Raquel Delgado in Tegucigalpa, Honduras
The food crisis in the Honduran departments worst affected by drought shows no sign of abating. Now, predictably, in El Paraíso, Choluteca and Valle, the prices of basic foodstuffs like beans and corn have gone up by some 40% since the Honduran government declared a state of emergency in July 2001.
The Rome-based World Food Programme says more than 135,000 tonnes of foodstuffs have been lost with the failure of the harvest, leaving nearly 66,000 families in need. And with food shortages come health problems.
A joint study last September by UNICEF, the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations showed that the level of acute malnutrition had increased by three percentage points since the previous investigation last July, now occurring in nearly 6% of people in communities in Choluteca and El Paraíso.
No deaths have been reported so far. But the figures indicate that more than six months after the crisis began, the nutritional state of children particularly, in the worst affected communities, is giving cause for concern because of the month on month increase in the level of malnutrition.
If bean harvests are inadequate or fail altogether there is a knock-on effect, reducing the amount that can be sown for the next crop. The wet season in Honduras - the country worst affected by drought in Central America - usually begins in late May, when subsistence farmers plant their main yearly crop of staple corn and beans. Many try to plant a second time in August, but last year farmers in eight provinces were reported to have lost almost all their first harvest.
Results for the second harvest in 2001 varied dramatically from place to place; although the rains eventually came, the ground was prepared and seeds donated by the Honduran Red Cross sown, in some areas it was too late. "There were instances of campesinos harvesting 14 quintales* of beans, and that's enough to see anyone through to the next harvest in August and September this year," says Alonso Sánchez, a farmer who received both seeds and fertilizer from the HRC. "In other cases, people were lucky to come away with three quintales of beans - and that's only enough food for three months."
The Honduran Red Cross rural programme has been helping more than 1500 farmers in Choluteca and El Paraíso. Accustomed though the region is to disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, Central America is not normally associated with widespread malnutrition. The Red Cross is taking up the challenge and managed to assist nearly 2500 campesino families - an estimated 15,000 people - in the first few months of the drought emergency last year.
The total number of families helped between the start of the crisis and the end of last month now stands at 7,700 - or more than 46,000 people.
But from drought itself there is little relief in sight. The Honduran national weather service has forecast that the el Niño phenomenon will continue to play havoc with the timetable for seasonal rains, and the result will be a "strong and prolonged drought" that continues to threaten the harvests and kitchen gardens of people in the countryside.
So Honduras enters 2002 having lost as much as a third of its agricultural product.
And as if that were not enough, the country has also had to cope with the collapse in the world price of one of its principle exports: coffee. An excess of supply over demand has led to the lowest international coffee prices for 30 years, with many producer countries now failing even to cover production costs. For the past two years Honduran coffee plantation workers have been laid off, increasing unemployment in the countryside and reducing the country's foreign exchange reserves.
*1 quintal = 100 kilograms