexander Gómez, financial secretary of the Trade Union Federation of Public Service Workers of El Salvador (FESTRASPES), told IPS.

The federation brings together 12 trade unions representing some 12,000 public employees in airports, education, health services, utilities and other sectors.

The continued trade union intimidation in this impoverished Central American country can partly be explained by the government being made up of individuals and groups with different sectoral interests that are sometimes at variance with one another, say labour activists.

“The dominant model remains the same, neo-liberalism, to the detriment of workers,” and that is standing in the way of progress in the area of labour rights, complained Gutiérrez of FEASIES.

Moreover, the Labour Ministry is institutionally weak and lacks the resources and personnel to fully enforce labour laws, other trade unionists told IPS. As of February, it had only 212 labour inspectors for the whole country.

Some middle-ranking officials, who were also in the ministry during the government of right-wing president Antonio Saca (2004-2009), indulge in unethical practices, such as taking bribes from companies in exchange for favourable inspection reports that cover up violations of labour rights or union freedoms, the sources said.

“Inspectors are still in collusion with the companies: in our view, nothing has changed there,” said Gutiérrez.

IPS made unsuccessful attempts to arrange an interview with Labour Minister Humberto Centeno, who was an experienced trade union leader during the 1970s and 1980s before devoting himself to FMLN party work after the end of the civil war in 1992.

Meanwhile the Trade Union of Municipal Workers and Employees of El Salvador (SITESMUES) is in negotiations with the authorities over alleged arbitrary mass dismissals, of union leaders as well, after the local and parliamentary elections in March.

Other workers have been dismissed for political reasons, José Neftalí Yáñez, head of the Electrical Industry Union of El Salvador (SIES) branch at the Delsur electricity distribution company, told IPS.

Yáñez claims his dismissal and the break-up of the executive committee of his union branch were the result of internal pressures in the FMLN, and were carried out in reprisal for protests he led some time ago in conjunction with business associations and civil society organisations.

Elsy Álvarez and María Menjivar – with her young daughter – planting plantain seedlings in a clearing in the forest. Credit: Claudia Ávalos/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala and Claudia Ávalos
SAN JULIÁN, El Salvador, Apr 30 2012 (IPS)

María Elena Muñoz industriously weeds a clearing in the forest and then digs several holes, where she and another four dozen women are planting plantain seedlings, to help feed their families in this poor farming area in El Salvador.

The group is involved in an agroecology programme that has two main aims: achieve food sovereignty, which is at risk in the rural communities of San Julián; and foment the development of energy forests, which provide local families with sustainable energy and help mitigate the impact of climate change.

“The forest belongs to everyone, it gives us fruit and firewood for cooking,” Muñoz, 42, told IPS.

She is president of the Association of Communities for Development in the district of Los Lagartos in the municipality of San Julián, which is home to 19,000 people in the western province of Sonsonate.

These communities, and especially local farms, are hit hard by climate swings year after year, said Mercy Palacios with the Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES), a local environmental NGO.

“During the drought, the crops are scorched, and during the rainy season, they are drowned,” she said the day IPS accompanied the local women in their activities in the community forest.

Subsistence agriculture is the mainstay of the local communities, where peasant farmers grow corn and beans on infertile hillsides, and the harvests are steadily declining, due to climate phenomena.

El Salvador, and Central America in general, suffers heavy rain in winter – the rainy season – which almost inevitably leaves a trail of pain and destruction. In October, for example, the rains claimed 43 lives in the country and flooded 10 percent of the national territory.

The cost of rebuilding in Central America in the wake of the October storms will amount to 4.2 billion dollars, according to estimates by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“We are suffering from climate extremes, something new that we have to adapt to,” Palacios said.

“There are very poor families that subsist on what they get out of the forest,” said Elsy Álvarez, a 37-year-old mother of two. “For example, they sell tangerines in the town, and get a ‘cora’ (quarter – 25 cents of a dollar) for tortillas or to give to their kid when he goes to school.”

Tired of losing the family harvest, the women in Los Lagartos decided to do something to ensure food sovereignty, and began to plant an energy forest.

Food sovereignty refers to people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

The idea of the project came from UNES environmentalists who were working in the area, establishing an “agroschool” to teach the basic concepts of agroecology. But soon the local women made the idea their own, and have made it flourish, without financing.

The food sovereignty project encompasses one-quarter of the 40 rural villages and communities in San Julián, a municipality 60 km west of San Salvador whose ancestral name was Cacaluta, which means “city of crows” in the Náhuat language.

The project benefits about 50 families – 300 people – and the energy forest component will be expanded from Los Lagartos to other participating communities.

In Los Lagartos, population 5,000, the women work in their family gardens, where they grow vegetables with organic compost that they themselves produce. They also use it in their plots of corn and beans, staples of the Salvadoran diet, and on fruit trees in the forest.

The compost is helping change planting techniques in the area, in favour of the environment. And the women plan to start selling their organic fertiliser in the future, to earn funds for the project.

The forest is less than one hectare in size, but it has a special importance for the women in Los Lagartos because they have managed to regain control over the area and replant it, after a sugar mill destroyed it 10 years ago to plant sugar cane.

“For 10 years we have been fighting for this forest,” said Muñoz, a married mother of four. When she and the rest of the women saw that the forest was being cut down, they complained to the authorities and managed to rescue a small portion – but the damage was already done.

So they began to replant. They planted avocado, mango and nance (golden spoon) trees. And this year they began to grow plantains (cooking bananas), and trees that can be used for their wood, like conacaste (elephant ear tree).

“Now we don’t let anyone cut down our forest,” Álvarez said during a break in the planting work. “We exploit it ourselves, but only the dry branches and what is cut in the pruning process.”

The concept of energy forests followed here is not based on planting trees to cut them down later for lumber, but on the sustainable use of trees, by using dry branches as firewood, and planting fruit trees.

“A tree has a useful life expectancy, and the branches can be used as firewood, while maintaining its capacity to regenerate,” Palacios explained.

In this country of 6.1 million people, some 400,000 families – 25 percent of the population – use firewood for cooking, according to official figures.

The poorest 10 percent of households in El Salvador spend more on firewood (three percent of their budget) than on electricity, according to the 2010 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report on El Salvador.

The use of firewood represents a major cost for poor families, which means that having a forest that covers their needs is a big help for the family budget.

Consumption of firewood not only represents an important expense in their budgets, but many households also dedicate a significant proportion of their time to collecting it, the UNDP report says.

In El Salvador, 36.5 percent of the population lives in poverty, and 11.2 percent in extreme poverty, according to official figures from 2010. But in rural areas, the poverty rate stands at 43.2 percent, and 15 percent live in extreme poverty.

Luis González, an environmentalist with UNES, said the Los Lagartos project falls under the concept of climate justice, which indicates that not every region, and not every population group within regions or countries, is affected in the same way by global warming.

“There are sectors that are more vulnerable than others, and different studies show that women are among the most heavily affected groups,” he said. For example, he added, when drought dries up a water source, women suffer the stress of having to find a new source of water, further away from their homes.

A gender focus must be included in this kind of environmental project, to give women a more decisive role, said Ima Guirola, with the women’s group Cemujer. In this part of the country, she told IPS, it is women who are taking the lead in efforts to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change.

“The important thing is to see whether women are adopting technological tools and scientific know-how on the environment, and whether they are participating in the decision-making involved in the project,” she said.