The Las Canoas lake in Tipitapa, near Managua, dries up every time Nicaragua is visited by the El Niño phenomenon, leaving local people without fish or water for their crops. Credit: Guillermo Flores/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jul 10 2014 (IPS)

The spectre of famine is haunting Nicaragua. The second poorest country in Latin America, and one of the 10 most vulnerable to climate change in the world, is facing a meteorological phenomenon that threatens its food security.

Scientists at the Nicaraguan Institute for Territorial Studies (INETER) say the situation is correlated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a weather cycle that periodically causes drought on the western Pacific seaboard and the centre of the country, in contrast with seasonal flooding in the north and the eastern Caribbean coast.

Crescencio Polanco, a veteran farmer in the rural municipality of Tipitapa, north of Managua, is one of thousands of victims of the climate episode. He waited in vain for the normally abundant rains in May and June to plant maize and beans.

Polanco lost his bean crop due to lack of rain, but he remains hopeful. He borrowed 400 dollars to plant again in September, to try to recoup the investment lost by the failed harvest in May.

If the rains fail again, it will spell economic catastrophe for him and the seven members of his family.

“In May we spent the money we got from last year’s harvest, but with this new loan we are wagering on recovering what we lost or losing it all. I don’t know what we’ll do if the rains don’t come,” he told IPS.

His predicament is shared by thousands of small producers who depend on rainfall for their crops. Some 45 kilometres south of Tipitapa, southwest of Managua, campesino (small farmer) Luis Leiva regrets the total loss of three hectares of maize and squash to the drought.

Leiva sells his produce in the capital city’s Mercado Oriental market, and uses the profits to buy seeds and food for his family. Now he has lost everything and cannot obtain financing to rent the plot of land and plant another crop.

“The last three rains have been miserable, not enough to really even wet the earth. It’s all lost and now I just have to see if I can plant in late August or September,” he told IPS with resignation.

Rainfall in May was on average 75 percent lower than normal in Nicaragua. According to INETER, there was “a record reduction in rainfall”, up to 88 percent in some central Pacific areas, the largest deficit since records began.

Based on data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), INETER has warned that the drought could last until September.

The nightmare is affecting all farmers on the Pacific coast and in the centre of the country. Sinforiano Cáceres, president of the National Federation of Cooperatives, a group of 300 large farming associations, expounded the sector’s fears to the inter-institutional National Board for Risk Management.

“We have already lost the early planting (in May), and if we lose the late planting (in August and September) there will be famine in the land and a rising spiral of prices for all basic food products,” he told IPS at a forum of producers and experts seeking solutions to the crisis. There is a third crop cycle, in December, known as “apante”.

The country’s main dairy and beef producers raised their concerns directly with the government. Members of the Federation of Livestock Associations and the National Livestock Commission told the government that meat and milk production have fallen by around 30 percent, and could drop by 50 percent by September if the ENSO lasts until then, as INETER has forecast.

Moreover, the National Union of Farmers and Livestock Owners said that over a thousand head of cattle belonging to its members have perished from starvation.

It also warned that the price of meat and dairy products will rise because some livestock owners are investing in special feeds, vitamins and vaccines against diseases to prevent losing more cattle on their ranches.

The agriculture and livestock sector generates more than 60 percent of the country’s exports and earns 18 percent of its GDP, which totalled 11 billion dollars in 2013, according to the Central Bank of Nicaragua.

In the view of sociologist Cirilo Otero, head of the non-governmental Centre for Environmental Policy Initiatives, a food crisis would have a particularly severe economic impact on a country that has still not recovered from a plague of coffee rust that hit plantations in Nicaragua and the rest of Central America over the last two years.

“Thousands of small coffee farmers and thousands of families who depended on the crop have still not been able to recover their employment and income, and now El Niño is descending on them. I don’t know how the country will be able to recover,” he told IPS.

According to Otero, if ENSO continues its ravages for the rest of the rainy season, thousands of families will suffer from under-nutrition in a country where, in 2012, 20 percent of its six million people were undernourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

“Producers do not know how to mitigate the effects of climate change, nor the mechanisms for adapting to soil changes. Unless the government implements policies for adaptation to climate change, there will be a severe food crisis in 2014 and 2015,” he told IPS.

The government has set up commissions to monitor the phenomenon, as well as information meetings with farmers and livestock producers.

The authorities have also expanded a programme of free food packages for thousands of poor families, and are providing school meals for over one million children in the school system, as well as a number of small programmes for financing family agriculture.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega ordered urgent imports in June of 20.5 million kilograms of beans and 73.5 million kilograms of white maize to supply local markets, where shortages were already being felt. The government’s intention is to lower the high prices of these products while hoping for a decent harvest in the second half of this year.

The price of red beans has doubled since May to two dollars a kilogram, in a country where over 2.5 million people subsist on less than two dollars a day, according to a 2013 survey by the International Foundation for Global Economic Challenge.

Logging is one of the main threats in the southern area of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. Credit: José Garth Medina/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, May 15 2013 (IPS)

Mayangna indigenous communities in northern Nicaragua are caught up in a life-and-death battle to defend their ancestral territory in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve from the destruction wrought by invading settlers and illegal logging.

The president of the Mayangna indigenous nation, Aricio Genaro, told Tierramérica that their struggle to protect this reserve, which is still the largest forested area in Central America, was stepped up in 2010, due to the increased numbers of farmers from eastern and central Nicaragua moving in.

In addition to the destruction of natural resources, this invasion has turned violent and poses a serious threat to the biosphere reserve’s indigenous population, estimated at roughly 30,000. Since 2009, 13 indigenous people have been killed while defending their territory, said Genaro.

The latest victim of this violent confrontation was Elías Charly Taylor, who died from gunshot wounds he received in the community of Sulún on Apr. 24, when returning from a protest demonstration against the destruction of the forest.

This protest, initiated in February, has drawn the attention of the government of leftist President Daniel Ortega and publicly exposed the destruction of Bosawas, which encompassed more than two million hectares of tropical forest when it was designated a Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1997.

According to a study published in 2012 by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Nicaraguan National Union of Farmers and Ranchers, the European Union and Oxfam, if deforestation were to continue at its current rate, all of the reserve’s forests would be wiped out in 25 years.

Vanishing wildlife

The Mayangna live from hunting and fishing, domestic livestock raising and subsistence agriculture, growing crops like corn, beans and tubers with traditional methods. But their way of life has been severely impacted by the invading farmers.

“They shoot everything, burn everything, poison the water in the rivers, and chop down the giant trees that have given us shade and protection for years, and then they continue their advance, and nothing stops them,” said Genaro.

“You don’t see tapirs anymore, the pumas and oncillas (tiger cats) have fled the area, you no longer hear the singing of the thousands of birds that used to tell us when it was going to rain. Even the big fish in the rivers are gone. Everything is disappearing,” he said.

According to Kamilo Lara of the National Recycling Forum, a network of non-governmental environmental organisations, more than 96,500 hectares of forest have already been destroyed within the protected core of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve.

Lara added that “55 percent of the forests in the so-called buffer zone, where some 20,000 mestizo farmers (of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry) have settled, have been cleared to sell the timber, to create pastures for cattle grazing, and to grow crops for commercial purposes.”

He further estimated that some 12,000 of the 19,896 square kilometres initially set aside as the original reserve have been damaged due to the expansion of the buffer zone, which was initially less than 5,500 square kilometres in area.

Jaime Incer Barquero, a presidential advisor on environmental affairs, told Tierramérica that the national authorities need to speed up protective measures “before the reserve loses its status (as a UNESCO biosphere reserve) and the world loses the reserve.”

This view is shared by the UNESCO representative in Nicaragua, Juan Bautista Arríen, who believes that “urgent and firm action” must be taken to protect both the indigenous population and the natural environment.

Official response

In response to the denunciations from indigenous communities and environmentalists, the Ortega administration has begun to implement a number of measures to deal with the destruction of the reserve. It has authorised the use of force, sending in 700 members of the Nicaraguan army’s newly formed Ecological Battalion along with a roughly equal number of police officers, for the initial purpose of controlling the violence between the settlers and the indigenous inhabitants of the reserve.

A commission of national authorities was also formed to coordinate actions and implement an “iron fist” policy against individuals and organisations responsible for damaging the environment.

After visiting the area early this month and observing the damage first hand, the authorities issued Decree 15-2013, which created a permanent Inter-Institutional Commission for the Defence of Mother Earth in Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Territories of the Caribbean Coast.

The main function of this commission, created to “strengthen the regime of autonomy of the Caribbean coast,” will be to enforce ancestral land rights in indigenous territories in conjunction with the corresponding agencies, as well as to promote the joint adoption and implementation of measures with local and regional authorities to protect the reserve’s biodiversity.

In addition, a series of criminal, administrative and civil court proceedings will be initiated against all individuals charged with destroying or threatening the environment and the rights of indigenous communities.

In accordance with the law that established the North Atlantic and South Atlantic Autonomous Regions, indigenous territories may only be occupied and used productively by members of native communities.

The director of the Centre for Environmental Policy Initiatives, sociologist Cirilo Otero, endorsed the protective measures, but warned that the implementation of coercive measures to protect the environment, unless they are accompanied by policies to support the small farmers who are moving into the reserve as a way of escaping poverty, could give rise to a socio-economic conflict and more violence.

The government has approached the general director of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, to present the problem and request assistance, while the country struggles to halt the destruction of the last major forested area in Central America through its own means.

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

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